Suchergebnisse

"This book explores an issue central to the study of age and ageing: Do we wish to preserve old age as a discrete stage of life, to be protected by welfare policies specifically targeting 'the old'? Should old age be accorded a privileged status? This may recognise the needs of a particular age group with regard to health, income and social care. But by doing so, we support the inaccurate and possibly offensive definition of 'old age' as the stage of life beyond age 65 - a demarcation line which has no biological or cognitive significance, since human beings age at very different rates. Defining old age in this way may ghettoise and marginalise one group of people in society, encouraging prejudice against them via policies that 'single out, stigmatise and isolate the aged from the rest of society', in a way that can be seen as subtly ageist. On the other hand, should we dispense with age as a categorisation and work towards an 'age-irrelevant', 'age-neutral' or 'ageless' society - one in which individuals will be judged by the content of their character, rather than their chronological age? Is the concept of old age an outmoded relic from the past?"--

"Age discrimination is a highly topical issue in all industrialised societies, against a background of concerns about shortening working lives and ageing populations in the future. Based upon detailed research, and adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this unique study traces the history of the age discrimination debate in Britain and the USA since the 1930s. It critically analyses the concepts of ageism in social relations and age discrimination in employment. Case-studies on generational equity and health care rationing by age are followed by an analysis of the British government's initiatives against age discrimination in employment. The book then truces in detail the history of the debate on health status and old age, addressing the question of whether working capacity has improved sufficiently to justify calls to delay retirement and extend working lives. It concludes with a detailed examination of the origins and subsequent working of the USA's 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act."--Jacket

In late 2011, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government announced the launch of a new programme on 'troubled families' – a term used to describe the estimated 120,000 most behaviourally anti-social families in England and Wales. To many social scientists, this appeared to be yet another reconstruction of the broad 'underclass' concept that has run like a thread of analysis through UK poverty discourses over the last 150 years. The symbolic nature and coded meanings of this particular concept of poverty are very interesting, as is the way it has been reconstructed periodically. This paper summarises these reconstructions, and the analytical issues raised by them: the 'residuum' concept of the 1880–1914 period; the 'social problem group' of the inter-war years; the 'problem family' of the 1940s and 1950s; the 'cycle of deprivation' of the 1970s; and the 'underclass' of the 1980s and 1990s.

Résumé Alors que les discriminations en raison de la race, du genre, de la religion, du handicap et de l'orientation sexuelle ont progressivement été encadrées par des textes législatifs réglementant en particulier l'accès à l'emploi, à la formation et à la fonction publique, l'âge n'est entré que récemment dans le corpus juridique. Cette postériorité est parfois interprétée comme un effet de la complexité de l'âge en tant que catégorie, moins binaire, plus flexible et plus poreuse que d'autres. Reprenant 1 des éléments d'une analyse approfondie présentée ailleurs 2 , le texte qui suit revient sur certaines difficultés propres à ce critère. À partir d'une analyse historico-économique du cas britannique, il invite à distinguer entre discrimination à raison de l'âge et âgisme au travail, et à s'interroger plus finement sur les causes des difficultés rencontrées par les travailleurs plus âgés en soulignant l'importance qu'y prennent les restructurations macro-économiques.