I recall being taken off guard when a well-known and widely respected sociologist entering the third age seemed to be constantly fishing for compliments. I had considerable respect for him both personally and for his very real accomplishments within the discipline. But I quietly wished he’d desist. I didn’t want him to somehow diminish his reputation, or himself. Also, I didn’t understand why he was doing this.
I kind of understand him better now I am in my mid-1970s!
I’m not on a fishing expedition myself, at least I hope not. But I do understand how, when well into the third age and with the fourth on the horizon, one’s personal attention and focus can shift from the future to the past: the past is much longer than the future. And this is a shift that has as its ‘natural’ correlate a tendency to appraise what one has contributed to one’s speciality, one’s discipline, or, more rarely, further afield (for example, via public sociology to the public sphere of the lifeworld). I have asked myself these questions in a spirit of self-criticism!
So what conclusions have I drawn? Context is important, as I have tried to articulate in previous ‘autobiographical’ blogs. The kind of metrics now routinely deployed within academia indicate that I have been more productive than my predecessors and less productive than my successors. I hope we can dismiss this nonsense. What matters is what matters. Chronological age ‘seems’ to nudge me towards reflexivity. My ruminations sit a trifle uncomfortably between reconciliation with what’s done and what might have been. Why would this not be the case?
My Healthy Societies has just been published (Policy Press, 6 September, 2024) and I have a proposal in for a new book on the sociological theories of Margaret Archer. Journal articles are also ticking over. In other words, I’m still intellectually alive and kicking for all that I can’t kick the ball as far these days. My stamina is reduced. Whereas on most Wednesdays post-retirement I was able to write for five or six hours as I sat in Dorking’s cafes, now I am down to around three. There is also the question of what I have left to say. There is always a temptation to respond positively to invitations to repeat oneself in edited collections. I am normally able to resist these.
In as far as I am becoming more reflexive about my career and output, I am pleased that I was able for several decades to teach undergraduates, which I thoroughly enjoyed and think I did reasonably well, and that I published a competent series of books, chapters and articles. I have not been an outstanding talent, but I have been independent-minded and have persevered. If I drew an unbroken line under my academic commitments and ambitions now, as I sit here in yet another café, I would not feel unfulfilled. But, referring back to my senior colleague, I find I’m increasingly sensitive to what others think. Maybe this is somehow a function of a third-to-fourth age running down of intellectual energy, or even acuity. Possibly too, it’s because I’m retired and separated from the intellectual cut and thrust of teaching and giving papers. Feedback, formal and informal, has dried up. I’ve been cut/cut myself adrift. It’s almost as if I need a degree of reassurance.
Two questions: first, what do I wish I had done differently? And second, what is reasonably left for me to do? ‘Wish’ is probably the wrong word. I was fortunately to be babyboomer with space in academia to prioritise my projects. I chose to focus on teaching and writing, having cut my teeth on a couple of early empirical studies. I actually enjoyed doing research and regret not doing more, though had I done so it would undoubtedly have impinged on my teaching and writing. Also, I would doubtless have been exhorted by managers to bring in more funding, which would have started me on that dire rollercoaster. As it happens, I was advised to present myself for promotion to professor at UCL unambiguously as a theorist. So not many regrets.
As for whatever ‘thinking time’ remains to me, I’m content that my Healthy Societies, which has as its central theme a rethinking of the sociological and public agendas on UK health inequalities to incorporate a coming to terms with health-related risks and threats exported from the Global North to the Global South, is a worthwhile contribution to the literature. And I hope to follow this with the volume on Maggie Archer’s corpus. After that, who knows? I tend to think books, but an article two or might find their way into print.
But when all’s said and done, I suspect I am now beginning to understand what motivated my esteemed mentor when, consciously or otherwise, he sought reassurance that his life’s scholarly endeavours added up to something. In retirement it can seem as if one exists in a vacuum. At any rate, there are few echoes to be heard. The bottom line for me, however, is that if I was taken seriously ill tomorrow, I’d be pissed off at plans unfulfilled but not altogether dissatisfied with the sum of my career outputs as teacher and writer. I think I’ve done okay within my own limitations and those imposed on me. But I recognise of course that this is really for others to judge, and over time.
I should add as a footnote that this is a blog directed at my career. My head of department once asked me what I thought my principal achievement was, and my reply: ‘my four daughters’. It confused him at the time, but I trust the point was made. There was and is a lot more to my life than my career.