Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Connecting meaning with social structure: theoretical foundations
- three My own life: ethics, ageing and lifestyle
- four Rethinking agency in late life: structural and interpretive approaches
- five Dementia: beyond structures of medicalisation and cultural neglect
- six Self-realisation and ageing: a spiritual perspective
- seven Social ability or social frailty? The balance between autonomy and connectedness in the lives of older people
- eight Critical perspectives on social work with older people
- nine Community-based participatory action research: opportunities and challenges for critical gerontology
- ten Commentary: contingent ageing, naturalisation and some rays of intellectual hope
- Index
one - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Connecting meaning with social structure: theoretical foundations
- three My own life: ethics, ageing and lifestyle
- four Rethinking agency in late life: structural and interpretive approaches
- five Dementia: beyond structures of medicalisation and cultural neglect
- six Self-realisation and ageing: a spiritual perspective
- seven Social ability or social frailty? The balance between autonomy and connectedness in the lives of older people
- eight Critical perspectives on social work with older people
- nine Community-based participatory action research: opportunities and challenges for critical gerontology
- ten Commentary: contingent ageing, naturalisation and some rays of intellectual hope
- Index
Summary
Death is a dramatic, one-time crisis while old age is a day-by-day and year-by-year confrontation with powerful external and internal forces. (Robert Butler, Why survive? Being old in America)
Demographic change in the 21st century – with the rise of ageing populations across the Global North and South – is setting moral as well as political and economic challenges for the range of countries involved. On the one side come complex issues about the distribution of resources between generations and groups, with pressures placed on the shoulders of individuals in determining how to manage life in old age. On the other side has come a strong sense of the possibilities of new areas of choice in later life, notably with debates around the rise of the so-called ‘third age’ and the growth of leisure and cultural industries targeted at older people. These different sides to growing old – constraint on the one side and choice on the other – are the subject of detailed study and exploration in the various contributions to this book.
Ageing, meaning and social structure aims to bring together a fruitful interface between two approaches that have been relatively insulated from each other, although both have been shown to be highly relevant to understanding processes of human ageing. One aspect has emphasised the analysis of structural mechanisms such as social inequality; another has focused on the interpretation and articulation of meaning in later life. The former often operates under the rubric of ‘political economy perspectives on ageing’ (Baars et al, 2006),the latter as ‘humanistic gerontology’ or ‘humanistic ageing studies’ (cf Cole et al, 2010). This volume prepares the meeting ground for these two paradigms that have developed separately, with each drawing on their own traditional resources. The purpose of this volume is to explore the extent to which they presuppose and complement each other.
Critical gerontology as structural analysis
Social critiques, such as those associated with ‘critical gerontology’, are usually responses to structural mechanisms that work in ways that contradict official discourses that emphasise freedom, social justice or equality. The structural character of such mechanisms implies that the social problems that trigger the critique were not caused by inevitable results of senescing, or by the irresponsible actions of those who suffer from them or through mere chance, but that they have a persistent and systemic character.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ageing, Meaning and Social StructureConnecting Critical and Humanistic Gerontology, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2013