ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines how a group of older women of different ages, in their chat and practices in this small village hair salon – Joellen’s Hair Palace – negotiated their way through their own and others’ expectations of ageing and constructed different kinds of older and other identities for themselves. A hair salon’s prima facie institutional focus or business is hair and appearance; it is also, though – unlike care homes or medical settings, for example – a place where this overt institutional focus is, stereotypically, often subordinated to talk. However, a hair salon is just one of many service providers that include older people among their clients. Just as in the institution of Backhaus’s study, the salon-workers’ orientation to speeding through time tended to be privileged over some clients’ orientation to filling time – and perhaps a relatively empty day – pleasurably.
