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

ISBN-13: 9780471016786 / Angielski / Twarda / 1994 / 304 str.

Tim Riley;Foner; Madeleine Kahn

Opis

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 newmix 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.

Spis treści

Partial table of contents:

THE DILEMMA OF STRUCTURAL LAG.

Structural Lag: Past and Future (M. Riley & J. Riley).

Opportunities, Aspirations, and Goodness of Fit (R. Kahn).

DIRECTIONS OF CHANGE.

Social Structure and Age–Based Careers (J. Henretta).

Work and Retirement: A Comparative Perspective (M. Kohli).

Family Change and Historical Change: An Uneasy Relationship (T. Hareven).

Old Age and Age Integration: An Anthropological Perspective (J. Keith).

CURRENT INTERVENTIONS: OLDER WORKERS.

Realizing the Potential: Some Examples (W. McNaught).

Changing Policy Signals (R. Burkhauser & J. Quinn).

Endnote: The Reach of an Idea (A. Foner).

Indexes.

Blurb

"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