This paper presents a discourse analysis of talk in reminiscence groups. Two main issues are addressed. First, we examine how speakers' identities are accomplished through the way they position themselves in social relationships and social practices of ‘remembered pasts’. Particular analytical attention is given to how people claim entitlements to the significance and consequences of their lived experience. Second, issues of membership are examined through the way people index their engagement in the narrative environment accomplished in reminiscence group talk. Finally, we are concerned with how these narratives contribute to a ‘reconstitution’ of understandings in common about cultural and moral orders of remembered pasts and the historical era in which the reported events, experiences and practices took place. Our analysis aims to demonstrate how reminiscence work affords a context for ‘re-membering’ where older people on their own behalf can work entitlements to voice the consequences of their experiences of life.

This paper focuses on the feelings that institutionalised and community-dwelling spouses have in regard to their own or their spouse's living in a long-term care facility. Qualitative data were gathered from 161 married respondents. Themes associated with positive feelings included: benefit to self, benefits to spouse, reappraisal of self as caregiver, and appraisal of institutionalisation. Themes associated with negative feelings included: concern about institutionalised partner's care, tension with staff, stress associated with visiting, loss of purpose, loneliness, privacy, and tissues related to the marital relationship. Data indicate that feelings about institutionalisation must be analysed in various contexts. Implications for service delivery are discussed.

Only a minority of adults of all age groups experience difficulty with their finances and affairs, due to the combined effect of their diminished competence and their social circumstances in placing them at risk, from themselves, or from family, friends or others (well-meaning or otherwise). If unable to manage independently or with informal assistance, formal intervention (guardianship) may be required. Neither the traditional formality of courts, nor the tests and clinical processes of medicine are well equipped to judge this in the abstract. Informal (family) models have their place but they (and other options) pose ethical difficulties. A more practical approach is that taken by Australia's multi-disciplinary panels.

This paper is concerned with the interlinked issues of citizenship and the structured dependency of older people within Social Gerontology. It argues that implicit in much British Social Gerontology is a strategy of advancing the wellbeing of elderly people through the extension of citizenship rights. Absence of these rights leads to poverty, exclusion and ageism being commonplace experiences of large sections of the older population. This approach draws heavily on the ideas regarding social citizenship of T. H. Marshall who has influenced much mainstream social policy in Britain since 1945. Changes to the Welfare State since 1979 have seriously questioned the validity of this approach and many of these criticisms apply to the structured dependency approach. Recent work on citizenship can help us to see how the relationship between old age and citizenship has changed and how far theory in social gerontology needs to change to take account of these new circumstances.