The legacy of social class in gerontology

For many years, the concept of class constituted a fundamental touchstone of gerontological scholarship. This was especially true during the late 1970s and 1980s when the political economy and structured dependency perspectives on ageing argued strongly how class holds a crucial role in determining how people experience retirement and the quality of lives they lead (Townsend, 1981; Walker, 1981). Influenced by neo-Marxism, such standpoints revolved around the role of retirees within the capitalist economy and, therefore, embraced Wright's (1978) rationale that the best way to deal with class locations in later life is to treat them as ‘parts of class-trajectories’ – that is, as a lifetime structure of positions through which an individual passes in the course of a work career. Retirees, according to such a raison d’être, occupy post-class locations so that their class location can only be understood in terms of the trajectories of class positions to which they are linked. Although it was acknowledged that not all inequalities can be reduced to class, since the role of gender and race in promoting material and social forms of exclusion can never be underestimated, retirement was perceived as the final ‘resolution’ of the advantages and disadvantages attached to established class positions. In other words, once the advantages arising from a particular position are consolidated, they are sustained during later life. For political economists and structured dependency theorists, this was mostly due to the continued impact of the relative inequality between the level of state retirement pensions, which was the source of the majority of working-class elders’ income, and the amounts paid out by the better-funded occupational pensions received by the middle class. This modernist drive to throw light on class relations in later life was instrumental in highlighting how the majority of working-class retirees tend to register a degree of distress that warrants social work intervention, following the ‘problems [that] may arise through interaction between the physical and social contexts of ageing’ (Phillipson, 1982: 111). However, this standpoint falls short by overlooking the effect of post-industrialisation and late modernity on the character of later life, class relations and society in general, and, hence, ignoring how classes are made and given value through cultural and symbolic processes.