The New Sociology of Ageing explores the challenges and opportunities of ageing as a global force. Alongside globalisation, urbanisation, new technology, climate change, and global pandemics, ageing is transforming life in the twenty-first century.
Through the eyes of a young sociology student and her multigenerational family, this book sets out a new sociological framework to interpret ageing societies. It explores how the ‘New Old’ – the baby boomer generation – might be mobilised as an agency of social change in transforming later life. It proposes this generation as the co-architects of a new intergenerational social contract for the era ahead, rather than as the recipients of a post-war twentieth-century social contract that society can no longer support. Taking Britain as a case study and societies across the world as examples, Slattery explores emerging revolutions in work and retirement, potential crises in pensions, healthcare and housing, as well as transformations in family life and in our attitudes to sex and death in later life.
This book provides a clear overview of the sociology of ageing. It introduces students to demography as a sociological force of the future, and to the perils and the promises of longevity as societies across the world approach the Hundred-Year Life. This book will be of interest to undergraduate students and early scholars in the social sciences, particularly in sociology, gerontology, social policy, and public health.
Introduction: An Introduction to the Ageing World Ahead
PART ONE: The Global Challenge of Ageing and the Global Response
1. The Global Challenge of Ageing and the Global Context
2. The International Challenge of Ageing and the International Response
PART TWO: The National Challenge of Ageing and the National Response
3. The Demographic Challenge and the Government’s Response
4. The Economic and Social Challenges of Ageing in the U.K. today
PART THREE: The New Old, the New Young and the Forces for Change
5. The New Old and the New Young: Baby Boomers, Generations X, Y and Z; and Intergenerational Relations Today
6. The New Old and their Powers for Change
PART FOUR: Towards a New Sociology of Ageing for the 21st Century
7. Towards a New Age Paradigm, Manifesto and Intergenerational Social Contract
8. Towards the Ageless Society of the Future, and the Ageing World Ahead
Biography
Martin Slattery is a retired Sixth-Form College Principal and Senior Education Officer who has previously written a number of introductory and specialist texts in Sociology including The ABC of Sociology (1985), Key Ideas in Sociology (2003), Urban Sociology (1985) and Official Statistics (1986). Since retiring, he has focused on the emerging topic of Ageing and Longevity in the 21st century with the publication of The Ageing of Great Britain in 2019.
