Peter Emmerson

On the first morning after retiring from full-time work, a moment I had looked forward to for so long, all felt somewhat anticlimactic. I felt quietly lonely as I watched busy people hurry on by through my kitchen window, just as I had done about 24 hours earlier. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I became aware that my life had changed in a big way.  An hour or so later I walked to a nearby supermarket feeling quite elated about my release from work responsibilities and many of the people with whom I had spent so much time. Even so, while doing my shopping I was struck by a rather unsettling observation – that accompanying me were two groups of people – young women with children and old folks, with which until then, I had little connection. This realization accentuated my earlier feelings of estrangement.  Suddenly I no longer felt ‘at home’. I had entered a period of high-speed transition for which I was ill-prepared and over which I had little influence or control. It left me feeling abandoned and insecure: overnight, I had been tipped out like a piece of social scrap. What were these intense feelings of disorientation that someone like me with good influence-chances had stumbled upon? The overriding sensation was one of shame.

Shame was an odd reaction – I had worked more or less non-stop since being thrown out of school at 17 and had a plan to exploit my new pensioned autonomy in a way that Zygmunt Bauman had recommended some years ago when I attended his retiring seminar – there was no obvious reason for feeling ashamed. And yet by engaging with pensioned status, I was signalling my formal withdrawal from adult productive life, a form of ejection, the beginning of a process leading to the final exit, death. Giving up on full-time employment meant relinquishing influence and control, and to some extent gradually returning to a child-like state of dependence and inferiority.  Women at the supermarket checkout start to call you “dear” or “darling”. This was a shameful experience. (2 mins.21 secs)

I had retired from a teaching career in further education, helping adults who like me had underperformed at school. This career was made possible by my graduation in 1979 as a 30-year-old with a degree in sociology from the University of Leeds, where I got to know two inspiring teachers – Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Kilminster. However, it was the latter who fired my interest in the work of Elias and opened up a chance to meet the great man in person when he came to Leeds to give a lecture.

As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, I was immersed in the theoretical devastation that had befallen sociology. The promise of Enlightenment beliefs in the efficacy of science explored so brilliantly by Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons had crumbled giving way to disillusionment and self-doubt. However, there was no self-doubt on display when Anthony Giddens came to Leeds and put on an impromptu and imperious performance backed by serious academic rigour. But I was not convinced. He had recently published his New Rules of Sociological Method which privileged philosophers such as Schutz, Winch, Gadamer, Habermas, Popper and Kuhn. Another significant book of this period was Hermeneutics and Social Science, written by my mentor, Zygmunt Bauman. As the title suggests, the book also focussed on philosophers such as Husserl, Heiddeger and again Schutz. Both Giddens and Bauman referenced the great sociologists but only as way of accessing the philosophical analysis that would cure contemporary sociological problems – it was a back-to-basics exercise. It was as if influential sociological theoreticians had forgotten Marx’s great rant against the idealist philosophers in his Theses on Feuerbach. Even more significantly, they were not giving sufficient and careful consideration to another remarkable book that was published at this time – Norbert Elias’s What is Sociology?. To me Elias seemed to do two things in this book: (1) he diagnosed the sociological malaise and (2) he provided a pathway out of the mire.

From Elias’s position a large part of the problem for sociologists was a lack detachment from their well-established, over-involved influential and controlling rivals, the philosophers. While Elias does refer to philosophers, he does so only with reference to the damage their homo clausus perspective inflicts on the scientific sociological enterprise by systematizing the search for knowledge according to metaphysical logical conventions  which I thought were designed to provide human certainty and control over the fear associated with a universe of perpetual change and pointlessness. Thus, philosophical knowledge is a technique for controlling human anxiety, and is not therefore a method to facilitate scientific engagement with social experiences.

However, if we adopt the more grounded perspective developed by Elias, one that specifies change and interdependency as universal features of social experience, which then become a default position for any sociological research, the perennial problems associated with dichotomies such as subject and object, agency and structure that have stifled sociological understanding since its inception, dissolve. Nevertheless, this is a very radical enterprise that requires a new lexicon of change and connectedness in which power, or what I prefer to call influence, and control are also universals. To facilitate this leap into a sociology of change Elias developed a new set of concepts such as figuration, habitus, we-I balance, detachment and reality congruence, a language that is capable of engaging with the processes that comprise human experiences.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons I was not able to capitalize on my insights when I graduated in 1979, but over my 37 years in teaching I never saw any reason to doubt my belief that Elias’s sociological model was the blueprint for what might be called a second phase of sociological development. However, it was not until 2017 that I was ready to explore my ideas through full-time research. I contacted Stephen Mennell for advice, and he referred me to Jason Hughes and John Goodwin at the University of Leicester who invited me for interview. After an exciting discussion we agreed on an Eliasian approach to retirement as my research topic. I started my project in January 2018 and here I am after nearly seven years of often tortuous struggle, fresh from completing my PhD just over a week ago.

  I grounded my research in the spirit of the Eliasian enterprise, which until then had never been attempted in this subject area. Thus, I did not aim my research at the conventional noun ‘retirement’. Instead I did what Elias would have done and focused on process using the verb ‘retiring’.  This meant carrying out a long-term sociogenetic investigation, in order to discover consistent data on retiring which could be used to identify any connections with Eliasian civilizing processes such as state formation and increased self-regulation. An important feature of these processes is the development of professionalization at both governmental and military levels, which is accompanied by the gradual development of a personal habitus patterned according to the competitive benefits of a more business-like, future oriented approach, that prioritizes calculation and planning over emotional outburst and the threat of violence.

One thing that was very obvious when I began my research was that there was no data on the long-term development of retiring. Accordingly, I spent some time looking at evidence on the changing use of the words retire, retirement and pension. The farthest back I could go was the sixteenth century where the pattern of usage was dominated by references to retiring as withdrawal from scenes of conflict, which fits with Elias’s work on the more violent figurations that pre-date state formation. After augmenting my evidence on word usage with historical data on old age, it became clear that very few UK people retired at that time. Those who did were either landowners or their servants.

A very good example of the latter concerns the group of soldiers known as the beefeaters, who were appointed in 1487 as full-time salaried guards to the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Not only did these men receive a wage for their violent services, but they were also allocated a guaranteed pension.  A direct line of descent can be traced from these men to the formation of the Royal Navy in 1546 and the British Army in 1707. Their pensioned status was given institutional recognition at the end of the seventeenth century by the building of three hospitals for retired sailors and soldiers at Greenwich and Chelsea in London and another in Ireland. Until this time these were the only figurations of men outside the upper tier in receipt of a state pension on which to retire. One explanation for these developments is the influence that accrued to those with specialist skills in violence who were valuable to the developing state.

            However, during the eighteenth century professionalization was expanding beyond state-oriented functionaries such as government officials and soldiers. An example comes from the following quote of 1806 from The Medical and Physical Journal: “Let the surgeons of the former retire upon an annuity”.  Clearly a link is being made between retiring and the procurement of an annuity or pension on withdrawal from full-time work.  Whether annuities were purchased by surgeons or granted as a form of pension is unclear, but it does show that a formal system of payments was emerging to service the needs of high tier professional people who were well-established by the early nineteenth century, and who were reliant on earnings even after retiring. However, such options were still only available to those paid a high salary, or who fulfilled critical security functions such as soldiers or revenue men.  Almost everyone else who relied on paid employment worked till they dropped, because annuities and pensions were either unavailable or unaffordable (Hannah, 1986, Thane, 2000).

During the last 200 years retiring from paid work has gone from being the preserve of a comparatively small group of wealthy professionals and ex-soldiers, to an expectation for everyone that they can retire when they get to a certain age or become unproductive. In accordance with this development, specialists in retiring have emerged whose job is to service the pension needs of those in specialist occupations that have developed since the eighteenth century. It seems that for those without property, patronage or military and clerical pensions, retiring is inextricably linked to industrial production and paid employment, which took-off in Britain around 1760. However, for most nineteenth century employees, who lived from hand to mouth and worked till they dropped, pensions were an irrelevance. It was not until the 1900s that retiring became a viable proposition for people at lower levels of income, unconnected with either national or local government.

As my research progressed it became increasingly obvious that I needed to ground my work on retiring in the experiences of real people. One of the earliest occupational groups of mainly working-class men who were awarded a guaranteed state funded pension were police officers in 1890. This is a marker of their emergence as a profession.  However, unlike lawyers, civil servants or engineers, they are the agents of internal state security, part of the process of pacification that can be traced back to the beefeaters in 1485. 

In my thesis I argue that the development of UK policing can be seen as a four phase process of professionalization beginning in pre-Norman England. This ended with the rise to influence of the gentry who as JPs were designated by royal authority to administer English and Welsh justice until the late eighteenth century. Their decline coincided with the rising influence of traders and manufacturers who were exploiting industrial methods of production which needed large amounts of wage labour, encouraging the mass migration of people to towns and cities. The lawlessness of urban living overwhelmed the traditional JPs and their parish constables and was damaging business prosperity, so urban leaders began pressing government to sanction the establishment of professional police forces. The first city to appoint a full-time police chief was Glasgow in 1800, closely followed by London’s Metropolitan Police which began functioning after the passing of the 1829 Police Act. These changes signal the beginning the third phase of UK policing in which officers become militarized professionals.

 However, there were serious problems all over Britain when it came to finding people with the competence to run the new police forces effectively. For example, in Glasgow there had been a series of disastrous appointments until they gave the job to a retired army officer. This approach to running police forces became commonplace and so it was that in 1829 Colonel Sir Charles Rowan was appointed the first commissioner of the Met. It was not until 1953 that a career police officer attained this rank. This was a landmark change that led me to identify the post Second World War period as transitional to the development of a fourth phase in UK policing in which the external force of military discipline had been superseded by a managerial style that relied on police officers using self-regulation to enforce their discretion.

This implies the emergence of a proper professional occupational habitus for police officers. I have identified three dimensions that comprise this habitus (1) outsider status (2) dangerous work and (3) dirty work. Professional police officers were and are the new kids on the block, working in the shadow of the gentrified established military. Their job is to engage with dangerous, violent people, work that in a comparatively pacified state, most people find repugnant. Their habitus is formed by a training programme that emphasizes the use of self-controlled and measured aggression. However, the dangerous and dirty aspects of their job coupled with their outsider status foster very strong group cohesion, or what I term high we-orientation. From this disparity in experience there emerges a tension which promotes a figurational inertia that hampers the development of a fully professional police force. On one level they are self-controlled professionals, on another they are stigmatized outsiders who deal in dangerous, dirty work that correlates with high emotions and high we-orientation that is very difficult to control. This tension coincides with what I have identified as habitus lag.

This potential for high we-orientation makes police officers interesting as far as retiring is concerned. Retiring is a process that requires a plan, it involves strong future orientation and the careful control of present-time spending. This is a feature of being a professional, a self-regulated person who is rational and calculating because their job has low emotional involvement and low we-orientation. However, for those whose job is high in we-orientation such as front line police officers, retiring is more difficult. I found evidence to suggest that officers at the rank of inspector and above had few problems with retiring. However, this was not always the case for sergeants and constables, both of whom were engaged in front-line policing

In a nutshell, successful retiring in general is about careful planning. However, for those with a habitus high in we-orientation this can be very difficult because it demands a significant reconfiguration of habitus and a greater level of self-control.