Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic Gerontology ed. by Jan Baars et al. (review)

This ambitious edited collection demands that we change our approaches to studies of aging. Reading it, I felt as if I were seated with the 13 authors around a coffee table, listening to them advance their disparate views. They do agree that aging is a socially determined process shaped by the existential conditions of senescence and finitude; a process perhaps more deeply dreaded and disparaged under the contemporary conditions of late capitalism. Further, they concur that aging studies must consider the interplay between the political economy and individual meaning-making, thus requiring a reconsideration of assumptions regarding the relationship between agency and structure. Aging, they insist, is about the relationship between existential as well as contingent factors; yet our understanding of this is limited by our theories. Beyond these points, disagreements commence. The chapters challenged me to re-think and to “bear with” authors’ views that differ dramatically from each other’s as well as from my own. Although there was little consensus, the “conversation” was rich, interesting, and useful.

Stemming from an international project that drew together critical and humanistic gerontologists to help understand aging more fully, this book does not achieve an integration of these perspectives, but takes us some way down that road. Although many chapters are primarily theoretical, others report from empirical studies and developments in aging research. Three major and related but distinct questions run through these contributions. First, how best can studies of aging apply social theory to develop a conceptual language and framing that can support lives of dignity and respect for older adults? Second, what constitutes a “good” old age in the period of late modernity? Third, how do we ensure that the vulnerable people, who are variously said to be in “the fourth age”, or called “older adults with high need for support” (including those with dementia), live in conditions of dignity and respect?

Setting out the journey towards better theory for aging studies, Jan Baars and Chris Phillipson trace developments in social theory and the politics of late modernity to show how and why new approaches to aging are needed that integrate structural and interpretive views. They locate the challenge for theory in the “problem of ageing”: finitude and senescence are inescapable, but the conditions under which we experience this existential moment are structural, as is the production of aging as a social problem for individuals and for societies. How can theory adequately reflect this dialectic of structure and meaning-making? Amanda Grenier and Chris Phillipson’s contribution considers how autonomy can be understood in the context of the “fourth age” – when people affected by frailty may no longer fit the criteria of the rational (neo) liberal subject. This chapter unseats notions of agency that measure its presence or absence to situate agency as an expressive possibility contingent upon the conditions of everyday life.

But which research methods can introduce this integration of structural and interpretive approaches into the research process? Friederike Zeigler and Thomas Scarf explore the potential of participatory action research (PAR), a method that includes participants to both reveal and challenge structural constraints and their internalization. While commenting on the method’s limitations (including the new tyranny of participation that can coerce participants rather than include them), the authors also demonstrate its promise to promote structural change at various levels of scale and to advance theory.

Quality of life for older adults is addressed from a wide range of contrasting vantage points in this volume. Joseph Dohmen draws upon wide-ranging ethical perspectives to argue that aging well is too often equated with optimal health rather than impairment and frailty. How can one “age well” while taking into account the inevitability of death and the uncertainty of its timing? Dohmen suggests that relationships are key – an important intervention, in my view – but he fails to take this view seriously. His comment that “the caregiver decides for himself/herself whether...