Professor Honored for his Book on Retirement

Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America --- Joel Savishinsky’s latest book --- was recently honored with the Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Award. Given annually by the Gerontological Society of America, the Kalish Award recognizes insightful and innovative publications on aging and life course development in the behavioral and social sciences. Savishinsky, the Charles A. Dana Professor in the Social Sciences, also received this award in 1991 for his book The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home.

"Ends of Time came out of my study of people living in nursing homes in the 1980s," says Savishinsky. "The courses I taught on aging at that time were drawn from those experiences. But as a new group of students came to the fore, I began asking myself, What about the rest of the older population? On any given day, only about 5 percent of Americans over 65 live in nursing homes. I wanted to examine aging in America, but I wanted to do it based on an experience that many older Americans shared."

Retirement, says Savishinsky, is a new stage in American life brought about by longer life expectancies and a changing attitude about work. In his book he points out that in 1900, when life expectancy in the United States was 47, 60 percent of men over 65 still worked; in 1990, with life expectancies at 76, that retirement number was under 20 percent. Because retirement is relatively new to the American scene, it is largely uncharted and often misunderstood territory. Breaking the Watch is a study of how people come to terms with this final stage of their lives, which can last 25 years or more.

Savishinsky and his students began by identifying people in a selected upstate New York community who were within a year of retiring. Of that group, 13 men and 13 women were willing to be interviewed before and during their retirement experiences. Ranging in age from 54 to 77, the retirees included a postal worker, a lawyer, a bookkeeper, clerical workers, and doctors. In keeping with the participant observation method of anthropology research, Savishinsky and his students spent six years meeting the retirees in diners, accompanying them on jogs, riding in their RVs, and having long talks in their living rooms.

"Retirement is a process, not an event," Savishinsky says. "It’s a series of adaptations and adjustments that occur over long stretches of time. To discover precisely what those adaptations are, you have to get to know the people you’re studying. You have to be able to enter their lives to the extent that they let you and establish rapport and trust with them."

Reviewers in some of the country’s most influential publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Generations, the journal of the American Society on Aging, have praised Savishinsky’s book for its strong prose, its scholarly integrity, and the way its author lets his subjects tell their own stories in their own words.

Though the 26 stories in the book are as varied as the personalities and experiences of the 26 people telling them, most of the retirees seem to feel that life after work can be a positive experience if you’re willing to let it be. In many cases that means knowing who you are, coming to terms with letting go, investing in a passion, adjusting to family matters, and using freedom responsibly."When it comes to retirement, the assumption that one size fits all just isn’t true," says Savishinsky. "In writing this book, I didn’t want to make abstract points as much as I wanted to find answers that other retirees could benefit from. Generally, it’s the people in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum who have the easiest time retiring. Those at the low end are financially and physically disadvantaged, and the ones at the high end have a hard time letting go because their identities are so bound up with their work."

The Kalish Award, Savishinsky says, recognizes not just his own efforts but the work of everyone who contributed to Breaking the Watch.

"No one wins an award like this just by his or her own efforts. I feel that this prize confers gratifying recognition not just on me but also on the students in the College’s anthropology and gerontology programs, the Gerontology Institute for grant assistance, and the School of Humanities and Sciences for the release time I needed for research and writing. A lot of forces at Ithaca College came together in the making of this book."

For more information visit www.breakingthewatch.com.

Photo by Kathy Morris