From the Inside Looking Out: Competing Ideas About Growing Old (review)

From the Inside Looking Out: Competing Ideas About Growing Old by Jeannette A. Auger and Diane Tedford-Litle is a book about aging and old age in Canadian contexts. The authors juxtapose the "inside" experiential and subjective worlds of older persons to the "outside" empirical and theoretical practices of the gerontological field. Gerontologists, along with governments and social planners, are seen as ageist culprits for constructing the elderly as a social "problem" while neglecting their productive contributions to Canadian society. In a clearly written style the book's introduction and five chapters range over materials condensed from a theoretical literature review, focus group sessions, web and community-based publications and interviews with Black Nova Scotian and Mi'Kmaw elder groups, the latter being especially important given the lack of Aboriginal research in Canadian gerontology. The accent on reflexivity and agency throughout the book is one of its strengths, but it can also limit the effectiveness of the qualitative research where the book relies too heavily on focus group participants.

Chapter One examines gerontology's scientific constructions of old age. Modern gerontologists who create both negative and positive views of aging are castigated for contributing to ideologies of dependency and need that characterize and constrain older people. While I join the authors in advocating critical gerontological approaches the task of From the Inside Looking Out should be to convince gerontologists in a non-alienating way that such approaches are worthwhile. It may be valid to claim that mainstream biomedical and instrumental gerontology has marginalized the very people on whose behalf gerontologists work. However, many gerontologists, including the ones frequently and sympathetically cited by the authors, seek out theoretical innovation as they too struggle with the ambiguities of negative and positive values around aging. Indeed it is surprising, given their orientation, that the authors only briefly mention critical researchers who work to broaden the gerontological field beyond biomedical models by imaginatively blending phenomenology, feminism, political economy, literary and biographical studies. Chapter One also introduces the qualitative focus-group research used by the authors to scrutinize gerontological perspectives and social policies, and to acknowledge older persons' experiences in aging research. The strategy to "empower" an inside,

agential and people-oriented "voice" that can speak to an outside, objectifying and intellectually bridling profession is an appealing part of the book. Qualitative researchers must also recognize, however, the burdens of truth and authenticity they place on such a voice. While the "outside" has its own sustaining rhetorics and narratives, so does the "inside." For example, the authors evaluate a workshop on aging dealing with "self-determination" and state that it would seem "that self-determination for the elderly is something that requires professional experience and competence rather than common sense knowledge. Unfortunately this viewpoint is also becoming popular among laypersons" (p. 28). But why shouldn't laypersons seek professional ideas about self-determination? How would the concept grow and change into something relevant and significant otherwise? We might agree with the authors that "subjective experiences of growing older illustrate the realities of aging as much as do theoretical explanations" (p. 28), but this does not permit us to essentialize the former in order to critique the latter. The making of meaning and narrative in aging is a creative fusion of professional and everyday discourses, which is why the older people interviewed by the authors talk about "activity," "adjustment" and "successful aging," and at the same time incorporate and personalize this professional vocabulary into their life stories.

Chapter two is a useful summary of theories of aging and their practical applications. At this point in the book I suspect that readers would look for fewer repetitive arguments against gerontology and more of an organized exposition that elaborates gerontology's main theories and methods in their historical, disciplinary and intellectual contexts, followed by a selection of critical and reflexive gerontologies in accord with the authors' perspective. The focus group materials could also be systematized into a more...