Background

In India, families are mandated to take care of their older members (Rajan and Mishra, 2011). The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act (2007) states that parents, grandparents and ‘childless’ older people who are unable to maintain themselves are entitled to demand and receive income, care and support from children, grandchildren and other relatives who have sufficient resources. Cases (where support is not forthcoming) can be taken to tribunal and can result in the issue of maintenance orders with penalties for non-compliance including fines and imprisonment. Thus, there is a reliance on informal social protection, that is, support from kin. However, changes in family structures, family values, migration of family members and a rise in the number of women working outside the home can put increasing strain on families to provide support. Traditional forms of solidarity and collectivism are eroded by market economies: increasing monetisation impacts on forms of reciprocity (Norton et al, 2001), and requirement for a responsive mobile labour force impacts on availability of caregivers (Himmelweit, 2007, Rishworth and Elliott, 2018). Therefore, it is important to challenge the ‘realities’ of family support systems which may not be as robust as portrayed by policy makers.

Social protection should provide ‘a set of public programs designed to mitigate or cope with the adverse effects of risks to income security and physical well-being’ (Kapur and Nangia, 2015, p 75). Therefore, in India, we would expect to find welfare policies and programmes that protect individuals against shocks to assets across the life course, and plug any gaps in kin support in later life which may include options to relocate to a care home. However, little is known about older people's decision-making around care and support in later life. This chapter draws on data from 30 in-depth interviews with older male and female residents of nine care homes in three districts of Tamil Nadu and addresses the following questions: i) what are the decision-making routes leading to relocation to a care home? and ii) how does culture and the political economy influence the care choices available to older people?

Connectivity from a governance perspective

The way in which people connect with each other in particular places (such as rural areas) has been discussed and evaluated in many different ways. The dominant contemporary characterisation among policymakers and politicians the world over tends to be a functionalist one: people connecting together offer great potential for social integration, the development of collective values and social cohesion (Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Wilkinson, 2008). It is assumed that stronger integration and greater social cohesion will make society a better place (Jaffe and Quark, 2006). In relation to older people, this rationale is reflected, for example, in the national strategy on ageing for the UK (HM Government, 2009), which promotes building links between people of different generations as a means of strengthening bonds within communities. Governments produce guidance manuals on how to promote a sense of belonging in local communities (Department of Communities and Local Government, 2009) and government agencies develop measures to show how well connected communities are, with variables relating to trusting people, helping in the community, volunteering and generally being good citizens (Grootaert et al, 2004; Economic and Social Data Service, 2011).

This notion of social connectivity is a useful one for governments and tends to be a common policy objective, even where motives for introducing it might differ. There are a number of different political traditions that can lead to the common policy outcome of increased social connectivity. In the North American neo-liberal tradition, social connectivity shows how people have the ability to look after themselves and avoid the ignominy of dependence upon the state (Cruickshank, 1996; Wilkinson, 2010). It allows the development of personal freedoms, particularly where community action can release communities from publicly provided services over which they have little control (Lemke, 2001). Individual rights take over from state controls to allow individuals to reshape their lives (Rose, 1999).

In the UK, promoting increased social connectivity has allowed successive governments of all major political parties over the past 20 years to advocate (and develop policies for) ‘stakeholding’ societies, ‘active citizens’, ‘third way’ politics and the Big Society. Such independence from the state has also been advocated as a means of reducing exchequer cost (Taylor, 2003) and the size of government (Barnes et al, 2007), and is seen as a political justification for policies concerned with empowering communities.

Introduction

We have seen how the Grey and Pleasant Land (GaPL) research project was based on an interdisciplinary collaboration that brought together two dozen researchers at five universities to study the civic and social lives of older people in six different rural communities in England and Wales. As explained in Chapter One by Hennessy, Means and Burholt, we followed an approach in which the cross-cutting theme of connectivity was used as a ‘heuristic metaphor’ (Klamor and Leonard, 1994), with the aim of facilitating shared theorising through the collective adoption of this shared concept. This chapter, therefore, starts with some reflections on the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary research on rural ageing.

During the life of the project, the popularity of the term ‘connectivity’ took off in assorted policy and research funding arenas, as exemplified in the UK Research Councils’ interdisciplinary programme on Connected Communities. This chapter argues that the exploratory power of connectivity makes it much more than a heuristic device. Drawing upon the previous chapters, the diverse ways in which rural elders connect will be illustrated, as well as the main barriers to such connectivity taking place. It will be argued that it is important to understand the distinction between how rural elders experience connectivity to people in such areas as civic engagement and intergenerational relations as opposed to their connectivity to objects (eg landscape and scenery). It will also be argued that connection to place still matters to many rural elders but that, overall, they are starting to transition from place-based to more geographically dispersed connectivity.

The chapter also revisits how best to theorise connectivity by looking at what Chapters Three to Eight tell us about the explanatory power of both the social capital and human ecology perspectives. It concludes by drawing out broad policy and practice implications for rural stakeholders and arguing that the overall findings do challenge the dominant problem-based paradigm for rural elders.

The challenge and rewards of interdisciplinary research on rural ageing

What does the literature on interdisciplinary research tell us?

Large-scale multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research is increasingly advocated by governments and the major research funders like Research Councils UK, with the present Strategic Vision of the latter stressing the need ‘to maximise opportunities for breakthrough research that crosses disciplines and domain boundaries’ (RCUK, 2011, p 3).

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the background and guiding interdisciplinary framework of a programme of research on ageing in rural areas of the UK that forms the basis of this book. The topic of this research is older people's participation in rural community life, in particular, the ways in which rural elders are connected to their communities and their contributions to rural civic society. This focus brings together a number of established and emerging strands of gerontological interest – the social inclusion (and exclusion) of older people; their support networks; financial security; leisure participation; availability and access to services; transport and mobility; civic engagement in later life; and digital inclusion – all considered within the rural context. In this chapter, we outline the aims and organisation of this volume, highlighting the broad interdisciplinary approach that informed our study of how and in what ways older people are connected to civic society and their rural settings. We term these links ‘connectivity’, and the nature and impact of older people's connectivities in rural communities form a thread that integrates the various disciplinary perspectives and elements of the research described in the chapters that follow.

Rural ageing in the UK context

Despite increasing urbanisation globally, it has often been estimated that more than 60% of the world's older population live in rural areas (Hermanova et al, 2001). In the majority of countries, it has been noted that rural areas continue to be disproportionately elderly (Kinsella, 2001) and the growth of the older segment of the population is occurring faster in rural than in non-rural settings. Worldwide, 9.7% of rural populations are aged 60 and over; in Europe, this figure is 22.9%, which is greater than the proportion of their counterparts (19.1%) living in urban areas (United Nations, 2009). Contemporary rural Britain reflects this demographic picture (Brown, 2010). Rural England is at the forefront of the demographic ‘age wave’, with a median population age in 2006 of 44.4 years, compared with 38.5 years in urban areas (Commission for Rural Communities, 2007, 2008); this is expected to increase to 50 years in rural areas over the next 25 years (Champion and Shepherd, 2006). Moreover, median age is increasing faster in rural than in urban locations, and rural communities, particularly smaller ones, now have higher proportions of people in the 40–64 and 65 and over age groups than do urban areas.

Place attachment is a particular type of connectivity that could be described as the ‘glue’ that connects people to places. The study of place attachment stems from phenomenology and builds on the philosophical premises concerning the sense of belonging and being-in-the-world. Typically, this approach shies away from reductionist or psychometric approaches to the study of place attachment and uses qualitative data to examine this concept. Although such qualitative approaches provide useful conceptions around place attachment, qualitative data are not readily empirically generalisable. Because a central aim of social gerontology has been to apply research to improve the lives of older persons, this chapter draws on quantitative survey data from the Grey and Pleasant Land (GaPL) project conducted in England and Wales (described in Chapter One) to construct a multidimensional measure of place attachment and to examine how older people develop a connection with their place of residence. In so doing, its aim is to strengthen the empirical research base on place-based connectivity.

In this chapter, we review the literature on place attachment and then empirically test conceptual models based on the literature to identify the predictors of, and the pathways to, place attachment. These analyses contribute to a small body of literature on the place attachment of older rural adults (Rowles, 1988, 1990; Burholt and Naylor, 2005; Burholt, 2006, 2012; Keating et al, 2011), and we reflect on the applicability of our findings to those from Canadian rural communities that formed a parallel project to the UK research.

What is place attachment?

A number of different degrees of connectivity to the community as locale are described in the literature and several authors have considered the multidimensional nature of place attachment. Mohan (2011), for example, notes its heterogeneity: from complete disengagement to full commitment; from activity in some spheres but not in others; and participation at some times but not at others. Scheff (2011) notes its extremes as being ‘complete alienation’ on the one hand and ‘complete solidarity’ on the other – from high levels of social capital to fractured communities. Some people are just happy ‘being’ in a place without necessarily being actively involved in it (Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Hidalgo and Hernandez, 2001), possibly because they do not share common values with others in the community (Gilbert, 1996).