Ricca Edmondson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781847425935
- eISBN:
- 9781447311737
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781847425935.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gerontology and Ageing
Life-course meaning and insight remain stubbornly significant for (older) people: it is damaging to inhabit societies that believe existence loses meaning after paid employment ceases. This view ...
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Life-course meaning and insight remain stubbornly significant for (older) people: it is damaging to inhabit societies that believe existence loses meaning after paid employment ceases. This view amounts to the social exclusion of older people, needing to be countered both politically and by exploring alternative interpretations of older age. Using examples from the author’s experience in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Austria and the US, the book deploys a confluence of disciplinary approaches, exploring compelling versions of later-life meaning in everyday life and gerontological literature. In earlier chapters it interrogates taken-for-granted practices making it harder to attach meaning to later life, including problems in discussing ethics, everyday reasoning, or the importance of human connectedness. It then examines varieties of meaning attributed to later life among gerontologists and older people themselves: meaning as stressing connectedness with values or practices outside individuals; meaning stressing (life-)time, life-course development and ‘generativity’; and meaning as insight, including inside into the human condition, and wisdom. Exploring these, the book uses ‘reconstructive ethnography’ to interpret meaning connected with time, narrative and practice. It probes ideas about wisdom in psychology and philosophy, including Aristotle’s connection of wisdom with reasoning, ethics, and urgent practical politics in uncertain circumstances. The book offers a social, transactional account of wisdom, used in co-operation among imperfect individuals who together can achieve more than they could alone. It illustrates the appeal of this idea in art and everyday life: reviving ideas about wisdom offers coherence, hope and meaning for social and individual life-course aims.Less
Life-course meaning and insight remain stubbornly significant for (older) people: it is damaging to inhabit societies that believe existence loses meaning after paid employment ceases. This view amounts to the social exclusion of older people, needing to be countered both politically and by exploring alternative interpretations of older age. Using examples from the author’s experience in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Austria and the US, the book deploys a confluence of disciplinary approaches, exploring compelling versions of later-life meaning in everyday life and gerontological literature. In earlier chapters it interrogates taken-for-granted practices making it harder to attach meaning to later life, including problems in discussing ethics, everyday reasoning, or the importance of human connectedness. It then examines varieties of meaning attributed to later life among gerontologists and older people themselves: meaning as stressing connectedness with values or practices outside individuals; meaning stressing (life-)time, life-course development and ‘generativity’; and meaning as insight, including inside into the human condition, and wisdom. Exploring these, the book uses ‘reconstructive ethnography’ to interpret meaning connected with time, narrative and practice. It probes ideas about wisdom in psychology and philosophy, including Aristotle’s connection of wisdom with reasoning, ethics, and urgent practical politics in uncertain circumstances. The book offers a social, transactional account of wisdom, used in co-operation among imperfect individuals who together can achieve more than they could alone. It illustrates the appeal of this idea in art and everyday life: reviving ideas about wisdom offers coherence, hope and meaning for social and individual life-course aims.
Ricca Edmondson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781847425935
- eISBN:
- 9781447311737
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781847425935.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gerontology and Ageing
Chapter 4 interrogates the notion of wisdom, reviewing work by psychologists and others, including the type of deliberation Aristotle associates with wisdom. He sees it as characteristic of human ...
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Chapter 4 interrogates the notion of wisdom, reviewing work by psychologists and others, including the type of deliberation Aristotle associates with wisdom. He sees it as characteristic of human beings to use wise reasoning to share values and reach decisions about what is right, in both strategic and ethical senses: the highest type of discourse possible in our lives in the community. Accounts of wisdom may be perfectionist, demanding lofty individual achievement, but those preferred here are more hospitable to human imperfection. In this reading, wisdom is portrayed as engaged in by ordinary people, collaborating to achieve more insight than they could reach on their own. The chapter next explores related exchanges in art or literature, including popular films, examining their widespread appeal. Lastly, it gives examples from the author’s ethnographic research, based on familiarity with local practices, yielding a transactional, social account of wisdom highly applicable to later life.Less
Chapter 4 interrogates the notion of wisdom, reviewing work by psychologists and others, including the type of deliberation Aristotle associates with wisdom. He sees it as characteristic of human beings to use wise reasoning to share values and reach decisions about what is right, in both strategic and ethical senses: the highest type of discourse possible in our lives in the community. Accounts of wisdom may be perfectionist, demanding lofty individual achievement, but those preferred here are more hospitable to human imperfection. In this reading, wisdom is portrayed as engaged in by ordinary people, collaborating to achieve more insight than they could reach on their own. The chapter next explores related exchanges in art or literature, including popular films, examining their widespread appeal. Lastly, it gives examples from the author’s ethnographic research, based on familiarity with local practices, yielding a transactional, social account of wisdom highly applicable to later life.
James W. Harrington and Trevor J. Barnes
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198233923
- eISBN:
- 9780191917707
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198233923.003.0019
- Subject:
- Earth Sciences and Geography, Regional Geography
To read the comparable chapter on economic geography in Geography in America is to recall a world, and a way of viewing that world, that seems remote. For ...
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To read the comparable chapter on economic geography in Geography in America is to recall a world, and a way of viewing that world, that seems remote. For one thing, that chapter was called Industrial Geography. There were good reasons why industrial geography was so prominent in the last report. The 1970s and 1980s were a period of fundamental industrial change in Western economies involving deindustrialization and lay-offs, restructuring of methods of production, the emergence of new manufacturing and service sectors, and new forms of international economic organization supported by innovations in telecommunications, transportation, and corporate organization and management. All those substantive issues remain important, and in some cases central, to present economic geographical research. Changed, though, is the conceptualization of those issues. In particular, newer approaches tend to blur the boundary between the economic part of economic geography, and other social, cultural, and political geographical practices. Some have labeled this move “the cultural turn” (Crang 1997; Thrift and Olds 1996; Barnes 1996b), but this description is too narrow because more than just the cultural is at stake. Rather, the very idea of the economic is being reconceived. The economic is no longer conceptualized as sovereign, isolated, and an entity unto itself, but porous and dependent, bleeding into other spheres as they bleed into it. To use Karl Polyani’s (1944) term, which is often deployed in this literature, the economy is “embedded” within broader processes. There are at least two reasons for the reconceptualization of the economic by economic geographers. One is internal to the academy, and is bound up with a broader intellectual shift in the social sciences and humanities that is increasingly suspicious of essentialized entities such as “the economy” (Barnes 1996a; Gibson-Graham 1996; Lee and Wills 1997). A second source of change is the actual geography of economic activities. The economic geographical landscape of the 1990s seems quite different from the one written about in the last report, and thereby demands a new theoretical vocabulary in which to be represented. In the last report, for example, there was no mention of Fordism or post-Fordism, flexibility or economies of scope, localities or local modes of regulation, growth coalitions or territorial complexes, or glocalization or even globalization.
Less
To read the comparable chapter on economic geography in Geography in America is to recall a world, and a way of viewing that world, that seems remote. For one thing, that chapter was called Industrial Geography. There were good reasons why industrial geography was so prominent in the last report. The 1970s and 1980s were a period of fundamental industrial change in Western economies involving deindustrialization and lay-offs, restructuring of methods of production, the emergence of new manufacturing and service sectors, and new forms of international economic organization supported by innovations in telecommunications, transportation, and corporate organization and management. All those substantive issues remain important, and in some cases central, to present economic geographical research. Changed, though, is the conceptualization of those issues. In particular, newer approaches tend to blur the boundary between the economic part of economic geography, and other social, cultural, and political geographical practices. Some have labeled this move “the cultural turn” (Crang 1997; Thrift and Olds 1996; Barnes 1996b), but this description is too narrow because more than just the cultural is at stake. Rather, the very idea of the economic is being reconceived. The economic is no longer conceptualized as sovereign, isolated, and an entity unto itself, but porous and dependent, bleeding into other spheres as they bleed into it. To use Karl Polyani’s (1944) term, which is often deployed in this literature, the economy is “embedded” within broader processes. There are at least two reasons for the reconceptualization of the economic by economic geographers. One is internal to the academy, and is bound up with a broader intellectual shift in the social sciences and humanities that is increasingly suspicious of essentialized entities such as “the economy” (Barnes 1996a; Gibson-Graham 1996; Lee and Wills 1997). A second source of change is the actual geography of economic activities. The economic geographical landscape of the 1990s seems quite different from the one written about in the last report, and thereby demands a new theoretical vocabulary in which to be represented. In the last report, for example, there was no mention of Fordism or post-Fordism, flexibility or economies of scope, localities or local modes of regulation, growth coalitions or territorial complexes, or glocalization or even globalization.