Age and the Reach of Sociological Imagination: Power, Ideology and the Life Course (Aging and Society)

By:

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis
The dominant narratives of both science and popular culture typically define aging and human development as self-contained individual matters, failing to recognize the degree to which they are shaped by experiential and contextual contingencies. Our understandings of age are thereby "boxed in" and constricted by assumptions of "normality" and naturalness that limit our capacities to explore possible alternative experiences of development and aging, and the conditions – both individual and social – that might foster such experiences. Combining foundational principles of critical social science with recent breakthroughs in research across disciplines ranging from biology to economics, this book offers a scientifically and humanly expanded landscape for apprehending the life course. Rejecting familiar but false dichotomies such as "nature vs. nurture" and "structure vs. agency", it clarifies the organismic fundamentals that make the actual content of experience so centrally important in age and development, and it also explores why attention to these fundamentals has been so resisted in studies of individuals and individual change, and in policy and practice as well. In presenting the basic principles and reviewing the current state of knowledge, Dale Dannefer introduces multi-levelled social processes that shape human development and aging over the life course and age as a cultural phenomenon – organizing his approach around three key frontiers of inquiry that each invite a vigorous exercise of sociological imagination: the Social-Structural Frontier, the Biosocial Frontier and the Critical-Reflexive Frontier.
Copyright:
2020

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
240 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781000405774
Related ISBNs:
9780429323676, 9780367190880, 9780367190897
Publisher:
Taylor and Francis
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Taylor & Francis. The right of Dale Dannefer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Sociology
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

No Rating Yet