ABSTRACT

Previously in this book, I have suggested that the ‘ageing society’ is deployed around a cleft problematic that relates health, activity/work and technology. In negotiating the possible solutions for the knowledge crisis of actuarial sciences, the ageing society became locked into the need to manage ‘health expectancy’ and productivity, and to take care of the ‘existing stock’ of population, rather than relying on fertility or immigration. The preceding two chapters have explored the thorny and contingent ways in which researchers have tried to measure the link between ageing and health, and the resulting increase in uncertainty about how to format health, illness and mortality. This uncertainty is underpinned by a co-productive, interactive relationship between different ways of organising knowledge making practices and institutions in managing activity and health in later life. In these, work and technology were mostly cast in a background role, or as the driving motivations for new ways of measuring or investigating ageing. In this chapter, I focus on work and technology, and their relation to the ‘ageing society’. My point of departure is, again, the epistemic and political formatting of later life through active and healthy ageing instruments and programmes. As we have seen, active ageing is the group of policies, programmes and interventions that aim to increase older people’s participation in the economy, and particularly in the labour market. Within this wider context, there is a Europe-wide shared goal to postpone and increasingly harmonise retirement age across member states. As the authors of the EU Active Ageing and Solidarity Between Generations report acknowledge, this requires us to ‘to look beyond basic measures of demographic change [. . .] with a focus on indicators that measure the propensity of older people to continue in work’ (Eurostat, 2012: 8). But what are these indicators and instruments? My suggestion in this chapter is that ‘indicators that measure the propensity of older people to continue in work’ can be placed within the group of tools linked to the concept of functional age, as discussed in Chapter 5. These are tools and instruments that measure and manage individual functional abilities, and imagine a corresponding articulation

– an adjustment – to the roles or tasks s/he may be involved in. As such they deploy mainly an efficiency form of justification, proposing to maximise older people’s participation in the economy by identifying unused capacities and opportunities to employ them. In the chapter, I explore the genealogy of a particular instrument, the Work Ability Index (WAI), an indicator developed by Finnish occupational health researchers (Tuomi et al., 1998), which is gaining increasing traction within work-related institutions in the EU and abroad. The WAI measures employees’ individual self-assessment of their health and ability to respond to the demands of the job. My suggestion is that the WAI is underpinned by key epistemic and normative ways of enacting bodies-at-work. In formatting the instrumental value of work, functional age measurements are concerned with understanding work as a function of the internal dynamics of the body-in-action, and in particular in understanding the drivers of responses to stress and strain. It is this attention to ‘internal equilibrium’ and homeostasis in adaptation and the generation of stress responses that links contemporary tools, such as the WAI, to the origins of the concept of functional age, originally formulated by the industrial psychologist Ross McFarland, as indicated in Chapter 5. The chapter details the specific conceptual, methodological, normative and institutional network that underpinned McFarland’s development of the concept during World War II, and in particular his previous work in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory and the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory. I suggest that these two sites generated different versions of the relationship between ageing and work, one underpinned by the idea of individual adaptation (Harvard) and the other concerned with identifying key mental abilities in hierarchies of working skill (Cambridge), the latter of which came to dominate the field of industrial gerontology until the 1980s. This dominance was challenged by the emergence of the post-industrial economy and what is sometimes called the post-Fordist mode of production. Normally associated with a shift in economic activity from manufacturing to services and ‘knowledge-based’ enterprises, for industrial psychologists this represented a vast challenge on how to design implements that are adequate for a tailored, flexible system of production. By wanting to implement ideals of ‘standardised differentiation’ (Busch, 2011) in the measurement of age-related abilities, experts and policy makers came to again rely on the concepts of stress and adaptation to propose solutions to the ageing workforce, thus recovering much of the work developed by McFarland at the Fatigue Laboratory. The chapter first outlines how the economic consequences of demographic ageing have been linked to Europe’s current productivity crisis, and how solutions to this problem have been consistently linked to the implementation of ‘active ageing’ programmes at work. Focusing on the WAI as a paradigmatic embodiment of active ageing instruments, the chapter then explores how shifts in the enactment of functional age have relied on a variation of the tension between different repertoires of knowledge making on ageing already explored in previous chapters.