Age and the Reach of Sociological Imagination

The dominant narratives of both science and popular culture typically define aging and human development as self-contained individual matters, failing to recognize the degree to which they are shaped by experiential and contextual contingencies. Our understandings of age are thereby "boxed in" and constricted by assumptions of "normality" and naturalness that limit our capacities to explore possible alternative experiences of development and aging, and the conditions - both individual and social - that might foster such experiences.
Combining foundational principles of critical social science with 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. Rejecting familiar but false dichotomies such as "nature vs. nurture" and "structure vs. agency", it clarifies the organismic fundamentals that make the actual content of experience so centrally important in age and development, and it also explores why attention to these fundamentals has been so resisted in studies of individuals and individual change, and in policy and practice as well.
In presenting the basic principles and reviewing the current state of knowledge, Dale Dannefer introduces multi-levelled social processes that shape human development and aging over the life course and age as a cultural phenomenon - organizing his approach around three key frontiers of inquiry that each invite a vigorous exercise of sociological imagination: the Social-Structural Frontier, the Biosocial Frontier and the Critical-Reflexive Frontier.

Dale Dannefer is the Selah Chamberlain Professor of Sociology and Chair, Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University.

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