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Address for correspondence: Diego Romaioli, Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, Via Venezia 08, 35131 Padua, Italy E-mail: [email protected]
Agency in ageing: an open issue
Despite frequent reports of increased longevity and growing numbers of older people who enjoy good health, a negative vision of ageing persists, often limiting adaptive capacities among older people and impeding individuals from realising their full potential. Shared perceptions of ageing often seem to focus on both physical and mental limitation and decline, which is thought to explain an inevitable disengagement of older people from their ordinary daily activities and habits (Kaufman 1994).
Personal expectations and cultural beliefs are becoming crucial variables in predicting how an older person will reorganise his/her life and find a new life balance as he/she grows older (Phillipson 1998). Among these variables, agency seems to assume, at least culturally, particular relevance in defining normality for the individual who is considered ‘healthy’ as long as he/she has a proactive attitude and is capable of making plans for the future (Kontos 2004; Marshall 2005).
The idea of a self or person as an agent has fostered a long debate since Durkheim and Mauss (2009), as it is well known. The construct of agency has also been explored by social movements as well as by socio-political activists since the end of the 1970s: first by feminist theorists (cf. Wray 2003), and later by sociologists such as Bourdieu (1984), Giddens (1979) and Sahlins (2004), who emphasise the role of the individual's decision-making processes. Nonetheless the construct of agency has remained broad in its formulation and has, over time, acquired different nuances of meaning (Campbell 2009; Hitlin and Elder 2007). Overall, however, it is generally understood as what Ratner (2000) defines as the ‘individualistic view of agency’, associated with autonomy, motivation, willpower, perseverance, planning, choices and initiatives (Chirkov, Ryan and Sheldon 2010). Some authors have come to call these qualities the capacity to act (cf. Ahearn 2001) or, rather, the capacity that an individual acquires to plan his/her own future assuming an active, conscious and intentional role in achieving this future. Emirbayer and Mische considered the temporal dimension as a central aspect of agency and identified the resulting capacity as rendering the individual capable of...