Main description:

Provides a critical synthesis of current models of aging.
Offers a broader perspective that accounts for the wide diversity of human aging, just as it better explains how this diversity "groups" into familiar patterns.
Written by a distinguished scholar of aging whose work has been internationally influential.

Contents:

1. Sociological Imagination and Human Aging

2. Sociomatics: The Social Structuring Of Human Development and Aging

3. Agency, Intentionality and World-Construction

4. The Social Organization of Human Development and Age, I: Historical And Cultural Variations

5. The Social Organization of Development and Age, II: Intracohort Variability And Cumulative Dis/Advantage

6. Cumulative Dis/ Advantage as A Cohort Phenomenon: Levels, Processes and Paradigmatic Alternatives

7. Sociosomatics And the Life Course: The Social Organizaiton Of Human Physiology and Gene Regulation

8. Situating Knowledge Production: The Sociology of Scientific Work in Studying Age and the Life Course

9. Bringing Ideology Back In - Science as A Mechanism of Naturaliation

10. Age, Sociological Imagination and Human Possibility