商品簡介
Is age by itself inclusive enough to make sense of changes and transitions over the life course? The Need for Theory explores how best to alloy the standard analytic techniques employed by social gerontologists to provide a more effective, nuanced, and insightful view of the assumptive realities thought to characterize the later years. Readers will come away from this book a little less sanguine about the nature of cause and effect within the experience of aging. 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. Building on a discerning overview of conceptual questions in contemporary gerontology, from social constructionism, to feminism, to social-psychological, structural, and political economy perspectives, the authors map key issues, paradoxes, and contradictions facing gerontology now and in the future. Their discussions are sure to engage readers who are themselves concerned with developing explanatory frameworks that reach beyond facile descriptions of existing practices.
作者簡介
ABOUT THE EDITORS Simon Biggs is professor of social gerontology, Keele University, United Kingdom. He has worked as a community psychologist and as a social work policy adviser, and has written widely in the areas of aging identity, social policy, and social theory. In addition to formal academic publications, he has authored training materials, including Confronting Ageing and Understanding Elder Abuse. From 1989 until 1993, he coordinated a National Community Care program, and he has also been a consultant on a number of initiatives in the areas of health and social care. Biggs is an executive committee member of the European Master's Degree in Gerontology. His latest book is The Mature Imagination: The Dynamics of Identity in Midlife and Beyond. Ariela Lowenstein is professor of gerontology and director of the Center for Research and Study of Aging, Faculty of Welfare and Health Studies, University of Haifa, Israel. She has written extensively in the areas of aging and family, intergenerational relations, family care giving, educational gerontology, and social theory. She works closely with national and international organizations in the field of aging and has produced several interdisciplinary manuscripts and training manuals. Lowenstein currently coordinates a five-country research study of family relations and quality of life. She is past chair of the Israeli Gerontological Society and currently serves as chair of the Behavioral, Social Science and Research Section, International Association of Gerontology, European Region. She is a fellow in the Gerontological Society of America. Jon Hendricks Jon Hendricks is Associate Provost and Professor of Sociology at Oregon State University. He is a past-president for the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, and has served as chair for both Sociology of Aging & the Life Course section, American Sociological Association, and the Behavioral and Social Sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America. Hendricks has published extensively in gerontology and is the series editor for the Society and Aging series (Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.), co-editor-in-chief of Hallym International Journal of Aging and serves on the editorial boards of four other journals. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. He has received the Distinguished Career Contribution Award as well as the Kalish Innovative Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America, and the 2004 Tibbitts Award from the Association of Gerontology in Higher Education. In 2008 he was named the top-researcher in the Gerontological Society of America and honored with its Robert Kleemeier Award.
