The New Aging Enterprise - aarp

RetirementJobs, and Curves) or by nonprofit initiatives (Eden Alternative and Experience Corps)
is not the question. The question rather relates to the role of individual agency or self-initiated
action in contrast to some hegemonic structure (bureaucracy or market) that would otherwise
inhibit freedom and self-fulfillment. When elder participants in these New Aging Enterprise
programs “vote with their feet,” we cannot simply dismiss their responses as “false
consciousness.” On the contrary, their participation itself has helped to foster and sustain the
new life-world manifest in their activities themselves.
Business ventures described as part of the New Aging Enterprise range from a web-based
portal (RetirementJobs) to the franchise model (Curves) to a privately held corporate model
(Erickson). A more thorough analysis of the character of these ventures would suggest many
ways in which they meet the profile established by Jim Collins in Good to Great. New Aging
Enterprises also match many of the criteria for “natural capitalism” 113 enunciated by Paul
Hawken in his visionary writings on this subject. For nonprofits, as for business ventures, the
key question is sustainability: can the nonprofit enterprise move beyond dependence on
foundation grants or the enthusiasm of a founder to develop a dependable income stream that
will enable it to endure over time? An important factor here is whether the nonprofit enterprise
develops its fee-based revenue stream and operates in a “business-like” fashion while still
remaining faithful to its nonprofit mission. By these standards, Elderhostel, successful after
more than 30 years, clearly meets the test.
The New Aging Enterprise describes a path toward innovation and enhanced freedom
that invites us to question old paradigms, for example, government versus the marketplace. In a
similar vein, Gilleard and Higgs conclude their book, The Cultures of Ageing, 114 with these
words: “…the aim of an increasingly commodified economy is to a maximize people’s ability to
spend at each and every point in their life course.” This formulation of course leaves some
questions unanswered. For example, what about persistent poverty in later life? Their own
solution to inequities in old age is for people earlier in the life course to have better jobs and
therefore better retirement income later on. As a result, people would spend more in later life,
now incorporated into that flux of expanding capitalism foreseen by Marx in his evocative
phrase, “all that (is?) solid melts into air.” Gilleard and Higgs insist that they are trying merely
to document this ever-advancing differentiation into commodified “cultures in ageing.”
But is advancing commodification the only foreseeable scenario for an aging society?
The message from the New Aging Enterprises is quite different. New Aging Enterprises do not
constitute endless “commodification,” which Habermas has termed “colonization of the lifeworld.”
True, Elderhostel is a merchandiser of educational travel but it is hardly well described
as a bundle of commodities, unless one wishes to claim that anything mediated by a market has
ipso facto become a commodity. The same holds true for other businesses like Curves or
RetirementJobs. Organizations such as Universities of the Third Age or Experience Corps
cannot remotely be described as “commodified” in their relationship to older people. New
Aging Enterprises indeed embody the “Third-Ageism” and “project of the self” which Gilleard
and Higgs find attractive as part of the “cultural turn” celebrated in their book. But the cultural
turn, and the primacy of agency, should not be equated with the marketplace, still less with
commodification.
38