Age and Structural Lag: Society's Failure to Provide Meaningful Opportunities in Work, Family, and Leisure - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471016780 ISBN 13: 9780471016786

Publisher: Wiley, 1994

Synopsis

"In society at large, lives have been drastically altered over this century--as a consequence of increased longevity, advances in science and education, the gender revolution, improvements in public health, and other historical trends and events--but numerous inflexible social structures, roles, and norms have lagged behind. There is a mismatch or imbalance between the transformation of the aging process from birth to death and the role opportunities or places in the social structure that could foster and reward people at the various stages of their lives. While the twentieth century has experienced a revolution in human development and aging, there has been no comparable revolution in the role structures of society to keep pace with the changes in the ways people grow up and grow old. The lag involves not only institutional and organizational arrangements, but also the many aspects of culture that, in addition to being internalized by people, are built into role expectations and societal mores and laws. For the future, then, structural changes will be needed if people are to find opportunities to spread leisure and work, as well as education, more evenly over the life course, and to make room for family affairs." --from Age and Structural Lag

About this title

About the Author:

Matilda White Riley was an American gerontologist who began working at Rutgers University as a Research Specialist before becoming a professor from 1950 to 1973. Here she wrote a textbook and discovered her interest in aging. Robert L. Kahn is the editor of Age and Structural Lag: Society's Failure to Provide Meaningful Opportunities in Work, Family, and Leisure, published by Wiley.

From the Inside Flap:

In twentieth-century industrial societies most of us live longer and healthier lives than ever before in history. Yet the social structures and institutions that provide opportunities for our lives are still marked by age constraints that were appropriate a century ago. Education is still primarily reserved for the young; work and family responsibilities are crowded into the middle years; while leisure and free time are allocated to the added decades of retirement. Even the many vital men and women past age 65, or even 55, who want or need paid jobs are regarded as "too old" to work. Lives have changed, but social structures have not caught up. There is a lag or mismatch between lives and structures. What are the detrimental consequences of this structural lag for individuals and society at large? How do structures change, and how can they be changed to enhance lives at every age? What alternative structures would lessen the burdens of middle age, prepare children for the complexities of the real world, and provide opportunities for productivity, independence, and esteem for older people? Seeking answers to such questions, the twelve chapters in this book bring powerful insights to bear on structural lag from sociology and psychology; and they draw upon history, anthropology, and economics to disclose new perspectives on the past and the present, and new hope for the future. While special attention is paid to structures affecting the old, issues relating to all ages are explored in respect to work, family, education, retirement, and other domains of social life. This is a powerful book, revolutionary in its conceptions and implications, calling for structural changes in society; a new mix of work, family, and leisure. Opening a critical but neglected area, it is the first book publication of a long-range Program on Age and Structural Change (PASC) directed by Matilda White Riley at the National Institute on Aging and involving an international network of scholars. Timely, authoritative, and the only book to offer a comprehensive treatment of this increasingly important social problem, Age and Structural Lag is a valuable resource for psychologists, sociologists, and those interested in human development and aging; for those in professional practice and in policy, both public and private; and for sophisticated readers concerned with major issues of everyday life. As a team of widely known experts, the editors offer a unique blend of psychological and sociological insights to this book on Age and Structural Lag. Riley and Foner are credited with creating the sociology of age, announced some twenty-five years ago in the three volumes of Aging and Society, and followed by an unbroken stream of related publications. Kahn, who collaborated on Aging from Birth to Death, draws on his classic work The Social Psychology of Organizations and his pioneering theories of "person-environment fit" and the "convoy of social support." Yet, it is the specific qualifications of these editors as individual scholars that make this team remarkable. Professor Emerita of Sociology at Rutgers University and Bowdoin College, has been President of the American Sociological Association and chair of key committees of the Social Science Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Gerontological Society. A member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Riley is the recipient of countless awards and honorary degrees--the latest from Radcliffe College in 1994. The best known of her publications is Sociological Research. Currently she is Senior Social Scientist at the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health. is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Health at the University of Michigan. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Statistical Association, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Psychological Society. Dr. Kahn's other books include Organizations and Nation-States and Work and Health. Currently he is Research Scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Rutgers University. A longtime member of the American Sociological Association, she has served as Chair of the Section on Aging, and has also held key positions in both the Gerontological Society of America and the Eastern Sociological Society. Dr. Foner's other publications include Age in Society, Old Age and Aging: New Perspectives, Aging and Retirement, and contributions to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and various professional journals. Currently she is working on a new volume in the Aging and Society series.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0471016780
• ISBN 13: 9780471016786
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Riley Matilda White, Kahn Robert L., Foner Anne