Social Divisions and Later Life: Difference, Diversity and Inequality

✍ Scribed by Chris Gilleard; Paul Higgs

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 224
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

As the population ages, this book reveals how divides that are apparent through childhood and working life change and are added to in later life. Two internationally renowned experts in ageing look beyond longstanding factors like class, gender and ethnicity to explore new social divisions, including contrasting states of physical fitness and mental health. They show how differences in health and frailty are creating fresh inequalities in later life, with significant implications for the future of our ageing societies. This accessible overview of social divisions is essential reading for those interested in the sociology of ageing and its differences, diversities and inequalities.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
Social Divisions and Later Life: Difference, diversity and inequality
Copyright information
Table of contents
List of figures and Tables
Preface
1 Social divisions and social differences
Divisions, differences, identities and inequalities
Intersectionality: identity and structure
Age, cohort and social change
Conclusions
Notes
2 Social class and inequality in later life
Relational versus gradational systems of social class
Class as gradational status: cumulative (dis)advantage theory
Relational classes in later life
Consumption and the articulation of class as distinction
Conclusions
Notes
3 Ageing and gender
Social science approaches to gender
Men’s and women’s socio-economic status in later life
Families, households and social capital
Men’s and women’s health and well-being in later life
Gendered representations of age
Conclusions
Notes
4 Ethnicity, race and migration in later life
Race, ethnicity and systems of categorisation
Age and race: difference, distinction, disadvantage
Age, ethnicity and cultural distance
Age and the demography of difference
The costs and benefits of difference
Conclusions
5 Disability and later life
Disability and social theory
What counts as ‘disability’?
Able-bodiedness as human capital
The costs and consequences of disablement in later life
Age, disability and identity
Disability, technology and critical studies
Conclusions: corporeality as a social divide
Notes
6 Identity and intersectionality
Identities and intersections
Intersections and the structural division of later life
Intersections and the ordering of age
Conclusions
Notes
7 Diversity, difference and division in later life
Structures and subjectivities
Positions, polarities and change
Structuring difference: identities and interests
Divisions, interests and power
Ageing outside of division: the inherent intersectionality of later lives?
Corporeality and the social in later life
Conclusions
Notes
References
Index
Back Cover