175
Book
ReviewLater
LifeOld
age. John Vincent, 2003. London: Routledge; ISBN 0-4153-0548-9, 190 pp., £12.99
SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120020505
TerenceChivers
University of the Third Age
It has
been 15 years since Fennell, Phillipson and Evers pointed out that the sociology
of old age is an underdeveloped subject. So a new book is much to be welcomed.
Moreover, Vincent has developed his own approach (based on sociology and anthropology)
and presents us with a product that is both informative and distinctive. The
work extends over six chapters plus introduction and conclusion. He begins
by explaining how old age is pre-eminently a social construction, while Chapter
2 adopts a cohort perspective to explain how attitudes and values of age groups
belong to the era of their experience. His Bosnian interviews are used here
in the first of several mentions. These two chapters supply a very useful
content. Chapter 3 opens out the discussion by consideration of global influences.
One of the principal aspects under this heading is the trend towards ageing
populations. The population pyramids shown in this chapter are among the best
illustrations of the comparative approach. Among the important issues considered
at this point is the one about the `problem' of the increasing number of elderly
people. Vincent argues that the issue of ageing needs to be considered in
terms of the various defining topics: growing national wealth and its distri-
bution, extent of unemployment, retirement age and re-employment options,
benefits and so on. The `problem' of an ageing population is therefore a decision
of social policy, which need have no problem definition at all. The question
of pensions is tackled in the next chap- ter together with the matter of how
pension investment relates to the financial markets. The danger to pensions
during the market down- turn of recent years is a circumstance set against
the view that pension capitalism opened up the possibilities of a form of
workers control. Holes in pension funds hardly support such optimism. Identity
is the dominant topic of Chapter 5 and the issue is con- sidered from several
angles. The argument is that the elderly are brought into line with the expectations
of the prevailing social defi- nition. Even so, the aged can and, to some
extent do, create their own world in certain respects, and this must have
some effect on the wider social definition. Moreover, even the very elderly
can find much in their lives that rejects society's prescriptive categorizations
(Bury and Holme, 1991). The experiential self-definition of old age is covered
in Chapter 1 but is not there argued as a subjective dis- missal of old age,
even though Kaufman's ageless self idea is featured
176
in Vincent's
text. Though Laslett and the University of the Third Age are mentioned, neither
the writer nor the movement is discussed as challenges to the prevailing definition
of either the elderly or the economic domination of funded educational provision.
Chapter 6 covers the matter of the medicalization of old age and questions
of sickness and death and the dangers associated with the medical model are
thoughtfully dealt with. My regret is that so much is left out: reminiscence
work and the use of autobiography, aspects of the sociology of leisure (such
as the development of the package holiday), issues of education (to do, for
example, with more consideration of lifelong learning) and per- haps some
extended exploration of religious beliefs. However, I would certainly recommend
the book to students of the topic area. REFERENCES
Fennell, G., Phillipson, C.
and Evers, H.
(1988) The sociology of old age. Milton
Keynes: Open University Press.
Bury, M.
and Holme, A.
(1991) Life after ninety. London:
Routledge.