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Population ageing and globalisation represent two of the most radical social transformations that have occurred. This book provides, for the first time, an accessible overview of how they interact.
Ageing has been conventionally framed within the boundaries of nation states, yet demographic changes, transmigration, financial globalization and the global media have rendered this perspective problematic. This much-needed book is the first to apply theories of globalisation to gerontology, including Appadurai’s theory, allowing readers to understand the implications of growing older in a global age.
This comprehensive introduction to globalisation for gerontologists is part of the Ageing in a Global Context series, published in association with the British Society of Gerontology. It will be of particular interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics in this area.
India’s ageing population is growing rapidly; over 60s constitute 7% of the total population and this is projected to triple in the next four decades.
Drawing on a wide range of studies, this book examines living arrangements across India and their impact on the care and wellbeing of older people. Addressing access to welfare initiatives and changing cultural norms including co-residence, family care and migration, it reveals the diversity of living arrangements, cultural customs and the welfare issues facing older adults in India.
This book offers a crucial examination for practitioners, researchers and policymakers seeking to understand and develop the infrastructure required to meet the needs of older people in India.
The rapid economic growth of the past few decades has radically transformed India’s labour market, bringing millions of former agricultural workers into manufacturing industries, and, more recently, the expanding service industries, such as call centres and IT companies.
Alongside this employment shift has come a change in health and health problems, as communicable diseases have become less common, while non-communicable diseases, like cardiovascular problems, and mental health issues such as stress, have increased.
This interdisciplinary work connects those two trends to offer an analysis of the impact of working conditions on the health of Indian workers that is unprecedented in scope and depth.
Living arrangements and the provision of care for older people in India have been affected by migration. This is particularly salient given that Indian diaspora is the largest in the world. Hence, one can expect the trends in transnational migration to have a particular impact in the Indian context. However, and perhaps more importantly, the chapter will explore the patterns of internal migration within India. This is an important corrective to the focus on transnational migration as levels of internal migration far outweigh the extent of international migration. Therefore, this chapter examines both internal and international migration to understand how families establish, maintain and retain transnational and transregional care relations. In so doing, we draw on 1) theories of migration, 2) global chains of care and 3) life course theories to frame how migration decisions are related to life-course transitions and care provision. The life-course approach focuses on life events and transitions of individuals and the ways in which these events define their life trajectories. In particular, we will draw on the concept of ‘linked-lives’ to show how older people’s life-course transitions, for example going into care, are linked to the migration decisions of their offspring. With increasing urbanisation and migration we will see emerging trends of global and transregional chains of care to supplant and complement care deficits for vulnerable populations left behind, especially older adults.
This chapter introduces the main arguments and questions that are addressed throughout the book. The key argument is that, although we are witnessing the decline of the nation-state as the dominant spatial unit through which to understand these political, economic and social processes, the system of nation-states has yet to be fully replaced by a new spatial order. It is argued that this represents a key challenge to many gerontological theories that either take the nation-state as their frame of reference or assume that globalization has replaced all other spaces. Hence gerontology often appears to be trapped within one or other of these spatial contexts and only addresses questions that seem specific to whatever level seems dominant. This chapter outlines the key message in the book that cautions against these tendencies before moving on to describe each of the chapters in the book.
This chapter covers the ways in which the main social gerontological theories have dealt with the issues of space. Rather than repeat the conventional narrative about the historical development of these theories, they are divided into groups which correspond to two broad historical periods; the modern and the late modern. The main argument here is that the gerontological theories that took modernist spaces, such as the nation state, as their reference for understanding ageing are being fundamentally challenged by the emergence of these new spaces and the relations between them.
The aim in this chapter is to contribute to the growing academic interest in the spatial relations of ageing and later life. In so doing, the arguments and evidence for the existence of global, regional, national and local, forms of space are addressed. It is argued that we need to be aware of the evidence that all of these spaces now co-exist and that it is important to develop theoretical models that allow us to examine the interrelations between the different spatial levels and how these impact on the experience of ageing. This is important, as these new spatial logics challenge the assumptions that underpin the ‘methodological nationalism’ of many modernist accounts of ageing and later life. In this chapter it is argued that the current world order needs to be understood not as a single spatial logic but rather as a number of linked, overlapping processes.
This chapter critically assesses the data on the health of older people across different spatial scales as well as the evidence for the impact of globalization on healthcare spending. Drawing on data from a wide range of international studies, the analysis shows that there is a great deal of international variation in the health of older people. Hence, far from witnessing the emergence of a global time-space of ageing and later life international and regional differences sit alongside global trends. Similarly, there is limited evidence that global economic flows have had a major impact on the provision of healthcare for older people. The data here lend greater support to welfare regime theory than those who predicted a race to the bottom in spending on healthcare.
Economic issues form a key dimension for both globalization and social gerontology. Drawing on data from a range of international studies, this chapter critically assesses the extent to which we identify a global convergence around labour market participation rates, retirement age, financial circumstances and pension policies. It also looks at the impact of globalization on the employment and financial circumstances of older people. The analyses reveal that, although new temporalities of ageing and later life have opened up around work and retirement, there is little evidence of an emerging global economic time-space of ageing and later life. Globalization also does not seem to have much of a direct impact on the economic circumstances of older people. International and regional variations in work and income point to the importance of non-global political and economic structures for older people.
This chapter explores the ways in which belonging and identity are produced and re-produced along what can be called the ethnoscapes of ageing and later life. In this chapter, data from a wide range of studies are used to explore how older people around the world think about ageing and old age and whether new co-ordinates for identities in later life are emerging. The analyses presented in this chapter lend further support to the argument that there has been a radical transformation in the temporal foundations of ageing and late life. The analyses also lend some support to the argument that the shift to late or second modernity has rendered problematic the fixed and stable reference points that people relied on in the past to form their identities and to ‘know their place’.
