Guest Editorial
Symposium on the sociology of health and ageing
Eileen Clark
Division of Nursing & Midwifery, La Trobe University, Wodonga, VIC
PP: 155 - 155
Article Text
There has been little debate among Australian sociologists about ageing, and there is no body of distinctively Australian work to match overseas studies in the sociology of ageing. In Australia, most of the discourses on ageing come from a biomedical perspective that see old age as a period of illness, decline and dependency. While there is no denying that old bodies may be less robust, old people may not see themselves as ill as a result. Instead, a faltering body may be seen as just one more challenge to confront. The changing demographic profile of Australia has also resulted in the portrayal of ageing as a time of financial dependency, and as a period that will have a major impact on national economic wellbeing. These views of ageing present unflattering stereotypes of old people as sick and dependent. As editor, I am pleased that two papers in this symposium challenge these stereotypes by focusing on wellness in old age.
In the first paper, Chris King raises provocative questions about the way old age is produced and reproduced in popular images and government policies. Drawing on Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum, King argues that the current spate of images portraying the Third Age as an active retirement lifestyle contribute to the construction of old age as something other than what it is. Government policies for older people are driven by rationalities and fail to address structural elements that precede and shape old age.
The second paper, Social Capital: One source of wellness in older adults? raises questions about the factors that maintain health in old age. The links between social capital and good health have been widely accepted by health sociologists, but there have been few studies of social capital that look specifically at older people. Eileen Clark and Terence McCann suggest that the growing popularity of retirement villages as a housing choice for older people may be linked to a desire to live in a Gemeinschaft - a community that promotes social integration, mutual support and wellbeing.
Suzy Gattuso also explores the process of wellness in later life in the third paper. Drawing on her empirical work with older women, she shows how old age has involved a complex balancing of pleasures and pains that leads to the development of resilience. This process shows life to be an active, reflexive process of deconstruction and reconstruction in which memories are shaped so as to guide and inspire life in the present. For Gattuso, this resilience enables women to define themselves as well, regardless of past or present symptoms of objective ill health.
Taken together, these three papers show just a few of the ways in which old age can be investigated. I hope they will encourage other sociologists to consider the contributions they can make to the understanding of ageing in postindustrial, postmodern societies.
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