Content area
Full text
Theorising ageing studies
Edited by Dr Jason Powell and Professor Jon Hendricks
Labour markets are a product of economic and social arrangements and of moral economies. These moral economies create life course expectations and social meanings that justify the arrangements required for these markets to function. Normative ideas about education, work and retirement legitimize occupational decisions by providing a patterned system through which workers can organize their lives. Though workers exert agency and resistance by reworking narratives to fit their needs, they are bounded by the interaction of larger structures that constrain their opportunities ([26] Sewell, 1992). The integration of global markets and the opening of global capital, labour and information flows has introduced new structural constraints on the choices available to workers and generated new narratives of work and ageing. Nations attempt to exert "biopower" through control over fertility, immigration and labour markets ([11] Foucault, 1995). Although these measures often have limited success, they have been crucial in forming policy narratives that define national economic goals. As these goals have been reworked to fit the imperatives of a global marketplace, nations have been forced to adapt to these changes. The new narratives created in this process call for alterations in welfare policy, reductions in state spending, deregulation and a reorganization of government priorities to reflect a growing consensus on the inevitable growth of globalization.
While the degree of globalization experienced by individual nations, as measured by flows of labour, capital and other economic indicators, is highly variable and the "objective" indicators difficult to measure, as [27] Stiglitz (2003) suggests, its social construction ensures that a global market will be influential. The concept of globalization has provided a frame for transforming work, welfare and regulation policies, even when it is uncertain that such changes actually enhance global competitiveness. What matters is that the changes attributed to globalization cause states and policy makers to respond to the rhetoric when making political decisions and economic choices.
Because a large share of national resources in every nation is devoted to the aged, they are a crucial starting point for delineating responsibilities between the state, market and family ([19] O'Connor et al. , 1999). Definitions of ageing workers must be renegotiated in order to make countries more compatible...