Anne Foner

Age and structural lag : society's failure to provide meaningful opportunities in work, family, and leisure

Partial table of contents: THE DILEMMA OF STRUCTURAL LAG. Structural Lag: Past and Future (M. Riley & J. Riley). Opportunities, Aspirations, and Goodness of Fit (R. Kahn). DIRECTIONS OF CHANGE. Social Structure and Age-Based Careers (J. Henretta). Work and Retirement: A Comparative Perspective (M. Kohli). Family Change and Historical Change: An Uneasy Relationship (T. Hareven). Old Age and Age Integration: An Anthropological Perspective (J. Keith). CURRENT INTERVENTIONS: OLDER WORKERS. Realizing the Potential: Some Examples (W. McNaught). Changing Policy Signals (R. Burkhauser & J. Quinn). Endnote: The Reach of an Idea (A. Foner). Indexes.

Age Stratification and Age Conflict in Political Life

The militancy of youth in the late 1960s has occasioned much comment on the reasons for age conflict in political life. This essay suggests that full understanding of such conflict requires a theory about the processes operating to stratify society by age. Application to political life of the emerging theory of age stratification reveals both a socially structured potential for political conflict between young and old and age-related mechanisms for reducing such conflict. These two possibilities, and the political context which may favor one or the other are explored.

Age in Society Structure and Change

In the taken-for-granted world of social thinkers, age is recognized as a factor that influences social life. Certainly, empirical studies routinely include age as a variable that must &dquo;of course&dquo; be considered. But in-depth analysis of age as a social phenomenon too often has been relegated to special fields, for example, to anthropology with its emphasis on simple societies; to demography which uses the demographic profile built around age categories; to gerontology and the study of old people; to psychology and the study of child development; to sociology and the study of youth cultures. Yet old age and adolescence are only parts of the total age structure; child

Age Stratification and the Changing Family

The history of family life is in part a story of changes in the age at which people go to work, marry, leave home, have children, and die. Thus most of the historical papers in this volume deal with age as an important variable. Their focus is on the social forces in the society that produced changing age patterns. My paper is an attempt to round out the picture by considering what these various age patterns can tell us about the family. I take off from the clues provided by historians. But the ques? tions I ask grow out of the age stratification perspective, an approach that views age as a key component in social structure and social change. While age is a seemingly simple datum, its relationship to family life is complex. To orient the reader to some of the underlying assumptions of this paper, I start off with a brief sketch of important elements of the age stratification model. The major part of the essay explores several age-related facets of family life. My focus is on three themes that derive from the age stratification model: the importance of the age structure of a family at a given period; changing family patterns over the family cycle; and the impact of the succession of cohorts of families.2 My con? clusions, if somewhat tentative, balance those of some of the historians. While historians may emphasize the positive in the 19th-century family, my analysis suggests unexpected strengths in 20th-century family life.

Looking Back: My Half Century as a Sociologist of Aging and Society

The 1960s do not seem to have been a propitious time to embark on a major project exploring social aspects of aging in the United States. In those days, when the baby boom cohorts were about to come of age, public attention was on young people rejecting traditional ways and in apparent revolt against those over 30 – not on aging, which was generally thought of primarily as growing old. Yet it was at that time that Matilda White Riley received a major grant from the Ford Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation to pull together, evaluate, and analyze social science knowledge about the middle and later years. It was then, in the initial stages of the project, that I was invited to join in what turned out to be a lifelong career studying age and aging and a decades long association, collaboration, and friendship with Matilda Riley, one of the leading scholars in the field.

The Underside of Public Policy for the Old@@@Aging and Public Policy: Social Control or Social Justice?@@@Public Policy Opinion and the Elderly, 1952-1978: A Kaleidoscope of Culture.

Charts Introduction Cultural Conflict, Cultural Change, and the Elderly A Kaleidoscope of Culture A Conflict Theory of Values Policy-Value Conflicts in American Society Policy Opinion and the Elderly: 1952-1978 The Eclipse of Public Function Righting Civil Wrongs The Wavering of Traditional Commitments Patterns in the Stones The Mosaic of Culture The Personal Roots of Commitment American Values and the Elderly Appendices: Frequency Data for Floating Bar Charts International Comparison--Germany and Japan A List of Questions from the National Election Study, University of Michigan, and the Gallop Poll Data and Method Factor Analysis and Techniques

Village and Family in Contemporary China.

After 1949 the Chinese Communists carried out land reform, the collectivization of agriculture, and the formation of peoples communes. The new economic and political organizations that emerged have made peasant life more comfortable and secure, but many economic and status differentials and traditional customs remain resistant to change. Focusing on rural Kwangtung province, William L. Parish and Martin King Whyte examine the rural work-incentive system, village equality and inequality, rural health care and education, marriage customs, and the position of women, among other topics, to determine what and how much of the traditional Chinese ways of life is left in Communist China.