Social Structures and Aging Individuals: Continuing Challenges arose from a conference in October 2006 and is the 20th and final volume in the landmark series ‘Societal Impact on Aging’. From their rare position of such extended commissioning of papers on the most recent developments in gerontology, the editors look back over the previous 19 volumes, assess long-term trends and identify rarely apparent agendas in gerontology debates. K. Warner Schaie sums up in a short preface the guiding principles of the successive conferences and emphasises the special appeal of the present volume. To organise the vast range of information from all these volumes, the editors have used five broad topics: health and wellbeing, including the roles of religion, personality and cognition; the impact of changes in technology and the workplace; socio-cultural change and historical context; the family; and societal contexts of ageing.
Well-known names have been recruited to help review the contributions, including Dale Dannefer, Neal Krause, Laura Carstensen, David J. Ekerdt, Thomas Cole, W. Andrew Achenbaum, Christine L. Fry, Vern L. Bengtson and Merrill Silverstein, to name only a few. However, to shoulder the responsibility of presenting an overview and evaluating this heritage of gerontological reasoning, the different contributions in the volume prove that this can be done in different ways. In a remarkable introductory contribution, ‘The waters we swim: everyday social processes, macrostructural realities and human aging’, Dale Dannefer uses this heritage as an additional incentive for developing his own theoretical and conceptual ideas on ageing. He starts from an almost philosophical-anthropological perspective in emphasising the irreducible sociality of humans and by characterising the human condition as being ‘hard-wired for flexibility’ (p. 5); in justification he speaks of ‘human natures’ instead of one human nature. This dependency of humans on the social context in which they live leads him to state that ‘everyday social relations are the invisible and unnoticed water we swim’ (p. 6). Individual agency and social forces are continuously shaping each other and moulding this process, but gerontological analysis has neglected contextual factors. So while studying cohorts has gained in importance, we see relatively little careful analysis of cohort-related factors. Such implicit reductionism is criticised by Dannefer and he gives particular attention to the impact of strong institutional forces, such as institutional social practices on ageing individuals. By opening up the potential impact of macro-level processes he concentrates on the theoretical and empirical challenges of ageing-in-context and signifies ‘the missing middle’, thereby completing the picture of still unfulfilled promises in gerontology.
While Dannefer's reflections are not specifically connected to the series, other contributions try to assess its achievement more systematically. This is done in an excellent way by Laura Carstensen and collaborators in a concentrated and condensed chapter, ‘From static to dynamic: the ongoing dialectic about human development’. This presents a very useful interpretation of the scientific enlargements of knowledge in the field of developmental psychology. A special and quite noteworthy quality of the volume must be attributed to the impressive attention given to questions of value transfers, of cultural definitions in the ageing field and their long-term implications for the positioning of old age in different societal environments.
In Part IV, ‘Sociocultural Change and Historical Context’, the contributions by T. Cole, W. Achenbaum and N. Carlin, Christine Fry and Rukmalie Jayakody evince different ways of presenting an argument. The chapter by T. Cole and colleagues, ‘Aging, history and the course of life: social structures and cultural meanings’ has an unusual design. It generates distinctive and rich perspectives by linking personal experiences of the ageing phenomenon with overarching historical changes in the meaning of age. Christine Fry's contribution, ‘Cultural transformations, history and the experiences of aging’, has as its starting point the increasing uncertainty of images of old age and the diminishing impact of conventional lifecycle conceptions, but the discussion extends into an ambitious undertaking, the development of a wider theoretical framework that combines anthropological findings from the global economy with the reanimation of classical sociological reasoning. Speaking about meaning leads to reflection on the worldwide increasing relevance of religion which is mirrored in two main contributions, one by Neal Krause on ‘Religion, health and health behavior’, and the other by Vern L. Bengtson, Merril Silverstein and collaborators on ‘Religion and intergenerational transmission over time’. Altogether, and exactly because of the theoretical heterogeneity of the contributions and the notably diverse perspectives, this volume is a highly valuable contribution to gerontological reasoning.
