The discussion does not systematically distinguish types of age-related outcomes, since many of these approaches consider their respective explanatory principles to be applicable to a wide range of age-related social, psychological, and physiological outcomes. The discussion that follows focuses on how various theories treat the explanatory forces that each nominates as important in explaining aging. For present purposes, micro approaches can be considered those that locate explanation at the level of individual, interpersonal, or small-group social dynamics macro approaches locate explanation in the more encompassing dimensions of social organization that form the broader context of experience, including microinteraction. These approaches can be divided into two general subgroups that can, at the risk of some oversimplification, be called micro and macro approaches. Such a resolution is only made credible, and perhaps only possible, thanks to the subsequent elaboration of several distinct approaches of social theories of aging, each of which has provided illuminating concepts and evidence. These challenges fuel the contention that disengagement is not a universal or inevitable pattern, but one that is encouraged, and even naturalized (made to seem natural and taken-for-granted), by the structure of modern societies. At the same time, within and beyond these societies, there are individuals, subcultures, and even entire societies that challenge this generalization. Theorists located in the activity tradition cannot dispute the fact that disengagement has been an accurate description of the experiences of many older people in the ‘‘late modern’’ societies of the middle and late twentieth century. The debate is partly resolvable by distinguishing the actual from the possible. This debate has framed the parameters and terms of much subsequent theorizing, some of which has turned out to be useful in illuminating and resolving this debate. Each of these perspectives was energized by the claims of its competitor, and the result was a crystallization of the classic debate between the two. Interestingly, the same data were simultaneously used by others to argue precisely the opposite- that continued activity was both possible and desirable among those with advancing age. The evidence for the initial formulation of disengagement theory was drawn primarily from the fabled Kansas City studies of aging, spearheaded by Bernice Neugarten in the 1950s. This condition is endemic to the scientific enterprise, and it requires a strong measure of self-critical reflexivity on the part of those who practice science to avoid such pitfalls. The positive reception of this work by many sociologists may be taken as an example of how scientists-even social scientists- are limited in their perspectives by assumptions about the society and culture in which their own existence is located. sociologist, Talcott Parsons, wrote a foreword for Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement, which was the initial monograph setting forth disengagement theory (1961). The extent to which this theory was initially accepted by social scientists is indicated by the fact that the pre-eminent U.S. It envisions a social order in which the removal of aged individuals from the mainstream of social life is both normal and desirable. Because it posits disengagement as a mutual process of withdrawal of others (and hence of social connectedness and social resources) from the aging individual, as well as the reverse, it is an organismic theory not only of individual aging, but of society. Such a theory cannot permit much scope to the social realm because it defines aging as a universal, biologically based process inherent to the human species. 14–15), yet anchored in the fact of chronological age. This is because it considers the disengagement of the aged to reflect an ‘‘inevitable’’ human process operating ‘‘in all societies’’ (Cumming and Henry, pp. It is more properly understood as an organicallyīased theory of society. Indeed, one of the most famous and centrally influential theories of aging- disengagement theory-is not a social theory of aging at all.
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