Consuming health in later life 77 SEVEN consuming health in later life introduction In this book, we have so far looked at a number of different aspects of the role of consumption in shaping the identity and experience of later life in contemporary Britain. Here we focus on health and health-related consumption. This is a rather different entity from those considered in earlier chapters where we looked at the growth of access to material goods by older people. Clearly, goods such as washing machines, videos and computers need little explanation or
Targeted as the ‘grey consumer’, people retiring now participated in the creation of the post-war consumer culture. These consumers have grown older but have not stopped consuming.
Based on extensive analysis over two years, this unique book examines the engagement of older people with consumer society in Britain since the 1960s. It charts the changes in the experience of later life in the UK over the last 50 years, the rise of the ‘individualised consumer citizen’ and what this means for health and social policies.
The book will appeal to students, lecturers, researchers and policy analysts. It will provide material for teaching on undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses in sociology, social policy and social gerontology. It will also have considerable appeal to private industry engaged with older consumers as well as to voluntary and non-governmental organisations addressing ageing in Britain.
Neoliberal political discourses have normalised the belief in northern European countries that individuals are responsible for their health and wellbeing, regardless of social class, gender or ethnic background.
Drawing on examples from Germany, Sweden and the UK, Simmonds critically examines how the neoliberalisation and marketisation of health and social care have created an adverse environment for older people, who lack social and cultural capital to access the care they need. This crucial analysis scrutinises provision for ageing populations on an individual, national and global level.
Challenging current political and social policy approaches, this rigorous text discusses innovative solutions to contemporary challenges in a complex care system.
Health policy thinking must change. This book explores the fundamental currents and tensions that lie behind recent trends such as shared decision-making, co-production, and personalisation.
These are often discussed in relation to an epidemiological transition but this text argues that they embody a philosophical transition – a change in our conceptions of healthcare and of appropriate forms of knowledge and analysis. As clinical concerns are increasingly nested within social concerns then policy analysis must engage with the multiple philosophical tensions that are now centre stage.
This focus on key underlying ideas and tensions in healthcare couldn’t have come at a better time. With international relevance, the book’s arguments help fuel a shift away from a ‘delivery’ model towards a more deliberative model of healthcare.
Populations around the globe are ageing rapidly. This demographic shift affects families, market structures and social provisions. This timely volume, part of the Ageing and the Lifecourse series, argues that the lifecourse perspective helps us understand the causes and effects of population ageing. The lifecourse perspective suggests that individuals’ experiences at an early age can influence their decisions and behaviour at a later age. This much-needed volume combines insights from different disciplines and real-life experiences to describe the theories and practices behind this idea. It therefore caters to the needs of scholars, practitioners and policy makers in a range of areas including sociology and political science.
This book challenges existing stereotypes about the ‘consumer as chooser’. It shows how we must develop a more sophisticated understanding of consumers, examining their place and role as users of public services. The analysis shows that there are many different ‘faces’ of the consumer and that it is not easy to categorise users in particular environments.
Drawing on empirical research, “The consumer in public services" critiques established assumptions surrounding citizenship and consumption. Choice may grab the policy headlines but other essential values are revealed as important throughout the book. One issue concerns the ‘subjects’ of consumerism, or who it is that presents themselves when they come to use public services. Another concerns consumer ‘mechanisms’, or the ways that public services try to relate to these people. Bringing these issues together for the first time, with cutting-edge contributions from a range of leading researchers, the message is that today’s public services must learn to cope with a differentiated public.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of social policy and public administration. It will also appeal to policy-makers leading ‘user-focused’ public service reforms, as well as those responsible for implementing such reforms at the frontline of modern public services.
We are often told that ‘money can’t buy happiness’. But if money is not the answer then what is? This book considers this question by examining empirical data stretching back almost 10 years. Whereas previous concerns of individual well-being have been drawn towards the negative outcomes of life experiences, this book provides a new approach by directly addressing the circumstances under which high subjective well-being is experienced, often with surprising results.
Drawing on nine years of panel data, the book examines demographic, social, spatial, health, domain satisfaction and socio-economic circumstances in a rich and complex longitudinal study, providing previously unknown information on factors associated with improved and sustained high well-being. It shows that subjective assessments of our circumstances are more important to well-being than our objective conditions and suggests that high well-being may be the key to improvements in people’s subjective experience of a wide range of adverse (and other) life events. It also highlights that high levels of well-being are more likely to be associated with our social relationships and health status than with income or personal status, and that affluence is no guarantee to high subjective well-being and indeed may have negative consequences.
The 21st century is seeing the emergence of a positive science, with a new focus on subjective well-being. This research adds new knowledge to the issues and debates which support the move towards a better understanding of the factors that promote subjective well-being. Such findings will be important to the international academic field as well as the national political arena where improving well-being has become a part of the government’s agenda.
Modernising health care: Reinventing professions, the state and the public is a crucial contribution to debates about the rapid modernisation of health care systems and the dynamics of changing modes of governance and citizenship.
Structured around the role of the professions as mediators between state and citizens, and set against a background of tighter resources and growing demands for citizenship rights, Ellen Kuhlmann’s book offers a much-needed comparative analysis, using the German health care system as a case study. The German system, with its strongly self-regulatory medical profession, exemplifies both the capacity of professionalism to re-make itself, and the role of the state in response, highlighting the benefits and dangers of medical self-regulation, while demonstrating the potential for change beyond marketisation and managerialism.
Kuhlmann critically reviews dominant models of provider control and user participation, and empirically investigates different sets of dynamics in health care, including tensions between global reform models and nation-specific conditions; interprofessional dynamics and changing gender arrangements; the role of the service-user as a new stakeholder in health care; and the rise of a new professionalism shaped by social inclusion.
Modernising health care provides new approaches and a wealth of new empirical data for academics and students of health policy, medical sociology and sociology of professions, and for health policy makers and managers.
Social Policy Review 15 continues the tradition of providing a different style and approach to policy issues from that found in most academic journals and books. Welfare and Welfare Reform in the USA, Europe and the UK combines issues such as globalization, Europe and pensions with examination of the current and historical contexts of social policy. Chapters have been purposely chosen to review a varied and interesting selection of topical social policy developments and to set these in a broader context of key trends and debates.
Published in association with the UK Social Policy Association.
At a time of heightened neoliberal globalisation and crisis, welfare state retrenchment and desecularisation of society, amid uniquely European controversies over immigration, integration and religious-based radicalism, this timely book explores the role played by faith-based organisations (FBOs), which are growing in importance in the provision of social services in the European context.
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the contributions to the volume present original research examples and a pan-European perspective to assess the role of FBOs in combating poverty and various expressions of exclusion and social distress in cities across Europe.
This significant and highly topical volume should become a vital reference source for the burgeoning number of studies that are likely follow and will make essential reading for students and academics in social policy, sociology, geography, politics, urban studies and theology/ religious studies.
