Retirement on the Line: Age, Work, and Value in an American Factory By Caitrin Lynch IRL Press (an imprint of Cornell University Press). 2012. 228 pages. $21.95 paper

Extract

In Retirement on the Line: Age, Work, and Value in an American Factory, anthropologist Caitrin Lynch presents a highly readable and enjoyable case study that has wide substantive applicability in not only her own field but also several areas of sociology, including work, aging and life course and cultural sociology. In addition, the book includes a valuable critical reflection of dilemmas of fieldwork. The challenge that Lynch acknowledges is that hers is not a case study that attempts to be “typical” or “representative” of work settings or of older workers or transitions to retirement, in general. She claims that broad lessons can be learned from a unique case, and goes so far as to claim that “this book explores what work means for people in the United States who are of conventional retirement age.”(30) How can she accomplish this exploration when she reports on a single factory that is so atypical that it has received widespread national and international media attention, and when the ways in which this attention affect the workers become part of her story?