Ageing, occupation and social engagement: Towards a lively later life

Abstract

Recent critical work in social gerontology has established that the dominant popular view of old age as a time of steady decline and withdrawal from ordinary life is a social construction. This image is the product of urbanised industrial society, over more than a century, in which older people have often been characterised as passive. Later life has become constructed as time without occupation. This article examines recent challenges to such ‘negative’ modernist view of later life, that is based on a deficit model of ageing. Examples of occupation and activity in later life are discussed. At the same time, it must also be recognised that the construction of a more positive and ‘lively’ later life is not uniformly open to all sections of society. Structural divisions (of gender, race and culture, ill‐health and poverty) still create difference of opportunity, in which certain sections of society are advantaged. The resulting disadvantages must be addressed in social policy if society is to be able to meet the aspirations of all ageing citizens.

Key words:

• Deficit model of ageing
• Leisure
• Social gerontology
• Successful ageing