Critical Perspectives in Gerontology

Critical perspectives in gerontology emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States (Carroll Estes, Laura Katz Olson, and Jill Quadagno), Canada (John Myles and Victor Marshall), and Europe (Peter Townsend, Alan Walker, Chris Phillipson, and Anne Marie Guillemard) in response to limited (micro)social gerontology perspectives on the aging process, individual life course development, disengagement, life satisfaction, and dependency. Work in critical gerontology has developed under the rubrics of radical gerontology, political gerontology, the moral economy of aging, cultural and humanistic gerontology, and the political economy of aging, with the latter being perhaps the most well recognized.

Scholars in the political economy of aging argue that broad social, economic, and political factors and structural arrangements (e.g., social stratification) are integral to understanding the aging process and the “life chances” of older persons both as individuals and as groups. Race, ethnicity, class, and gender are highlighted as crucial dimensions of old age and aging, but not just as individual characteristics or attributes. More specifically, race, ethnicity, class, and gender are to be understood at the macro level as systemic features of our society as expressed in subtle and not so subtle ways (e.g., institutional racism, patriarchy) and with significant effects on all aspects of aging, including health and illness. Other key elements in the political economy of aging are the role and effects of systems of governance and power struggles therein (e.g., the state), economic production (e.g., capitalism), and the production of ideas (e.g., ideology, systems of communication and cultural production) on old age and the aging. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's early work on the social construction of reality has been developed and incorporated as integral to understanding old age and the political economy of aging, advancing the points that old age and aging are socially produced through processes not only at the micro level but also at the meso (organizational and institutional) and macro (social system) levels. All levels of analysis are deemed to be essential to understanding the meaning and lived experience of old age and an aging society, including the dynamics and consequences of inequality within the nation and the world.

From its inception, critical gerontology has been a multidisciplinary project influenced by diverse theoretical and philosophical traditions and drawing deeply from critical theory—the role of intellectuals in shaping social thought (Antonio Gramsci), the connection between a critical consciousness and social action (Frankfurt School), the concepts of dominance and power in relation to the state and individual agency (neo-Marxists and neo-Weberians), the struggles for legitimacy and crises faced by the state (Jurgen Habermas, Claus Offe, and James O'Connor), the role of patriarchy in structuring the experiences of women and feminist theories of the state (Joan Acker, Catherine MacKinnon, and Gayle Rubin); the importance of feminist epistemology and the recognition of intersectionality (Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins), the influence of institutional racism (Gary King, Michael Omi, Henry Winant, and [in gerontology] James Jackson), and the connections between inequality and health throughout the life course (David Williams, Chiquita Collins, Nancy Krieger, Stephanie Robert, and [in gerontology] Kokos Markides). Other theoretical influences include cultural studies, social constructionism, psychoanalytic perspectives (Simon Biggs), the sociology of knowledge, and (increasingly) work on globalization and risk.

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