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Safeguarding Social Security for Future Generations: Leaving a Legacy in an Aging Society
by W. Andrew Achenbaum
February 2023
This book offers a unique multi-generational approach to saving Social Security. Public programs have adapted to societal aging, but fears overwhelm hopes for Social Security’s future prospects. Conservatives want to privatize operations that liberals seek to expand. Younger workers are happy that Social Security protects their elders, but most do not expect benefits when needed. Achenbaum reframes conflicting perspectives and offers new models of respectful transgenerational dialogue that can mobilize pragmatic reforms.
Designed for use in gerontology, social work, and public-policy courses, Safeguarding Social Security for Future Generations offers measured hope for leaving a legacy that safeguards the common good.
When Strangers Become Family: The Role of Civil Society in Addressing the Needs of Aging Populations
by Ronald Angel and Verónica Montes-de-Oca Zavala
September 2021
As the 21st Century unfolds, the traditional welfare state that evolved during the 20th Century faces serious threats to the solidarity that social programs were meant to strengthen. The rise of populist and nationalist parties reflects the decline of a sense of belonging and inclusiveness that mass education and economic progress were meant to foster, as traditional politics and parties are rejected by working- and middle-class individuals who were previously their staunchest supporters. This book examines the potential role of civil society organizations in guaranteeing the rights and addressing the needs of vulnerable groups, paying particular attention to their role in advocacy for and service delivery to older people. Angel and Montes-de-Oca Zavala ask about the extent to which civil society organizations represent a potential mechanism whereby vulnerable individuals can join together to further their own interests and exercise their individual and group autonomy.
Age and the Reach of Sociological Imagination: Power, Ideology and the Life Course
by Dale Dannefer
August 2021
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. 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.
The Privatization of Care: The Case of Nursing Homes
edited by Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong
September 2019
Nursing homes are where some of the most vulnerable live and work. In too many homes, the conditions of work make it difficult to make care as good as it can be. For the last eight years an international team from Germany, Sweden, Norway, the UK, the US and Canada have been searching for promising practices that treat residents, families and staff with dignity and respect in ways that can also bring joy. This book documents moves toward privatization in the six countries and their consequences for families, staff, residents, and, eventually, us all. While none of the countries has escaped pressure for privatization, the wide variations in the extent and nature of privatization indicate privatization is not inevitable and alternatives exist.
Aging A-Z: Concepts Toward Emancipatory Gerontology
by Carroll L. Estes with Nicholas B. DiCarlo
April 2019
This provocative, intellectually charged treatise serves as a concise introduction to emancipatory gerontology, examining multiple dimensions of persistent and hotly debated topics around aging, the life course, the roles of power, politics, and partisanship, culture, economics, and communications. Critical perspectives are presented as definitions for reader understanding, with links to concepts of idenity, knowledge construction, social networks, social movements, and inequities. The book’s entries offer a bibliographic compendium, crediting the salience of early pioneering theorists and locating these within the cutting-edge of research (social, behavioral, policy, and gene–environment sciences) that currently advances our understandings of human development, trauma, and resilience. Accompanying these foundations are theories of resistance for advancing human rights and the dignity of marginalized populations.