ten - Future directions

Summary

This chapter draws together arguments used throughout the book to provide ideas for further development in the study of ageing and late life. It restates how current dominant age- and stage-based understandings of transitions overlook contemporary interpretations of ageing and late life. As demonstrated throughout the book, dominant models are often unable to address the tensions between structured and lived experience, the ‘fit’ between suggested models and subjective interpretations, the fluid nature of continuity and change, the experiences of older people at diverse social locations, and the intersection between advanced age and impairment. This concluding chapter reiterates the diversity and fluidity that can exist within and between structures, expectations and experiences and offers critical questions that have emerged throughout the reviews of academic sources, social and cultural discourses, and personal and social understandings of lifecourse transitions. It points to the fluid processes of continuity and change that may be experienced differently as a result of social location, life history, relationships and subjective interpretations over the lifecourse. It draws on the insights of older people from diverse social locations to reconsider transitions, challenge dominant perspectives and suggest new ways to approach ageing and late life in a contemporary context.

Contributions

Challenging fixed normative patterns

This book has confronted the normative patterns of the lifecourse as articulated in relation to late life. Exploring the intersections of policy, organisational practice and lived experience, it draws attention to the problems created in approaching ageing through a set of normative patterns or binary assumptions. Dominant socio-cultural constructions and expectations of ageing are set against interpretations of ageing from the academic literature and older people's accounts, resulting in the identification of contradictions and tensions that exist between normative constructs and lived experience. Consider, for example, how the new success-based models sustain the polarisation of health and illness in late life, thereby failing to provide a framework other than decline to impaired older people in the fourth age. The frame of transition has been incredibly illustrative in this regard. It has shown that while ideas and frameworks organised around change in age are deeply established in the mindsets of individuals and societies, and reinforced through policies, practices and socio-cultural constructs, the rigid boundaries suggested in understandings of transitions do not always correspond with older people's experience.