Novas sensibilidades culturais, novos mercados: representações sobre idosos na imprensa de negócios brasileira
Abstract
The aim of this study was to analyze the concepts of old age that have
been spread by the economics and business media in the context of increasing
longevity of the Brazilian population. The analysis of the production of cultural frames
regarding age reveals that a notion generally taken as purely natural is actually a
historical and social construction. Shifts in cultural perceptions of age have changed
the economic space and also contributed to the diffusion of new understandings about
it. Drawing on the Reflexive Sociology of Bourdieu and taking as references works of
Economic Sociology, Sociology of Generations, Gerontology and Anthropology of
Aging, the economic sphere and the markets were taken as social constructions. The
statements produced by the magazines Exame and Pequenas Empresas Grandes
Negócios (Small Companies, Big Businesses - PEGN) between 1990 and 2014 were
analyzed based on the content analysis technique proposed by Bardin (1979). Old age
represented in these magazines intend to sensitize two specific economic characters:
the executive, in the case of Exame, and small business owners in the case of PEGN.
In this sense, it was revealed the themes, terms, ideas, markets, organizations, people,
authors, among other issues, to which they appealed to trigger identities associated
with old age in their audience. First, each magazine was analyzed individually and then
in a more aggregated way. Four ideas dominate the media space analyzed: planning
for retirement; the domination of the economic logic to think about old age; the aging
population and its macro and micro-economic impacts and; aspects related to
boundaries and generational disputes. In general, publications analyzed alternate
between the micro level, where each individual is responsible for his old age, and the
macro level, dealing with the State and demographic changes. Old age is proposed as
a privileged moment of fulfillment of dreams postponed during other phases of life. This
emerging notion clashes with other more negative, that consider old age as a source of
misery or expense, creating barriers to its reframing. Besides, the representations of
generational issue turn out to be limited by orthodoxy, as in the case of the pension
systems for retirement, in which it is reinforced the capitalization logic rather than the
pay-as-you-go one. These ideas promote an individualized conception of old age
instead of proposals that evoke an intergenerational solidarity.