With 39 well-presented chapters written by 67 well-known gerontologists, I can recommend this handbook to any personal or institutional library that supports the study of ageing. With it, gerontology now has a solid base upon which to develop a theoretically grounded body of knowledge. This said, however, I have some serious reservations. First, despite being 56 per cent longer and having 15 more chapters than the first edition published ten years ago (Bengtson and Schaie Reference Bengtson and Schaie1999), it is disappointing to note that 55 of the 67 contributors are based in the United States of America. It is still a distinctly ethnocentric work, and it retains the same basic structure, with the middle half of the book made up of substantial sections headed ‘biological’, ‘psychological’ and ‘social science theories of ageing’. So, not much has changed since 1999. The second edition still presents theories of ageing as viewed from the platform of the Gerontological Society of America.

Secondly, in the opening paragraph, having reminded the reader of the familiar claim that gerontology is ‘data-rich but theory-poor’, the editors argue that the situation is changing, most visibly in the growth of ‘cross-disciplinary studies’. Given their emphasis on ‘reaching out beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries’ (p. xxii), they must have been disappointed to discover that there is still little overlap between the three broad areas of research: there is, for example, barely any cross-referencing in the lengthy index between the biological, psychological and social science sections of the book. A notable exception, however, is the ‘embodied capital theory’. In Chapter 3, drawing from capital investment theory in economics, the anthropologist, Hillard Kaplan, and his colleagues, conceptualise ageing as a process of investing in ‘stocks of somatic or embodied capital’ (p. 43). Extending back two million years to the origin of the genus Homo, they describe the impact on longevity statistics of historical changes in individual energy levels and environmental assault rates. Although oriented towards biology and the historical long view, this theory offers a novel approach to theorising the ageing process.

My third reservation is that the editors do not attempt to list or even identify those ‘theories of ageing’ that are currently being deployed. Although theory is defined in Chapter 1, the question of what constitutes ‘a theory’ is evaded. Indeed, at various points in the book the focus turns from theories to hypotheses, models and perspectives. In Chapter 23, ‘Theorizing lifestyle: exploring agency and structure in the life course’, for example, Hendricks and Hatch argue that the concept of lifestyle should be integrated into the ‘theoretical explication of life course experience’ (p. 435), and they go on to develop ‘a personal resource model’ that provides ‘an integrative framework’ (p. 451) for making sense of experience. Interestingly, four clearly labelled social theories of ageing – disengagement, activity, continuity and age stratification – are largely consigned to history by contributors to the handbook.

One theory is seen as currently relevant and important for social science, however, it is (inconsistently named) cumulative inequality or cumulative dis/advantage theory. Set within the political economy approach of critical gerontology, it is given space in six chapters and is most fully articulated in Chapter 22. Here Kenneth Ferraro and colleagues build upon five axioms: (1) social systems generate inequality; (2) disadvantage increases exposure to risk but advantage increases exposure to opportunity; (3) lifecourse trajectories are shaped by the accumulation of risk, available resources and human agency; (4) the perception of life trajectories influences subsequent trajectories; and (5) cumulative inequality may lead to premature mortality. Arguably they over-egg the theory by then formulating 19 propositions and, in a table that extends over three pages, match these against ‘other theories or perspectives’ (pp. 419–21). What I find interesting about this chapter and particularly the five axioms is that ageing is seen to be the consequence of incremental processes: over time and as the individual ages, exposure to risk increases and risk accumulates. Moreover, a continuing stochastic mechanism is implied in the proposition that trajectories ‘influence’ subsequent trajectories. Such processes imply that individuals are constantly ageing, rather than that they become old as a result of some radical transition. Despite this, structure still upstages agency in the formulation of the five axioms: the subject of the first, for example, is ‘social systems’. More specifically, in arguing that ‘it is difficult to overstate the influence of structural forces, but neither should one neglect the influence of human agency’ (p. 426), the authors effectively say that it is structure not agency that primarily determines whether one's life trajectory is dominated by disadvantageous risk or advantageous opportunity.

In Chapter 19, the first in the social sciences section, Scott Bass struggles to develop an ‘integrative theory’ of social gerontology (pp. 347–74). Echoing the editors' concern with academic territory, he gets bogged down in articulating the distinction between ‘disciplinary studies’ of ageing and the ‘interdisciplinary field’ of gerontology and then, in identifying two schools of thought, the critical gerontologists and the post-modernists, he has to work hard to identify any common ground. There is something rather desperate, for example, in the claim that: ‘[while] there may be extremist positions emerging from each of the camps, and while the philosophic roots are divergent, there may be some broader understanding of social gerontology that can be generalized for wider audiences’ (p. 360). It is on this basis that he expounds his integrative theory. This leads to a series of seven ‘overarching principles’ (pp. 368–71) and, like Ferraro's, these include a number of incremental propositions (e.g. ‘advantages and disadvantages accrue over the life course’, p. 369). Bass's primary objective is to bridge the two camps: he wants to develop a theory that the whole interdisciplinary field of gerontology can subscribe to, but he does this in a way in which structure once again dominates agency. So his first two principles focus on the ‘larger sociopolitical environment’ and ‘invisible macrolevel influences’ (p. 368). Allusions to a post-modernist perspective are first represented in the fourth principle (concerning the ‘consequences of bodily change’, pp. 369–70), and individual agency is left till the sixth and a loose reference to ‘the constant interaction between the individual and society’ (p. 371).

Several critical gerontologists have contributed chapters but only Longino and Powell offer a post-modern approach and then only indirectly in a chapter titled ‘Toward a phenomenology of aging’. The most frequent citations to post-modernist approaches are to the work of Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, and so it is a major disappointment that they do not contribute a chapter themselves. Bass claims that Alan Walker, on behalf of the critical gerontologists, has offered ‘a bit of a concession’ in the debate over structure and agency (p. 360), but in Chapter 32, Walker himself sets aside conciliatory rhetoric in accusing Gilleard and Higgs of the sin of ‘one-sidedness’, claiming that ‘microsociological gerontological perspectives have tended to ignore the constraints of structure and, therefore, have unnecessarily diverted attention from the sources of inequality in old age’ (p. 603). British gerontologists may remember the tension between the two camps surfacing rather dramatically at the 2002 annual conference of the British Society of Gerontology, and clearly it rumbles on. There are signs, however, that this debate, like that between the proponents of disengagement and activity theory, is becoming history. In a special edition of the Journal of Aging Studies (volume 22, number 2, 2008) and the review of that publication in this journal (volume 29, number 4, 2009, 649–58), it is clear that the generation of critical gerontologists who were so influential in setting the research agenda in the 1980s and 1990s are now ruminating on the failure of governments to sustain ‘the welfare state’. In the handbook, Walker remains committed to his belief that research should influence government policy (p. 610) and he fears the consequences for older people of ‘the risk society analysis’ (p. 605). He incorporates agency into his theoretical approach to ageing by identifying two tensions: between societal and biographical development, and between systems/institutions/organisations and communities/networks/families. Within this context however, he argues, agency is embedded within structure and in his conclusion he returns to the welfare state, its role, responsibilities and potential.

This particular debate originates in long-running arguments about individual and society, structure and agency, and wealth and poverty. Age and ageing figure only insofar as older people, as a group, are cast in a distinctive position in relation to the rest of society. The consequences of such structuration are of course critically important and should be the subject of research but, in my view, this is not ‘ageing’ (or even ‘aging’). As a result of the dominance of such theorising, however, gerontology is all too often seen to be about ‘them’ (and an implied ‘us’) in the ‘here and now’. Bass, for example, first notes that critical gerontologists have extended the Frankfurt school's meta-analysis of social systems ‘to the elderly’ (p. 356), and then that Gilleard and Higgs ‘see aging as a flexible time of opportunity and choice’ (p. 359). It is hardly surprising that how people age year-by-year over the course of long lives is rarely theorised satisfactorily within this literature.

Fortunately, other chapters in this book offer alternative social science perspectives on the processes, assumptions and experiences of ageing. Dannefer and Keeley-Moore provide a valuable review of the lifecourse approach; Settersten and Trauten set the concept of old age in the context of age identities; Toni Calasanti, in introducing the contribution of feminist gerontology, provides the only theoretical discussion of ageism and age relations; and Christine Fry discusses the relevance of anthropology for the study of ageing experiences. Twenty-seven years ago, Malcolm Johnson, then editor of this journal, expressed his regret that attempts at that time to construct theories of social and psychological ageing ‘have tended to be conceptual propositions about the nature of old age in advanced western societies rather than distillations of the social ageing process’ (Johnson Reference Johnson1982: 4). Here, he offers a cogent summary of the ‘burgeoning literature’ on theories of the lifespan, culminating in the rhetorical question, ‘is there so little distinctiveness about old age that gerontology itself as an age-related enterprise is approaching its own demise?’ (p. 662). In my view, the evidence provided by this new edition of this important handbook suggests that he need have no doubts: in 2009, old age maintains its grip on the gerontological agenda.