The intersections of policy, practice and experience

This chapter outlines how discourse in policy and practice can be linked with older people's experiences of transition in late life. It moves beyond academic understandings of transition, providing the conceptual background and methodological means to reinterpret transitions as they are presented in social policy discourse. Rather than treating the study of social policy and the analysis of lived experience as separate, this chapter is drawn to an understanding of what happens at the intersections of these sites. First, it outlines how policy discourse may be understood to represent and shape socio-cultural interpretations of ageing and late life. Second, it outlines how a narrative approach can be used to access the storylines told in public policy and older people's accounts, and the link between the two. Third, it outlines how these ideas were used in the Late Life Transitions project that forms the basis of the book. This linked approach provides the foundation to consider the models that shape late life, and the ways in which older people may use these ideas to negotiate socio-cultural and personal constructs of ageing. Together, a storied approach to late life can provide new ways of understanding expectations and interpretations of transitions in late life as taking place in the intersections between policies, discourses, organisational practices and lived experience. In doing so, the approach builds on and links critical traditions in gerontology from structural and humanist perspectives. It outlines both how older people's experience may be shaped through ideas such as those articulated by academic study and public policy practices, and how older people may draw on, negotiate or contest the expressed ideas about ageing and transitions in their own lives. Although focus on policy has always been central to the study of ageing from a critical perspective (Estes, 1979; Phillipson, 1982; Walker, 1982), contemporary planning issues have brought debates on ageing to the fore. In recent years, concerns for transitions related to ageing and late life have resurfaced through debates on the age of eligibility for retirement benefits, and ideas on how to best achieve productive and successful ageing (see Moody, 2001). Underlying the attention to issues of ageing are concerns for financial stability amid shifting demographics, ensuring productivity over the lifecourse, and attempts to reduce fiscal expenditure on costs such as pensions (Gee and Gutman, 2000).

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