Marvin Formosa: Class Dynamics in Later Life: Older persons, class identity, and class action in Malta, Lit Verlag, 2009, pp160.
Class may be dead for some but for Marvin Formosa it is alive, well, and not likely to go into retirement any time soon. Rather, it’s a key device in our understanding of the social differences that accompany us into old age.
In this book, which is based on his doctoral dissertation, Formosa shows us some of the ways in which this is so. Albeit brief, the volume establishes him as an authoritative researcher in the field of social gerontology.
The volume eschews rigid models of class based on the old divisions of labour in favour of a more flexible approach that combines economic and cultural insights.
Rich in qualitative empirical materials which function to bring Formosa’s informants to life, the various chapters look at how different classes construct, contest, and sometimes subvert social distinctions.
The general findings of Formosa’s research are threefold. First, it seems that class retains its relevance post retirement.
Although older people may find it hard to articulate their experiences of class, they remain significantly sensitive to its architecture and their own place in it.
Second, class in later life is not simply a temporal extension of people’s final occupations. Class mobility can and does occur outside of the labour market, in this case due to retirement.
Third, class among older persons is best understood using a model (such as that associated with Pierre Bourdieu, whose work Formosa is a specialist in) that privileges quotidian, informal, and micro-political competitions.
Formosa is fiercely egalitarian. Throughout, he sees class inequality as a ‘key differentiating and oppressive principle’. This assumes that people are somehow trapped in it; and yet, as Formosa himself argues, class differences are ultimately the result of elaborate processes of production. Surely such an effort hints at some dividend, at least for some?
If it is at all possible to retire in style, and Formosa thinks it is, style must matter in some way. Though I can’t say I look forward to it, Class Dynamics in Later Life makes old age sound rather more eventful than conventional ideas would have it. If for the old nature stands on the very verge of her confine, culture it would seem does no such thing.