• Home
• Projects
• Past Projects
• Shaping the modern retiree

Shaping the modern retiree

Project Description:

The assertion that retirement, as a social institution and ‘phase’ of life, must be reconfigured, given changes in longevity, purported future pension crisis, and rising dependency ratios, has increasingly surfaced within policy, academic and policy texts over the past decades. In parallel, positive aging discourses have increasingly become central to Canadian and international approaches to governing aging populations, as well as gerontological research and popular media. From a governmentality perspective, such discourses are conceptualized as technologies of government that seek to enact power in ways that shape possibilities for being and doing for ‘modern retirees’. While often celebrated for combating negative stereotypes of aging, there is a need to critically consider what new standards for ‘aging well’ are promoted within neoliberal contexts and how such discourses are mobilized in ways that download financial, bodily and social risks of aging and retirement onto individuals.

Building on Laliberte Rudman’s dissertation work that unpacked the discursive construction of the ‘active, autonomous and responsible’ modern retiree, this qualitative study utilized critical discourse analysis and critical narrative inquiry to examine the discursive re-shaping and narrative negotiation of retirement within the Canadian context. Informed by a governmentality perspective, critical discourse analysis of Canadian newspaper texts examined the ways in which positive aging discourses intersected with neoliberal rationality to construct ideal and non-ideal subject positions as well as occupational possibilities for aging subjects. Objectives of the critical narrative inquiry were to examine how contemporary discourses of positive aging are negotiated by aging individuals as they move towards and into retirement, particularly in relation to the negotiation of identities, bodies, and occupations/everyday activities.

Findings from the study highlight the individualized ‘duty to age well’ constructed at the intersection of positive aging discourses and neoliberal rationality, and the implications for how aging individuals understand and negotiate the aging process. These findings raise concerns regarding differential access to resources and conditions that enable ‘aging well’, the demands to engage in a never-ending and ultimately unrealizable project of evading aging, and the promotion of ‘new ageism’ against those deemed to have failed at ‘aging well’. The concept of occupational possibilities also evolved out of this project.

Publications:

Laliberte Rudman, D. (2017). The duty to age well: Critical reflections on occupational possibilities shaped through discursive and policy responses to population aging. In N. Pollard & D. Sakellariou (eds.). Occupational Therapy without Borders: Integrating justice with practice (2nd edition) (pp.319-327). Edinburgh, UK: Elsevier.

Laliberte Rudman, D. (2016). Risk, retirement and the ‘duty to age well’: Shaping productive aging citizens in Canadian newsprint media. In Polzer, J. & Power, E. (Eds.), Neoliberal Governance and Health: Duties, risks and vulnerabilities (pp.108-131). McGill-Queens University Press.

Laliberte Rudman, D. (2015). Embodying positive aging and neoliberal rationality: Talking about the aging body within narratives of retirement. Journal of Aging Studies, 34(1), 10-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2015.03.005

Laliberte Rudman, D. (2015). Situating occupation in social relations of power: Occupational possibilities, ageism and the retirement choice. South African Journal of Occupational Therapy, 45(1), 27-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2310-3833/2015/v45no1a5 

Laliberte Rudman, D. (2014). Reflecting on the social situated and constructed nature of retirement: A research program addressing the contemporary restructuring of retirement. In D. Pierce (ed.), Occupational Science for Occupational Therapy (pp.143-156). Thorofare, NJ: Slack.

Laliberte Rudman, D. (2010). Occupational terminology: Occupational possibilities. Journal of Occupational Science, 17(1), 55-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2010.9686673

Laliberte Rudman, D., Huot, S. & Dennhardt, S. (2009). Shaping ideal places for retirement: Occupational possibilities within contemporary media. Journal of Occupational Science, 16(1), 18-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2009.9686637

Laliberte Rudman, D. & Molke, D. (2009). Forever productive: The discursive shaping of later life workers in contemporary Canadian newspapers. WORK: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation, 32, 377-390. https://doi.org/10.3233/WOR-2009-0850