In this timely and authoritative overview on social gerontology and social theory, Chris Phillipson outlines the changing contexts and experiences associated with later life as we move into a new century. The book critically reviews the different theoretical explanations which attempt to explain these changes. Phillipson shows how in late modernity changes to pensions, employment and retirement, and intergenerational relations, are placing doubt on the meaning of growing old. He suggests that later life is being reconstructed as a period of potential choice on the one hand, but also of risk and danger on the other. This book will be essential reading for students and academics in social gerontology, as well as for students and academics in sociology, social policy and related disciplines interested in the future of an ageing population and the future of social gerontology.

The "Need for Theory" speaks to the burgeoning need for critical thinking in social gerontology. The editors have brought together some of the foremost contributors to theoretical advances in the field. This volume incorporates state-of-the-art theorizing with a focus on selected topical areas facing gerontologists around the world. Using their keen insights into substantive issues, the contributors examine personal and structural changes affecting individuals over the life course. Extolling the need for theory is not enough; the contributors focus their insights on a panoply of substantive issues, linking the personal with the political and with the structural parameters that shape the process of aging, no matter where it occurs.

What does it mean to grow old in America today? Is 'successful aging' our responsibility? What will happen if we fail to 'grow old gracefully'? Especially for women, the onus on the aging population in the United States is growing rather than diminishing. Gender, race, and sexual orientation have been reinterpreted as socially constructed phenomena, yet aging is still seen through physically constructed lenses. The second edition of Margaret Cruikshank's Learning to Be Old helps put aging in a new light, neither romanticizing nor demonizing it. Featuring new research and analysis, expanded sections on gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender aging and critical gerontology, and an updated chapter on feminist gerontology, the second edition even more thoroughly than the first looks at the variety of different forces affecting the progress of aging. Cruikshank pays special attention to the fears and taboos, multicultural traditions, and the medicalization and politicization of natural processes that inform our understanding of age. Through it all, we learn a better way to inhabit our age whatever it is.

This book is about rethinking the ways in which we make sense of social action or agency in later life. The contributions in this collection challenge traditional academic approaches to the study of later life, which, arguably, often deny older people agency. Social gerontology, and the wider society, should be more reflexive and rather than contribute to the continued marginalisation of older people, should draw attention to the extent to which the latter's actions may be understood within the set of normalising discourses which people have to manage and negotiate as they get old. The purpose of this collection is to continue this process, by providing philosophical, theoretical, conceptual and empirical direction for a reflexive social gerontology. This book argues that the management of later life has become complex, caught as it is within a broad discourse which continues to construct old age as a time of decline and dependency but has shifted the burden of responsibility for the avoidance of decline on individuals.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth—and the relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period, many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale. But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these scientists still debated a great many questions: Had the earth cooled from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same kind of place as it is now? Was prehuman life marked by mass extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time? The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, Martin J. S. Rudwick’s Worlds Before Adam picks up where his celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain’s Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory. Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick’s magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of one of the world’s leading historians of science.

Families in market economies have long been confronted by the demands of participating in paid work and providing care. Across Europe the social, economic and political environment within which families do so has been subject to substantial change in the post-World War II era and governments have come under increasing pressure to engage with this important area of public policy. In the UK, as elsewhere, the tensions which lie at the heart of the paid work/unpaid care conflict remain unresolved posing substantial difficulties for all of law's subjects both as carers and as the recipients of care. What seems like a relatively simple goal – to enable families to better balance care-giving and paid employment – has been subject to and shaped by shifting priorities over time leading to a variety of often conflicting policy approaches. This book critiques how working families in the UK have been subject to regulation. It has two aims: · To chart the development of the UK's law and policy framework by focusing on the post-war era and the growth and decline of the welfare state, considering a longer historical trajectory where appropriate. · To suggest an alternative policy approach based on Martha Fineman's vulnerability theory in which the vulnerable subject replaces the liberal subject as the focus of legal intervention. This reorientation enables a more inclusive and cohesive policy approach and has great potential to contribute to the reconciliation of the unresolved conflict between paid work and care-giving.

Studies how religious and ethical concerns are an integral and structuring part of the physical system of Empedocles.