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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.
1. Introduction
There are two perennial questions about retirement -- What is it, and how can one achieve it? -- whose answers are related and shift across time. Nowadays, the ends and means of retirement need to be considered within a cultural context that maps retirement as a "given" of the life course (Kohli, 1986). Surveys show that most workers expect to retire, and that large majorities of men and women are willing to project the exact age or date of that transition (Ekerdt, Kosloski, & DeViney, 2000; National Public Radio, 1999).
But what is this stage of life? As a retiree, what will one be and do? The role ambiguity of retirement came in for early comment in gerontology. Burgess (1960) called it a "roleless role." Parsons (1942) said retirees had "a peculiarly functionless situation, cut off from participation in the most important interests and activities of society" (p. 616). Contemporary retirees, when led into reflective interviews, will also note the ambiguity of retirement: one is free, but marginal (Savishinsky, 2000; Weiss, 1995). Yet, norms do seem to be developing that retirees should have more than an "ex-" identity (Ebaugh, 1988), left -- and left out -- to do as they please. The involvements of retired life remain discretionary, but there is a growing expectation that one's days be full and active (Bernard & Phillipson, 1995; Ekerdt, 1986) and devoted to personal fulfillment and development of the self (Laslett, 1989).
To achieve this stage of life, one must replace the income that came from work. The historic problem of how to do this has been met for many workers by the provision of Social Security income, employers' pensions, and employers' contributions to tax-deferred accounts. These arrangements have democratized retirement -- made it widely available and, importantly, conceivable across adulthood. But these benefits of employment may not yield enough income to assure a comfortable standard of living (for that pursuit of personal fulfillment), or security against costs of health care, or a legacy to pass to one's heirs. The more that people anticipate retirement to be a long period of comfortable consumption, the more wealth they must assemble to underwrite it. State pensions make a modest retirement available to most workers, but more expansive ideas require some initiative to bring about. One does not retire rich as a matter of course.
When American workers ponder their preparation for retirement, surveys reveal that they are somewhat confident about their financial readiness, yet significant proportions of the public remain anxious about their prospects or unable to save (AARP, 1999; Employee Benefit Research Institute, 1999; National Public Radio, 1999). Objective assessments of retirement readiness suggest that American adults are overconfident in this regard, and many will need to engage in substantial saving to achieve a comfortable retirement (Employee Benefit Research Institute, 1999; Merrill Lynch, 1997; Mitchell & Moore, 1998).
Retirement is thus a stage of life, vague but desirable for its leisure possibilities, that takes some agency to achieve. One source that is bidding to define the nature of, and path to, retirement is the financial services industry, which consists of businesses that manage peoples' savings and investments. The well-aired financing problems of Social Security, the rise of investor-directed 401(k)-type savings vehicles, the retail proliferation of investment devices, and tax law changes have all led to a surge in the advertising of financial planning services on behalf of retirement (Pogrebin, 1998; Race is On to Sell Roth IRA, 1998; Sherman, 1997). The advertisers are competing for the attention of workers who participate in the kind of savings and pension arrangements that require them to directly manage the investment of their retirement savings. The sums involved are very large. In the US in 1997, over US$3 trillion in assets were held in defined contribution pension plans and Individual Retirement Accounts (US Bureau of the Census, 1999). Workers who participate in 401 (k) plans can accumulate substantial balances to invest. In 1998, individuals in their 60s with at least 30 years tenure with the current employer had average account balances in excess of US$185,000 (Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2000).
The essential task of advertising for retirement financial planning is to link, in the mind of the reader or viewer, ideas about retirement with the services being offered for sale. The goal of this paper is to examine both the ideas and the linking so as to articulate how commercial concerns contribute to the current cultural construction of retirement as a status-to-be-achieved. In general, advertising obviously functions to sell things, but it also functions to create structures of meaning (Williamson, 1978). Fulfilling this latter function, ads do not create reality so much as reflect back to us things we will recognize. According to Goldman (1992), "Advertisers draw sociocultural meanings from viewers' life-worlds and the mass media themselves, and embed these meanings in images, which are then returned to viewers -- now framed in relation to meanings of products, services, or corporate identities" (p. 61). They "isolate salient meanings from the context of daily life, and then stylistically rework those meanings to accommodate the sales agenda" (p. 68). To sell retirement financial planning, advertisers necessarily shape ideas of retirement toward a correlation with company interests.
Commercial signification about aging has its precedents. Calhoun (1978), for example, has traced the efforts of the real estate industry from the 1950s onward as it conjured a market for a "golden years" retirement, and then sold housing to satisfy the demand it had sparked for leisured withdrawal to resort-type locales. Other authors have characterized how marketers promote "positive aging," health, and promises of bodily integrity with numerous personal care products, diets, fitness regimes, and surgeries that purport to mask or retard advancing age (Hepworth & Featherstone, 1982; Sobchak, 1999; Wang, 1988). Such commodities as housing and rejuvenation techniques are intended for near-term consumption, and so are targeted to those middle-aged and older. But financial services that will accumulate a nest egg for retirement are a much longer term proposition, and require that marketing and taste-making for ideas of retirement push back up into the earlier reaches of adulthood. Representations about retirement must be presented to workers who...
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