Jon Hendricks

An Alternative Perspective on Retirement a Dual Economic Approach

A structural model for examining retirement is presented in the context of a political economy of ageing. Contemporary capitalist economies may be conceived of in terms of macro-level organisation which results in a monopolistic core and competitive peripheral sectors. In turn this configuration serves to colour individual life-experience. Data on differential worker- and work-related characteristics are presented as a means of explicating the need for an alternative perspective to explain later life events. A proposed research agenda based on a consideration of both the status attainment and dual economic framework is put forward.

Social Dimensions of Mental Illness among Rural Elderly Populations.

Despite growing concern with rural elderly populations, little attention has focused on their mental health, ways it may correlate with physical health, or how rural mental health patterns compare to urban. Popular wisdom contends that elderly people in general, and rural elderly persons in particular, are at increased risk for mental illness. This article examines these questions. A review of available literature suggests that elderly people may be at only slightly greater risk of mental illness than the population at large, though there are some indications that rates of depression may be somewhat higher among the elderly population. Much of this same literature implies that objective environmental conditions play a significant role in the incidence of depression. Analysis of data gathered in a statewide random poll (N = 743) indicates that while physical health tends to be poorer among rural populations, when health is held constant there is actually an inverse relationship between age and depression. Therefore, rural elderly persons are no more likely to be depressed than their urban counterparts despite harsher living conditions. Both conceptual and policy implications are discussed.

Making sense of literary aging: Relevance of recent gerontological theory

Literature provides rich resources for interpretations of the meaning of aging in cross-cultural and historical circumstances. A theoretically informed understanding of such literature should be rooted in contextual understanding of literature as an art form, including considerations of style, genre, intentions of authors, and of audiences; an awareness of perspectives of analysts; and explanatory frameworks drawn from gerontology. Early theories in gerontology focus on the individual level, taking structure as a given. Second generation models-modernization and age stratification-focus on structure excluding the individual. Recent frameworks, namely political economic approaches cognizant of intentionality, and structurally informed social psychological perspectives, address the confluence of individual and structural factors. A hermenutic-dialectical framework incorporates the dynamic interplay between structural factors, individual meaning-giving and action. To illustrate, five brief vignettes from cross-cultural literature are analyzed, drawing on recent gerontological theory. A hermeneutic-dialectical approach to literature provides a forum for debate, research, and theory-building, rather than an overarching model of aging in cross-cultural context.

The Age Old Question of Old Age: Was it Really so Much Better Back When?

The belief that the elderly in pre-industrial societies fared considerably better than the elderly in modern mass societies has received nearly universal acceptance. Utilizing literary, historical and archaeological reports from early Greece to the present, the present paper offers data which challenges popular conceptions. Close examination of evidence dealing with societal evaluation, family and kin support reveals prejudicial stereotypes as pervasive as those associated with modern urban industrialized societies. While a gradual transition of the basis of authority and esteem is noted from nomadic and agrarian to industrial societies, there is substantial correspondence in the dominant cultural imagery of old age, life expectancy notwithstanding.

Defining the Situation: Reflection of Life Styles in Funeral Eulogies

The nature of funeral orations was analyzed. Based on participant observation of over 100 funeral services in central Pennsylvania the nature of the variables which condition eulogies was assessed and two orientations outlined. For those individuals who were seen as the victims of life or who lacked an element of control over their own life-situation, death was treated as a release, which enabled them to realize their true potential. For the group who experienced a modicum of control and success in their lives, death was viewed as unfortunate fate. For both groups conceptions of the afterlife included the most salient desires and frustrations of the earthly life as well as a continuation of the personal integrity of the deceased.

Rewards and Impacts of Participation in a Gerontology Extension Program

Because involvement in specific organizations typically is part of a general pattern of social participation, understanding the effects of activity in a particular realm is difficult. A 1985 program designed to make the skills of retired professionals available to public service agencies provided an opportunity to follow volunteers during various stages of their participation. It also permitted an assessment of the impact of their volunteer work in this program on changes in their morale, self-esteem, and alienation as well as the extent of their participation in other voluntary activities. It was predicted that the effects of voluntary action would vary according to the participants’ reasons for volunteering, their perceptions of their success in serving the agencies, and the number of opportunities they had for demonstrating their competencies. Analysis suggested that participants responded positively but not dramatically to opportunities for meaningful social participation.

The Ideal Type and Sociological Theory

Though widely used in the literature of sociology ideal types have received little systematic explication. One of the difficulties is the ambiguity surrounding the usage of types as theoretical or definitional statements. Beginning with the types constructed by Weber and his contemporaries the discussion proceeds by analyzing subsequent revisions as they relate to the subject matter of the social sciences. Suggestions for improving the explanatory powers of typologies are made based on the kinds of knowledge deemed relevant for observer and actor at differing levels of the social world.

Impact of Technological Change on Middle-Aged and Older Workers: Parallels Drawn from a Structural Perspective

In the last three decades labor force participation rates for middle-aged and older workers have shown a consistent linear decline. While it is true that female employment patterns have remained fairly stable, even rising somewhat among those women over the age of forty-five who are active in the labor market, male participation has not kept pace. To explain what has been happening to older workers, labor economists, sociologists, and social scientists of all stripes must focus not only on life cycle factors or human capital variables characteristic of individuals, but on structural determinants of employment conditions as well. To adequately understand the broad ranging changes which spell displacement and dislocation for many workers, it is essential that a sociology of labor markets examine business cycles, product market characteristics, firm or sectoral placement and so on. Permeating each of these should be a concern with the differential impact of innovations in technology, automation and modes of production in general. According to the Commissioner of Labor Statistics for the New York federal region, there is already sufficient evidence accumulating to suggest technological displacement is being disproportionately settled on workers, especially males, over the age of forty-five (Ehrenhalt, 1983).

Origins of German social thought

The German Enlightenment has been ignored in accounts of the origins of sociological theory. The works of Leibniz, Lessing, and Herder contain a number of ideas that influenced the intellectual climate in which later German social thought took shape. We discuss several of these ideas in some detail and suggest some of their influences in the works of Marx, Weber, and Simmel. The major portion of the paper is devoted to the exposition of the incipient sociology of Leibniz, Lessing, and Herder.

Synderesis and Phenomenology: Intermediate Concepts of Value and Law in Social Science

Most sociological treatments of law and its foundations are quite narrow in scope. The nature of law is strictly delimited to preferences of individual societies and defined by their existential circumstances. Law is generally conceived simply as a fact with which sociology must deal if it is to explain the functionings of a specified social order. In such schemes law is regarded as valid only in particular spatial and temporal settings and any notions of a natural law or a moral order which transcends cultural and societal bounds are quickly dismissed. An exception to this confined treatment is the analysis of law put forth by Georges Gurvitch and a number of others in the phenomenological tradition, the tradition of Franz Brentano, Max Scheler and Florian Znaniecki among others. For though the similarity is not at all apparent, Gurvitch and the phenomenologists, upon close inspection, can be shown to toe what is essentially a Thomistic natural-law line. Gurvitch, for example, is so deft in his avoidance of the phrase ’natural law’ that Phillip Bosserman, his American intellectual chronicler, lists Gurvitch among those who have renounced the concept. Bosserman’s’ contention is not purely intuitive. After defining natural law as ’that law, which grounded in the innermost nature of man or of society is independent of convention, legislation, or other institutional devices’, Gurvitch2 derides natural law theorists as having ’resolved all the antinomies contained in the juridical sphere by transposing these contradictions into an entirely detached sphere’.3 3