Age And The Reach Of Sociological Imagination (Aging And Society)

Dominant cultural narratives tend to treat aging and human development as self-contained individual matters - bound by fixed biological processes that are imagined to be "natural", and largely independent of individual experience and social context. Our understandings of age are thus boxed in and constricted by assumptions of "normality" and naturalness that limit our capacities to recognize the diversity of life-course pathways, their intersection with other axes of differentiation and inequality, and also to envision innovative possibilities for the life course. By applying the sociological imagination to examine 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. It explores the anthropological and organismic fundamentals that make the actual content of human experience so centrally important, and it also explores the mystery of why attention to these empirically established fundamentals has been so resisted in studies of individuals over the life course, and in policy and practice as well. To address these puzzles and related issues, Dale Dannefer organizes his multi-leveled approach around three key frontiers of inquiry, each of which invite a vigorous exercise of sociological imagination: the social-structural frontier, the biosocial frontier and the critical-reflexive frontier. To make clear the breadth and depth to which human development and aging are socially shaped throughout the life course, Section I lays the foundation by presenting a detailed review of distinctively human features of development. Given the remarkably flexible and "world-open" character of the human organism, why do human development and aging often follow orderly and seemingly rigid patterns of age-graded activities. If the organism is not internally programmed to follow a set sequence of stages like other species, what does account for its patterning? Sections II and III address this question by clarifying how the dynamics of social processes provide spatial and temporal organization to individual's experiences. A key part of the explanation lies in the often-unnoticed operation of social forces and processes (both in everyday life and in age-graded institutions) that organize generative human flexibility into ordered lives, and that impact human health and developmental possibilities over the life course. These processes are explored in Section II. Section III takes a reflexive turn, focusing especially on power, knowledge and ideology in squelching sociological imagination in science as well as in popular culture. On this basis, the final chapters explore the implications of a reflexive approach to a sociological re-imagining of life-course possibilities.

• | Author: Dale Dannefer
• | Publisher: Routledge
• | Publication Date: 10-Aug-21
• | Number of Pages: 240 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0367190893
• | ISBN-13: 9780367190897