The Many Meanings of “Active Ageing”. Confronting Public Discourse with Older People’s Stories

In recent years and throughout the European Union, “active ageing” has become a prominent conception of how to “age well”. In analyzing the governmentality of old age inherent to the “active ageing” paradigm, this paper tries to avoid the short-cut from program to praxis commonly being taken in governmentality studies. It reports on the findings of an empirical research project that asks for the specific images of “old age” and “retirement” becoming prominent in the context of last decade’s push for “activation” in German politics. The analysis combines the reconstruction of so-called “story lines” emerging in public discourse with the evaluation of qualitative interviews with “young” elderly people, conceptualizing older people’s narrations as being an integral part of the discourse itself. Moving from simple, ad-hoc illustrations of theoretical claims concerning a “neoliberal” government of old age to a systematic empirical reconstruction of what may be called the dispositif of “active ageing”, the paper claims to make an innovative contribution to an “empirical theory” of governmentality.