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BOOK REVIEW |
Professor of Social Policy Boston University School of Social Work Boston, MA 02215
Civic Engagement and the Baby Boomer Generation, edited by Laura B. Wilson and Sharon P. Simson. The Haworth Press, Binghamton, NY, 2006, 276 pp., $49.95 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).
Locating and assigning appropriate social roles to older people has long been a central topic of gerontological discourse. Perhaps the most familiar treatment is found in social gerontology textbooks, beginning with an opening salvo at Elaine Cumming and William Henry for endorsing Talcott Parsons' functional withdrawal of the old, warming to Robert Havighurst's activity theory alternative, and moving on toward celebrating yet greater levels of involvement, most recently under the rubrics of productive and successful aging.
Describing and assessing civic roles played by all Americans has been the topic of a separate literature, dating to the nineteenth century. Beginning famously with Alexis de Tocqueville, myriad investigations have explored the magnitude and consequences of Americans' engagement in the larger community. Today, due much to the writings of Robert Putnam, worry over diminishing levels of engagement is being voiced across the political spectrum.
In the past decade, these two streams of inquiry have come together, spawning investigations of the actual and potential civic engagement of older Americans. The basis for a rich cross-fertilization between the two is not hard to discover. Research into the worlds of civic and political participation has revealed attitudinal and behavioral patterns of concern to all who value notions of social cohesion, citizenship, and obligation. Americans have been widely portrayed as increasingly withdrawing from various avenues of social intercourse, focusing instead on private and insulated activity. Among other dangers associated with such a trend is a weakening of civil society—that is, the social fabric that connects the public to the private and the formal to the informal. The political theorist sees twin pathologies emerging from this disintegration: isolated and disconnected social groupings on the one hand and a detached and potentially unresponsive governmental enterprise on the other.
Driving discourse about appropriate social roles for older people has been the remarkable transformation in elder well-being that has taken place over the past half-century. In the well-known litany, poverty rates are down, health status is up, work opportunities are increasing, and both social- and self-images of aging have moved notably along the "ill-derly" to "well-derly" continuum. The salience and acceptance of the successful aging moniker has concretized these positive changes. Whether it be around the ability and desire to continue working, an abiding interest in late-life learning and teaching, or volunteering through foster grandparents or subsidized senior employment programs, a new template about active and engaged seniors is alive in the land. Today's seniors are about production and contribution, not just consumption and need.
These roughly concurrent developments and the magic elixir of foundation funding have animated a host of "civic engagement and aging" endeavors. Multiple gerontological organizations have undertaken civic engagement activities; colleges and universities have inaugurated learning, leadership, and even housing ventures predicated on an engagement model; and books and journals devoted to the topic have proliferated in recent years. Civic engagement and aging represent an important crossroads: American civil society is in need of reinvigoration, and growing numbers of older Americans have the energy, time, money, and interest to contribute to this effort.
Civic Engagement and the Boomer Generation, edited by Laura B. Wilson and Sharon P. Simson, approaches the topic from multiple perspectives. The chapters in Part I (Overview of Civic Engagement) provide perspective and data directed to the twin topics of aging and engagement. Part II (National Service and the Fifty-Plus Population) and Part III (Life-Long Learning and Civic Engagement) evaluate a series of discrete programs involving older adults. Part IV (Intergenerational Concepts and Applications) explores questions of generation and leadership. And Part V (National and Global Agendas) looks at the topic both globally and into the future.
In this organization, the book is true to its subtitle of "Research, Policy, and Practice Perspectives." The wide-ranging content of Parts I, IV, and V assess what is known about civic engagement and includes both policy and research suggestions about where future activity might be directed. The chapters in Parts II and III are explicitly about practice, and they contain programmatic description and evaluation findings centered on enhancing the civic engagement activities of older Americans. In moving between these sections, however, the reader must be prepared to encounter some analytical air pockets, where only a few pages separate the broadly contextual from the narrowly applied. Some reorganization (e.g., a combining of Parts I and IV) and some bridging material provided by the editors might have gone a long way toward smoothing these discontinuities.
Given their well-known attention to civic engagement, it is not surprising that the opening chapters by William Galston (and Mark Lopez) and by Putnam (with Thomas Sander) provide a useful introduction to the topic. Galston and Lopez summarize data around attitudes and behaviors associated with civic engagement. Comparing inter-war and Vietnam-era cohorts, they report declining levels of trust, lessened interest in public affairs, and higher levels of materialism among the latter group. As to behavior, they find lower levels of political, volunteering, and mobilizing activity among the younger cohorts although they are quick to point out that socioeconomic factors generally trump generational ones.
In a similar vein, Putnam and Sander also find Americans born earlier in the century ("the long civic generation"; aka Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation") are more engaged than those born later. The authors conclude that "the civic differences among Americans are mostly generational" (p. 33), whereas the engagement activities of younger Americans are mainly social and, importantly, are mostly life-cycle rather than cohort generated (emphasis added). The conclusions of these chapters are important for a book about older baby boomers and civic engagement because the authors suggest that the boomers may turn out to be less rather than more engaged. In Sander and Putnam's words, the boomers ("who have never been an especially strong volunteering cohort") will have to "develop new stripes" if they are to volunteer in record numbers as they retire (p. 26).
The very different chapters of Part II and III indirectly address this concern in reporting on a series of programs designed to heighten the involvement of the emerging generation of older boomers. Priyanthi Silva and Cynthia Thomas report findings from a survey funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service examining the three principal Senior Corps programs—Retired Senior Volunteer, Foster Grandparent, and Senior Companion programs. Program directors are frustrated by a lack of resources, feeling that the model could do more if it were provided with more. Karen Harlow-Rosentraub, Wilson, and Jack Steele discuss a study designed to see if the AmeriCorps model (aimed principally at younger Americans) can be modified and used in ways to encourage the civic participation of older Americans as well. Through a contract to the University of Maryland, programs were developed at eight sites around the country. Research based on six months experience found a number of positive developments among participants in the areas of increased knowledge and involvement, although a number of the participants were veterans of earlier volunteer efforts rather than being ones attracted to the world of voluntarism and formal engagement for the first time.
Part IV focuses as well on activities associated with the editors, who are at the University of Maryland, evaluating Lifelong Learning programs and describing and assessing the university's Legacy Leadership Institutes. Simson, Wilson, and Harlow-Rosentraub examine the learning programs, including those associated with the Elderhostel Network, to see in part the degree to which they are involved in civic engagement activities or are interested in doing so. Although some of the oldest and newest programs seem predisposed to new developments in this direction, a number of sites in the study appear to be largely tied to their more traditional educational activities at or near their host universities. The authors tease out instances where moving ahead seems likely and present a lengthy list of steps Lifelong Learning programs might engage in toward promoting more civic activities. But it does appear that some amount of effort will be needed to bring these institutes—unquestionably involving active and able seniors—more directly into civic engagement beyond other engagement modalities.
The chapter devoted to the University of Maryland's Legacy Leadership Institute stands out here in terms of both detail (it is by far the longest of any chapter in the book) and passion (the authors are clearly invested in the model). The Institute is designed to "prepare older persons to serve as multi-generational ambassadors" committed to aiding communities in multiple ways (p. 116). Meaningful opportunities are to be harnessed to the "needs and desires" of this emerging generation of elders. An elaborate schematic is presented depicting how individuals aged 50 and older are linked to community organizations and how these individuals engage in both classroom and field-based activities. Participants graduating from the program were asked a series of questions about likely future activities involving community activity and leadership, with the results suggesting that program participation had increased likelihood of such activity. The chapter concludes with an upbeat assessment of the positive effects that this program and possible replications of it might have on older civic engagement. Part IV concludes with a short chapter describing how a version of the Legacy Leadership model played out in the Netherlands. The authors stress differences rather than similarities in the Dutch and Maryland experiences, leaving uncertain what conclusions should be drawn from the two.
The book's focus broadens once again in the following section. The chapter by Sally Newman and Richard Goff centers on intergenerational engagement, reviewing models where older and younger people help each other and the community in some degree to everyone's advantage. It concludes with a series of useful recommendations developed by Generations United. Tracey Manning follows with a strong chapter presenting the tightest connection in the book between civic engagement and leadership. She discusses the critical "civic/political" linkages and more generally provides a very useful discussion of "civic," something surprisingly overlooked in many civic engagement discussions. This is followed by an equally interesting dissection of leadership characteristics. Finally, she contrasts how engagement and leadership may vary by age, concluding with an assessment of how adult programs might meaningfully promote participant leadership.
The book's concluding section addresses future prospects. The chapter by Wilson and David Rymph reports on a meeting in Minnesota designed to set a future agenda. Jim Hinterlong, Amanda Moore McBride, Fengyan Tang, and Kwofie Danso's chapter reviews cross-national experiences in voluntarism and civic service. Once again experiences seem encouraging, and the chapter benefits from a strong conceptual and research base. The authors highlight program outcomes and tightly tie the concepts of age and service together. Indeed, in a manner reminiscent of the book's opening chapters, Hinterlong et al. are cautious in their assessment of age per se: "we may discover that population and individual aging are less relevant to patterns of engagement than are cohort and personal history and contemporary contextual factors that promote and inhibit engagement" (p. 234). The editors conclude the book by reporting on what major organizations intend to do in order to promote civic engagement, a principal conclusion being that traditional understandings and terms (such as "volunteering") may have to be updated to attract the emerging boomer generation to civic activity.
Although the overall organization of Civic Engagement and the Baby Boomer Generation is uneven, there is much of value to be culled from the wide-ranging content. Yet, a more extended concluding chapter by the editors, drawing various themes together, would have been a useful addition to the volume. One such theme would incorporate the opening chapters and those found in the programmatic sections. Thus, much of the contemporary enthusiasm surrounding the advent of successful aging—soon to be massively manifested through the arrival of 77 million older baby boomers—seems to clearly presume that the boomers' commitment to various forms of civic engagement is, in Dick Francis's words, a "dead-cert." Yet, the overviews provided by Galston and Putnam et al. remind us that levels of engagement have been declining rather than increasing. Thus far, the boomers have not shown themselves to be engagement stalwarts, but their numbers and the resources that might make them such have been clearly present in their middle years. Put simply, the boomers' future engagement is not a default-drive demographic, and efforts to realize their potential will be needed. To its credit, the present volume reports on such activities to promote heightened activity, but more clearly joining the challenge to the potential would have strengthened the overall presentation.
A second theme in need of underlining centers on what can be called the participatory tension associated with civic engagement. As multiple authors in this volume and elsewhere observe, civic participation varies strongly with various measures of socioeconomic status (SES). The connection between participation and SES may be, if anything, more poignant in the case of the old because much of the civic engagement-and-aging mantra is predicated on the presumption that they don't need to work. Alas, for many older people, foregoing work in order to engage is not an option. Certainly, civic engagement and aging proponents—notably Marc Freedman—are aware of this dilemma, but assuring that opportunities are available to lower income seniors is a pressing matter for the movement. It also sounds a cautionary ring for Civic Engagement and the Baby Boomer Generation because several of the programs described and evaluated have tended to attract upper-quintile elders. The lifelong learning institutes are heavily tied to college and university circles, and 21 percent of participants in Maryland's Legacy Leadership program being college graduates with an additional 45 percent holding graduate or professional degrees. Passing comments are made by various authors about the skewed participation associated with civic engagement, but highlighting and more directly confronting it would have strengthened the volume.
There is much to commend Civic Engagement and the Baby Boomer Generation. The uninitiated reader can find useful perspectives on the topic; the researcher (or skeptic) can find data suggesting what works and does not in promoting age-based civic engagement activity; and the social entrepreneur can learn about programs that are trying to put civic engagement's pedal to the metal. The implicit theme of the overall volume is that people, programs, and society can benefit from heightened levels of civic engagement. In places, the analysis belies this undercurrent, but it is hard to argue against strengthening America's social fabric through heightened civic engagement of the young and old alike.
Reference
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