Managing Change in Old Age: The Control of Meaning in an Institutional Setting

This book is an ethnographic study of an old age home in Israel that sheds light on the existential experience of elderly retirees. Hazan looks carefully at the universal concerns of old age, specifically examining the nature of everyday life in the institutional setting. He shows the workings of the micropolitics of control in an old age home and the tension between controlling dwindling resources and sustaining life-long meaning for residents. He also effectively brings out distinctive features of the Israeli situation, its cultural and bureaucratic codes. Hazan’s study of the life cycle, based in the anthropology of process, is a senstive portrayal of the dynamics of institutionalized elderly in a complex society.