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What's so critical about it? An analysis of critique within different strands of critical gerontology
- Shane Doheny, Ian Rees Jones
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- Journal:
- Ageing & Society / Volume 41 / Issue 10 / October 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 25 March 2020, pp. 2314-2334
- Print publication:
- October 2021
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- Article
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Shortly after emerging in the 1980s, critical gerontology became a recognised part of mainstream gerontology. Under the umbrella of ‘critical gerontology’ sits a number of orientations that draw attention to how ageing is socially located, while foregrounding the importance of values in ageing research. Nevertheless, as critical gerontology is not a clearly defined field or orientation, inconsistencies in the use of ‘critique’ among critical gerontologists has been fermenting internal tensions. In this paper we draw on recent debates on critique as a form of discourse that aims to criticise a deficient social order with the aim of helping to bring about a good society, to identify four discourses of critique. These include the discourses of immanent critique and of transcendent critique, critique that focuses on tensions between these two, and critique that builds on constructive combinations of immanence and transcendence. We add to these an extra level of depth by distinguishing how critical discourse is applied in each case. We use this framework to identify the discourses of critique deployed in variants of critical gerontology. Here, we distinguish political economic, lifecourse, humanistic and culturalist approaches within critical gerontology and assess how each of these applies a discourse of critique. We find that these gerontological perspectives draw on a variety of discourses of critique and make use of varying degrees of engagement with critical discourse. The paper concludes by discussing how critical gerontology may develop as a reflective forum commenting on and integrating insights offered by its own varieties of critique and connecting these with macro-social analyses.
seven - Older people, low income and place: making connections in rural Britain
- Edited by Catherine Hagan Hennessy, Robin Means, University of the West of England, Vanessa Burholt, Swansea University
- Foreword by Alan Walker
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- Book:
- Countryside Connections
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 04 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 29 April 2014, pp 193-220
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Summary
Introduction
Many of our poorest and most vulnerable older people live in the country and have little choice, but to use heating oil to keep warm. A significant number can't afford the hundreds of pounds that they have to pay up front and simply do without, often, in the coldest months of the year. (Age UK, 2013)
It is usually in the winter months that the connections between poverty and older people are made by the media, campaign groups and politicians in the UK. Recent coverage of these connections in the national press, for example, has focused on findings from a survey of older people commissioned by the charity Age UK, which indicates that about two million people aged over 60 years are so cold that they retire to bed when they are not tired with a similar number moving into a single room within their homes in order to reduce their energy bills. What is also clear from the preceding Age UK quote is that fuel poverty among older people appears to be more pronounced in rural areas, where detached and older properties combine with the absence of mains gas provision to increase the costs of heating homes. In this chapter, we maintain the focus on rural areas by discussing the broader situations, problems and experiences of older people living on low incomes in rural parts of Britain. To do this, we draw on empirical materials from the Grey and Pleasant Land (GaPL) project. In particular, we utilise findings from our study on the welfare and well-being of older people in rural areas, which involved surveys of older people and qualitative research with older people living on low incomes in all six of the GaPL rural case study areas. Before discussing key themes emerging from our research, we explore existing academic accounts of the relations between older people, low income and place in urban and rural areas.
Older people, low income and place: national and urban perspectives
The linkages between low income and old age have long been recognised by poverty researchers (Alcock, 2004; Lister, 2004; Cann and Dean, 2009). Townsend's (1979) national survey of poverty in the 1960s indicated that almost two thirds of retired people were living below the poverty line (defined as an income less than 140% of a household's supplementary benefit entitlement), a rate more than double that recorded for working-age groups.
one - Introduction: managing the ‘unmanageable consumer’
- Edited by Richard Simmons, Martin Powell, Ian Greener
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- Book:
- The Consumer in Public Services
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 22 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 15 April 2009, pp 1-18
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Summary
Introduction
The figure of the consumer has been central to New Labour's approach to modernising and reforming public services (Clarke, 2004; Clarke et al, 2007; Needham, 2007). However, both consumers and public services are problematic. First, it is possible to claim that government documents tend to see the ‘consumer’ in a narrow sense: the individual ‘consumer as chooser’ to use the term of Gabriel and Lang (2006). Choice is becoming the watchword of the ‘new’ public services (Le Grand, 2005, p 200). At the risk of some oversimplification (see later), commentators tend to associate choice or exit with economic consumers and voice with political citizens. The recent choice versus voice debate (eg Audit Commission, 2004; NCC, 2004; Office of Public Services Reform, 2005; PASC, 2005) clearly sees a role for both mechanisms. However, according to the Joint Memorandum from Ministers, The case for user choice in public services (2005, p 3):
Both theoretical and empirical evidence points to choice serving as an important incentive for promoting quality, efficiency and equity in public services – and in many cases more effectively than relying solely or largely upon alternative mechanisms such as ‘voice’.
However, Gabriel and Lang (2006, p 2) argue that the word ‘consumer’ is now so overused that it is in danger of collapsing into meaningless cliché, and that the consumer can mean all things to all people. They point to ‘the theoretical softness of the concept of the consumer’, and are ‘impatient with one-dimensional views’, claiming that it is time that different traditions of defining the consumer started to take notice of each other (pp 2, 3). In particular, they point out that one type – the ‘consumer as chooser’ – has monopolised the attention of writers (p 42), but many other ‘faces’ exist: the consumer as communicator, explorer, identity seeker, hedonist or artist, victim, rebel, activist and citizen.
Second, consumption of public services is more complex than consumption of private goods and services, because of the possible tension between efficiency and equity criteria, and individual and collective dimensions. Few would raise the problem of equity if some consumers did better than others in snapping up a bargain in a sale or negotiating a good discount in buying a new car.
three - Responsibility and welfare: in search of moral sensibility
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- By Shane Doheny
- Edited by Hartley Dean
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Welfare
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 24 March 2004, pp 49-66
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Summary
In 1997, Britain’s New Labour government promised “a modern welfare state based on rights and duties going together” (Blair, 1997, p 4). One of the striking features of New Labour’s ‘third way’ discourse is that it moralises without making recourse to a moral sensibility. Theirs is a discourse that makes judgements about action without needing to provide ethical grounds for preferring one course of action to another. This moral reasoning fits easily with a social philosophy where responsibility has more to do with calculating the risks and benefits of providing for welfare than with any sense of solidarity for the stranger (Bauman, 1993; Fevre, 2000). New Labour takes up responsibility as part of a communitarian discourse offering both a critique of liberalism and, ostensibly, a vocabulary commensurate with ethical socialism (Driver and Martell, 1998). Responsibility is supposed to articulate the social web of relationships that bind communities together and to voice a critique of liberal individualism that holds out the possibility of social cooperation. However, without a moral sensibility articulating reasons for people to come together and cooperate – as opposed to reinforcing the ways that people do in fact come together – New Labour’s discourse begins to look empty of any ethical socialist conceptions.
To help illustrate my argument, this chapter first reconstructs and analyses the discourses employed by New Labour in a series of press releases dating from the end of its first term of office. I reconstruct these discourses because of their special status as news stories written to be retold by the press and broadcasting media to (potentially) everybody (Jacobs, 1999). What we find in these discourses are four different constructions of the citizen, each requiring different kinds of information and services; but uncovering the sense of responsibility implied in these discourses means using a theoretical framework sensitive to social constructions of responsibility. For this reason, the second part of the chapter applies Dean’s (2002) taxonomy of discourses of responsibility to map the repertoires New Labour takes up. We shall see that New Labour’s press release writers draw principally on discourses of duty and obligation – and on occasions a discourse of obedience (see also Chapter One of this book). Their discourse largely excludes an ethical understanding of responsibility.
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