The Life Course and the Social Organization of Age

Abstract

Dimensions of the inequality-age relationship can be considered from several perspectives—(a) cross sectional characterizations of differences between age strata at a given point in time, (b) longitudinal depictions of age-related changes in the lives of individuals and cohorts, and (c) the analysis of age as a component of culture, which encompasses the significance of beliefs about age, the institutionalization of age-related policies and practices, and popular and scientific accounts of aging. Such accounts comprise a regulatory feature of social life, and they also have an ideological significance, in obscuring issues of inequality both between age strata and within cohorts. Although we have elsewhere suggested that processes of microinteraction and attendant social-psychological dynamics are fundamental to all of these processes, such dynamics have so far received little attention in the study of the age-inequality relation, making this a promising area for further study.