Introduction: Discourse, institutions and the elderly

INTRODUCTION: Discourse, Institutions and the Elderly

NIKOLAS COUPLAND* VIRPI YLANNE-McEWEN University of Wales

This special issue derives from a workshop session, under the title of Discourse, Institutions and the Elderly, at the Uppsala International Conference on Discourse and the Professions (26-29 August, 1992). In itself, representing empirical projects under way around the world, the workshop was evidence of the upsurge of interest in discursive approaches to aging and to lifespan issues. Although these projects and the articles assembled in this issue are rather diverse, they share a focal concern with linguistic and communicative aspects of older people’s lives and elderliness. More specifically, they share a commitment to locally contextualized social explanation, through appreciating how forms of talk organize our perceptions of late life and shape our relational and cultural experiences. There are many well-argued rationales for this general perspective within the social sciences, whether affiliated to the labels discourse analysis (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Potter and Edwards 1992; van Dijk 1985), critical linguistics (e.g. Fairclough 1989), social semiotics (e.g. Kress and Hodge 1988), conversation analysis and ethnomethodology (e.g. Boden and Zimmerman 1991; Drew and Heritage 1992) or others, and we cannot pursue these arguments in detail here. The presupposition that unites these approaches is essentially the Whorfian case-that the categories and rules that tacitly underpin all facets of our social lives, and in fact all aspects of social order, are sociolinguistic. They emerge from and are constituted in our routine practices of talk, which cannot therefore be excluded as objects of research. So, understanding how discursive formations can conventionalize and consolidate the abstract categories and relationships that order our everyday lives should be empowering-for social analysts but more importantly for social actors. It should allow us to critique and deconstruct *Directail

correspondence to: Nikolas Coupland, Cenrre for Applied English Language Studies, University of Wales, Cardiff; Cardff CFI 3XB. Wales, United Kingdom. JOURNAL OF AGING STUDIES, Volume 7, Number 3, pages 229-235 Copyright @ 1993 by JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 08904065.

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our own and others’ everyday communication practices and conceive of individual and cultural alternatives. But the so-called ‘linguistic turn’in the social sciences has a special relevance to studies of aging. From one perspective, the lifespan is very clearly set of culturally specific, ascribed linguistic categories. Preston (1986, p. lo), for example, suggests that ‘American culture generally cuts up age.. . in the following way: 1. Baby. 2. Child 3. Teenager 4. Young person 5. Middle-aged person 6. Old person.’ He goes on to point out how different cultures differ in the number of categories, the placement of divisions between them, and the rights and responsibilities associated with each. Historically within western cultures, the designation ‘old person’ has had highly variable associations and implications. In pre-industrial societies, before retirement norms were widely recognized, there was a far less ‘natural’ basis for invoking occupation-based conceptions of ‘old persons’, with the associated implications of their being socially unproductive, roleless or disengaged (Young 1980; see also Coupland and Coupland this issue; Neussel 1982,1984). Cole (1986) gives an illuminating account of how western societies have engineered an arguably ageist climate through fostering ideologies of an inherently healthy old age. And the dissemination of a culture’s ideologies of aging is of course in and through its discourses-its media and literary portrayals of the generations (e.g. Harwood and Giles 1992; Woodward 1991) its conventional language about aging (e.g. Bytheway 1985; Middleton and Buchanan this issue) and its formulaic patterns of intergenerational talk (Grainger; Henwood; Nussbaum; Wood and Kroger this issue; also Coupland, Coupland, and Giles 1991). Because so much of our experiential world, and our experiences of ourselves within our social worlds, are mediated by language, personal and social identities can themselves be considered as discursive products (cf. Giddens 1991). In Shotter and Gergen’s terms, ‘persons are largely ascribed identities according to the manner of their embedding within a discourse-in their own or in the discourses of others. In this way cultural texts furnish their “inhabitants” with the resources for the formation of selves’ (1989, p. ix). But social aging carries within itself an inherent transitoriness of subjectivity that makes the Shatter/ Gergen perspective even more compelling for aging research. Our ‘selves’ will always struggle to find even a temporary stability among the mass of age-referencing or age-implicative meanings that everyday living throws up (Coupland and Nussbaum in press). Some instances are the habitual ‘age-tagging’ of individuals in journalistic reports; rituals of age-telling and responses to these in elderly adult/young adult conversations (Coupland, Coupland, and Giles 1991); ‘calendar marking’discourses at and about decade boundaries and presumed life-transition points (of which ‘coming of age’, marriage, vasectomy, divorce and retirement are some culturally rather specific instances). Day-to-day talk is replete with requirements for us to reappraise where we stand developmentally in relation to all sorts of lifespan indices and norms of age-appropriate behavior. Despite this, it is only recently that aging research has embraced qualitative, interpretive, discursive approaches. When language has been the focus in aging research, studies have been largely quantitative, psycholinguistic investigations of language impairments or decremental effects. Researchers themselves have largely been socialized into a deficit ideology of aging, which has led to the testing of deficit-implying hypotheses. Do older speakers use less complex syntax or less differentiated vocabulary,

and should their talk be characterized as ‘off-target’ and ‘verbose? Do memory deficiencies and reduced attentiveness inhibit older speakers’ communication? In fact, research has been equivocal on most measures of productive language competence (see Coupland, Coupland, and Giles 1991, chapter 1, for a review). But what seems most significant about this paradigm is its resolutely outgroup perspective on elderly people, presumed to be at least relatively homogeneous and sharing the attribute of (at least potential) communicative decrement. And where decremental effects do emerge, no socially-sensitive framework exists in which to interpret their significance. We learn very little about the social positioning that may very plausibly lead older speakers to adjust their communicative goals and priorities, and nothing about how communicative experiences impact on the subjectivity of aging. Since aging is, above all, something we all do, and in another sense something we all have done to us, researchers’ reticence in the past to look inside discursive experiences is all the more surprising. Some recent reappraisals of what qualitative and quantitative research can offer gerontology are therefore very significant, and we hope this special issue will take the debate a step further. Murphy and Longino (1992) critique the view that quantification in aging research is necessarily more objective and more ‘scientific’, and they endorse the search for ‘more personal sources of data’ (p. 143). Gubrium (e.g. 1988, 1992) has emphasized the need for aging studies to develop an analytic orientation to the local contexts of everyday life, and to appreciate how individuals both understand and achieve their behaviors and relationships through talk. The discourse analytic project of aging is to develop methods for understanding how we attach ‘subjective meaning’ to our lifespan experiences (Gubrium 1988, p. 15). Theoretical support derives partly from the vast, contemporary interdisciplinary movement usually referred to as social constructionism (see the Shotter and Gergen quotation above; Henwood this issue), but also from the long-standing traditions of ethnomethodology and cognitive sociology (e.g. Garlinkel 1967; Wieder 1974; see also Coulter 1990) as well as linguistic ethnography and anthropological sociolinguistics (e.g. Gumperz 1982; Hymes 1972). In contemporary studies, qualitative research is rapidly developing our knowledge of personal histories and autobiographical narratives and their relationship to selfhood throughout the lifespan (e.g. Bielby and Kully 1989; Mishler 1992; Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992; see also Coupland and Nussbaum in press). Narrative data has also revealed the similarities and parallels between professional researchers’and lay people’s theorizing about age and aging (Gubrium and Wallace 1990). However, beyond their engagement with discourse and aging, all the articles collected in the present issue establish some explicit link with institutional concerns. Several of them work with conversational data from medical or caring settings where elderly people are involved as patients or as residents (Coupland and Coupland; Grainger; Nussbaum; Wood and Kroger). These, then, are ‘total institutions’in Goffman’s (1961) sense, where participants orient to one another largely in terms of their institutionally prescribed roles. There are many reasons why this sort of research is urgently needed. Total institutions can wield enormous power to enhance or constrain the quality of life of all of us who spend time within them, and very largely through the quality of relationships and social encounters they permit or deny. Where possibly frail and very dependent elderly people are involved in long-stay arrangements, the institution in a real sense is the life experience.

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Researchers with specialist expertise in language and interpersonal communication have only recently begun to highlight the implications of talk and relational development for psychological health and wellbeing in these settings (see also Grainger, Atkinson, and Coupland 1990; Nussbaum 1991). Nussbaum’s contribution in this issue overviews the background research in this area. He then considers the case of one individual making the transition into a nursing home (in the USA) in order to highlight the importance of the local management of this transition. Grainger’s article, on the other hand, overviews the diversity of conversational ‘modes’ to be found in two long-stay hospitals (in the UK). She presents an analysis of how these modes of talk are constituted in relation to different goals held by carers and residents. Different modes of talk reflect and reproduce different versions of the ‘reality’ of the social context which can often appear to impair the quality of institutional life. Coupland and Coupland (this issue) begin by outlining how societal ageism is represented in academic and other contemporary public discourses. But their empirical focus is again on a geriatric medical institution-a geriatrics outpatients clinic in the UK. They highlight the strategies used by medical personnel in this context in trying to resist the ageist formulations of own-health that patients themselves articulate. Wood and Kroger return to one of the foundation concerns of modern sociolinguistics in their analysis of how forms of address can color the interactional experiences of older people. They again build a constructivist interpretation, showing how forms of address (across a wide range of medical institutions and other contexts) can create different qualities of relationship along the ubiquitous dimensions of status and solidarity, but impinging crucially on older people’s sense of their own power or powerlessness. A great deal of conversation analytic work has focused on medical issues in general and medical consultations in particular (e.g. Silverman 1987; West and Frankel 1991) but studies specifically relevant to older patients are still rare. Articles in this issue begin the important task of redressing this unfortunate imbalance. But perhaps paradoxically, studies of (total) institutional settings need not address wholly ‘institutional’ concerns. In fact, Schegloff has argued the corollary-that talk within such settings is not to be taken as necessarily ‘institutional’: ‘Even if we can show by analysis of the details of the interaction that some characterization of the context or the setting in which the talk is going on (such as “in the hospital”) is relevant for the parties, that they are oriented to the setting so characterized, there remains another problem, and that is to show how the context or the setting (the local social structure), in thaf aspect, is procedurally consequential to the talk. How does the fact that the talk is being conducted in some setting (say, “the hospital”) issue in any consequences for the shape, form, trajectory, content or character of the interaction that the parties conduct? And what is the mechanism by which the context-so-understood

has determinate

consequences for the talk?

(emphasis original, Schegloff 1991, pp. 52-53).

We suspect that Schegloff’s requirement to be explicit about this ‘mechanism’ is too demanding, and it is in any case unclear what would count as a demonstration of what he calls ‘procedural consequentiality.’ On the other hand, Schegloff’s argument does succeed in highlighting the naivety of assuming that talk within an institution ‘is’ itself

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institutional in character. Grainger’s discussion (in this issue) of ‘personal discourse’ in her hospital data makes this point very clear. Again, Nussbaum (in this issue) argues that residential institutions for the elderly need not articulate the ‘institutional’meanings that their patients (as clients or residents?) presumably anticipate. One important implication of these studies, then, is that institutionalization is more a discursive quality than it is a characteristic of a social setting. This is certainly a theme that has emerged in some earlier analyses of lay conversations between younger and older adults (Coupland, Coupland, and Giles 1991). This study reported that in firstacquaintance conversations between women in their thirties and older women (60+years), a common pattern was for the younger women to ‘interview’ their older partners, eliciting often quite intimate information about health and other personal problems. We commented that, in such circumstances, conversation commonly shaded into consultation. And it may be that everyday orientations to the elderly in western societies rather generally enact a process of institutionalization, through which aging itself is redefined as a quasi-medical concern, or alternatively a matter impinging on social services and economic concerns. The UK experience (Hepworth personal communication) is certainly that social gerontology has been excessively dominated by research into service provision, housing and welfare. Discourse studies at this metalevel therefore have a further critical contribution to make. Once again the process is to deconstruct conventional and received practices, including those of research itself, allowing them to be challenged where necessary. Middleton and Buchanan (in this issue) show how lay, professional and academic discourses interact to consolidate a diversity of elderly people’s communication acts as ‘reminiscence’, with purportedly ‘therapeutic’ potential. Middleton and Buchanan are less concerned with reminiscing events themselves than with the discursive climate that generates categories of elderly people’s behaviors, and so to an extent elderliness itself. Henwood’s article brings a similar perspective to bear on the institutionalization of mother-daughter relationships within the family. In her data, women’s talk about family and about particular relationships makes repeated structural references to how family members achieve degrees of ‘closeness’. These metacommunicative acts can then be shown to play a crucial role in the construction of daughterly, motherly and grandmotherly roles. We have not presented this collection of qualitative, discourse analytic studies in a spirit of hegemonic resistance to alternative perspectives and traditions of aging research. In any case, there is enough diversity within the present articles for us to be sceptical of claims in favor of a single movement, school or paradigm of research. Discourse analysis seems destined to remain a vibrant but diversified and interdisciplinary enterprise, reflexively critiquing its own as well as its antecedents’ assumptions and approaches. Still, the Uppsala workshop and this collection of articles do seem to make a meaningful and original contribution to a new wave of qualitative research on aging which should considerably enrich future work in gerontology. An Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK) grant to Nikolas Coupland for 1992-3 was instrumental in forging links in sociolinguistic research between the UK and Sweden. This award provided a context for the Uppsala workshop and this special issue of Proceedings to come into being. Thanks are due to the conference organizers, Britt-Louise

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

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Gunnarsson, Per Linell, Bengt Nordberg, and financial assistance.

and Bjorn Melander,

Vol. -l/No. 311993 for their practical, administrative

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