Stay healthy, be active and work! - Motive analysis of policy proposals on old age

Abstract

This article discusses the motives of ageing policies, based on two cases of national policy documents, from Sweden and Poland. The discourse analysis applied in this study follows the key principles of motive analysis. The main findings indicate that neither document is primarily concerned about older people and their well-being. People and their lives are secondary to the main focus of the analysed policy proposals. Ageing is feared in those documents, and imagined consequences of the population ageing are attenuated.This study offers an insight into discursive spaces of old age in Poland and Sweden. Furthermore, it presents motive analysis as a valuable method for studying ways of problematising social policy issues. The article draws attention to discourses that shape social policy and are reinforced by it. It also shows the process of enacting a precautionary principle in social policy that often leads to reductionist and simplistic perspectives that focus on only one aspect of a given phenomenon.