Aging Through Three Lenses

Applying the three perspectives to one case means asking what a mandatory retirement age accomplished for the system, whose position it protected, and how retirement is experienced day to day.

Take a workplace that once required retirement at sixty-five, a practice now barred for most jobs by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The functionalist question, echoing disengagement theory from Soc 1142, asks what the rule accomplished: an orderly transfer of roles to younger workers, timed rather than left to chance. The conflict question, from Soc 1146, asks whose interest the rule served: a fixed exit age let employers avoid the higher wages and accumulated leverage senior workers had earned, packaged as a neutral policy applying to everyone alike. The interactionist question, from Soc 1152, asks how the rule was actually lived: some retirees found a new community built around a shared, freely chosen identity, as subculture of aging theory describes, while others experienced the same exit as an abrupt loss of the status their work had given them. The same policy produces stability, protects a structural interest, and is lived as either liberation or loss, depending on whose account is asked.