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Introduction
Although 'active ageing' marks contemporary gerontological discussions, its roots can be traced back to the 1940s and 1950s, when socio-gerontologists stressed the importance of an active lifestyle in old age for personal life satisfaction, a viewpoint later termed 'activity theory' (Lynott and Lynott 1996). Because this theory emphasised the maintenance of activity patterns typical of middle age, it was criticised as overly idealistic (Walker 2002). In 1961, Cumming and Henry (1961) looked at the ageing process in a fundamentally different way by focusing attention on disengagement, or the mutual withdrawal between ageing persons and society. They assumed disengagement to be universal and inevitable, claims which soon came under attack by researchers reporting substantial numbers of engaged (very) old people. Disengagement theory was further criticised for largely ignoring older adults' own perceptions: behaviour considered a sign of disengagement could be interpreted very differently if the meanings ageing persons attach to what they do were taken into account (Hochschild 1975). Despite these and other criticisms levelled against both theories, the underlying themes reoccur throughout gerontological history: the portrayal of older adults in society and the role hereby assigned to activity.
For a long time, older people's limitations were emphasised in the socio-gerontological literature and the societal debate through the dominance of the deficit-model, which legitimised the trend towards early exit from the labour force, apparent amongst older men in most developed countries during the post-war period (Verté and De Witte 2006; Walker 2006). In the 1970s and 1980s, public policies of many European countries encouraged early withdrawal from the labour market as a solution to increasing (youth) unemployment (van den Heuvel et al. 2006). Similarly, Defined Benefit occupational pension plans, which were dominant in the United States of America (USA) until the early 1980s, were originally designed to encourage older workers to withdraw from the labour force by offering substantial early-retirement incentives (Hong 2006). Within this context, learning, working and resting were portrayed as three strictly successive phases throughout the lifecourse, with the latter stage characterised by dependency, decline and loss (Jacobs 2004; Townsend, Godfrey and Denby 2006).
Despite differences between industrialised countries in the extent and speed of diffusion of certain conceptions about older adults, the negative view...