This latest in the ‘Society and Aging’ series from Baywood is an edited collection of papers. Two of the three editors of New Dynamics in Old Age are based in Germany: Hans-Werner Wahl in Heidelberg, and Clemens Tesch-Römer in Berlin, while the third, Andreas Hoff, works at Oxford in England. They bring together an international and cross-disciplinary set of authors from primarily the USA, the UK and Germany. There are over 40 authors and many of the names will be familiar to readers of Ageing and Society, but there is no consolidated list of their affiliations, qualifications and backgrounds. Volumes of collected papers have fallen from favour in recent years, partly because publishers sell more textbooks and partly because authors know their chapters can be overlooked by abstracting and referencing systems.
The book has seven parts each with three papers. Each part is entitled ‘New and persistent dynamics regarding …’ some aspect of the ‘environment’. The introductory section has a paper on social construction and one on physical and mental functioning. The second section is on the social environment and has papers on cohort differences, family relations and aspects of care. The ‘home environment’ covers housing and the quality of life, relocation and urban deprivation. Section 4 covers the outdoor environment, and examines mobility, driving and leisure. The fifth section on technology has papers on the Internet, technology in the home, and care technologies for chronic conditions. The section on the ‘societal environment’ has papers on policy responses to globalisation, older people's politics, and economic aspects of productivity in old age. The final section headed ‘New Challenges’ has two papers, one on cross-cultural ageing research and the other on micro- and macro-perspectives. The papers concentrate on empirical description, and many draw on original research. They are, as is inevitable in such a volume, variable in their geographical scope, theoretical sophistication and quality of expression.
It is impossible to review the many contributions in 800 words but four captured my interest. Christine L. Fry presents a very neat piece on social constructionism. It is a concise, theoretically informed overview of change in the experience of old age and how it is conceptualised. This is followed by Kenneth G. Manton and XiLiang Gu's careful examination of the US National Long-term Care Survey and discussion of the changing prevalence of severe cognitive impairment. Both are valuable but very different in their scope and approach. Heidrun Mollenkopf, Isto Ruoppila and Fiorella Marcellini present findings from a five country European research project, ‘MOBILATE: Enhancing Outdoor Mobility in Later Life’. They apply historical and generational perspectives to their analysis and present interesting contrasts to the US data in the paper by Karlene K. Ball, Virginia G. Wadley, David E. Vance and Jerri D. Edwards. The US team present the importance of driving for mobility and quality of life in the US and comment on various new technologies for vehicle safety and driver assessment.
The volume is not a teaching text. It has interesting reviews of the state of some specific research areas, and presents some important new research findings but it is not a book to read from cover to cover. The prime audience is clearly the research community. It is not an undergraduate text but might feature usefully on particular post-graduate programmes. The editors struggle stoically to bring coherence to this large and diverse volume of material. In their introduction they have a section appropriately entitled, ‘On the dynamics of old and new aging: attempt to define a fuzzy concept’. In essence they contrast gerontological understanding during the third and last quarters of the twentieth century. They identify four themes that provide the framework for the book: the development of a fourth age in contrast to the third age; the scientific management and biomedicalisation of old age; changing dynamics in the societal acknowledgement and institutional support for old age as a period of the life span; and new societal discourses on the possibilities and burdens of old age. This characterisation does not reflect fully the book's focus on familiar social policy concerns. For example, there is little reflection on consumerism, generational cultures or the body, all of which have attended post-modern trends and the ‘cultural turn’ in social science. Indeed, the volume has a distinctly modernist flavour, not least with the several papers on new technologies and their impact. I presume it is a complete coincidence that the book's title is the same title as that of the current combined United Kingdom research councils' research programme on ageing. Let us hope that the millions of pounds that will be invested in that project produce as much insight as in this volume.
