Beyond Successful Aging 2.0: Inequalities, Ageism, and the Case for Normalizing Old Ages

Renegotiating identity and relationships: Men and women’s adjustments to retirement

Toni Calasanti, Neal King and Deborah Carr

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2021, vol. 76, issue 9, 1817-1827

Abstract: This article reviews challenges to Rowe and Kahn’s Successful Aging (SA) framework, particularly those that focus on the ways social inequalities, including ageism, stratify age groups and affect possibilities for SA. We then assess the authors’ replies to these critiques. We find that SA 2.0 maintains a naturalization of outcomes of age relations, and retains both its focus on personal choice and its indifference to inequalities. We advocate a paradigm shift that recasts the problems of aging in three distinct ways: (i) avoids treating old age as a problem; (ii) avoids treating medical and other maladies as results of aging; and (iii) treats the problems of old age as results of age relations instead. By focusing on age relations, this paradigm goes beyond calls to examine inequalities over the life course, and seeks to normalize old ages, valuing both different modes of aging and old age itself.

Keywords: Age relations; Diversity in aging; Paradigm; Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbaa037 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:76:y:2021:i:9:p:1817-1827.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().