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BOOK REVIEW |
Director, Gerontology Institute P.O. Box 3984 Georgia State University Atlanta, GA 30302-3984
Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, 6th Edition, edited by Robert H. Binstock and Linda K. George. Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 2006, 514 pp., $75 (paper).
A priest, a rabbi, and a gerontologist go into a bar ... sorry, but I don't have a punch line for that setup. Gerontologists are just not very funny. Ours is a serious business, not given to levity. Aside from the occasional scholarly paper analyzing the structure and function of aging humor—or ageist humor, as it often is called (see Palmore, 2005)—we are not often found joking about our subject. We take aging as seriously as a heart attack (sorry, that just slipped out). In addition, the easy grace and casual manner of the front-runner, the perpetual winner, is not our métier; Tiger Woods is not our role model. We more often identify with the well-intentioned, dedicated also-ran who competes but rarely scores and almost never wins. In the academic community, we are considered good but not great. Gerontology is a good subject, but it doesn't excite the masses. It isn't flashy or stunningly beautiful. It does occasionally produce an important insight or socially useful bit of knowledge, but mostly we are content to play with our ideas, build our models, and teach the few students who take our classes.
What a self-image! If you found yourself agreeing with the assessment above, I am truly sorry for you. That may be how others view us and even how some of us think about our profession, but it need not be our daily reality. Gerontology is exciting and highly relevant. If you doubt that, talk with the students who have not only wandered into our classes but who have discovered a subject that truly fascinates them. Nothing excites like finding a life's work. Over the years, many of my students have come to gerontology after at least a partial career doing something else. When they discovered the possibility of a career in aging, they also found intellectual stimulation and personal meaning. Hey! Gerontology can be both fascinating and fun. So, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, let's try again: You might be a gerontologist, if you can't find a birthday card for your brother-in-law because you think all the cards are ageist. You might be a gerontologist, if the picture that came in your wallet was George Burns, and you still have it. You might be a gerontologist if your two cats are named Cumming and Henry. You might be a gerontologist, if your idea of a beach book is the Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences—any edition.
Speaking of the Handbook, edited by Robert Binstock and Linda George, it is my task in this essay to review the latest edition (the sixth) so you will know if you need to buy this one, too. I would say you should. The first of my reasons is that this book is a window on the field, both present and past. While it is instructive to compare this sixth edition with the fifth edition, it is fascinating (and a little overwhelming) to compare it with the first, published in 1976. That's right, 30 years ago. Nowhere in the current edition can I find the phrase "30th Anniversary Edition," but perhaps something should have been made of the milestone.
In the first edition (Binstock & Shanas, 1976), prepared by Binstock (a political scientist) and Ethel Shanas (a sociologist), the chapters were entitled more broadly, for example, "The Family Life of Old People," "The Economy and the Aged," "Work and Retirement," "Aging and the Law," and "Political Systems and the Aging." The content was somewhat more straightforward then, that is, less complicated by the nuanced findings of thousands of studies done over the past 30 years. The citations were more limited; authors were more likely to cite themselves—or the other authors. And the authors at the time were perhaps better known because most were pioneers of the field of aging study. For anyone just beginning a career in gerontology when the first edition appeared, the names of George Maddox, Bernice Neugarten, Philip Hauser, Gordon Streib, Matilda Riley, Marvin Sussman, Frances Carp, Hal Sheppard, Leonard Cain, Kurt Back, Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal, Irving Rosow, Richard Kalish, Carroll Estes, James Schulz, and Walter Beattie, just to name some of the contributors—not to mention Binstock and Shanas, themselves—typically inspired reactions of awe and admiration. In the world of social gerontology in 1976, this was the pantheon. These were the people who, with a very few others (notably Clark Tibbitts and Robert Havighurst) invented the field of social gerontology. How could a reader of this volume in the mid-1970s—student or new member of the academy—fail to be impressed with the importance of their perspectives and their words? It is not an exaggeration to say that this book did more to define and shape our field than any since Tibbitts's (1960) own Handbook of Social Gerontology published 16 years earlier. Testimony to that fact is seen in the shorthand title that has developed over the years: it is called simply, The Handbook. There are many reference books entitled "handbook of this or that," but only one enjoys the sobriquet, The Handbook.
It is sobering and sad to note that at least one of the authors of 13 of the 25 chapters has died, and a number of others are retired or inactive. But that's to be expected over a 30-year span. Ideas continue; people do not. Yet we owe these pioneer gerontologists a great debt for the richness and excitement they brought to our field in that first edition of the Handbook. And we owe, too, the original editors, Bob Binstock and Ethel Shanas, for their scholarly insight and editorial creativity in launching this amazing series. Sadly, Ethel Shanas died not long ago, but leaves us with her marvelous body of sociological work. With the Handbook's third edition (Binstock & George, 1990), sociologist Linda George became Binstock's co-editor. George has emerged in her own right as one of the leaders and seminal thinkers of the second generation of social gerontologists, and her hand in shaping the Handbook through its last four editions is not hard to discern.
Before I plunge deeper into reviewing this edition, I should offer a disclaimer: I have known both Bob Binstock and Linda George for over 30 years, since before this volume first appeared, and I count them as friends. Likewise, many of the chapter contributors are colleagues and friends of long standing. Were I to dislike this book or think it shallow and misguided I would have to think carefully about saying so in print, lest I damage some of my professional relationships. Though not without flaws, the book meets the highest standards of scholarship, and continues to provide the field of social gerontology with a clear statement of where we are and a perceptive roadmap of where we should go. Let me try to explain why I think so.
The Maturing Field
During the 30 years spanned by the six editions of this volume, gerontology has become firmly established as a part of American academic life, if not yet our national consciousness. To be sure, we do not share the same high prestige as the traditional disciplines, such as literature, history, psychology, physics, or biology, and have not even reached the next lower rung where the social sciences—political science, sociology, and anthropology—are perched. Nevertheless, gerontology has established itself as having a right and a need to exist in many universities and has gained at least a measure of respect. We have departments, institutes, research centers, degree programs (ranging from bachelor's to doctoral degrees), federal funding agencies (primarily the National Institute on Aging) that provide significant grant support for our research, and scholarly journals that are not automatically the first to be discontinued by our librarians in fiscal hard times. None of these marks of academic respectability was common in 1976 when the first edition appeared, and most did not exist at all.
Gerontology has accomplished its relatively steep, if incomplete, ascent is several ways. First, our scholarly and professional societies, especially The Gerontological Society of America and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, have worked effectively these past 30 years to support their members' continued learning and to provide us with an opportunity for professional contacts and a sense of professional identity and pride. They also have made some progress in putting the issues of aging before the public, though, truthfully, AARP and the American Society on Aging have contributed more in this area.
Second, gerontologists have embraced theoretical and methodological rigor. Despite that fact, the state of both our theory and method are still underdeveloped, as a reading of any commentary on these building blocks of our science will attest. However, we owe at least some of our relative success to similar struggles among our competitors, the other new, interdisciplinary fields that began elbowing their way into university curricula about the same time we were: African American studies, women's studies, family studies, and regional studies (Asia, Middle East, and Latin America). It turns out that developing theory is hard, regardless of the subject matter. Fortunately, as the old joke says, we don't have to outrun the bear, we just have to outrun at least one of the others in the race. In this race, we have some decided advantages. We have chosen a topic of universal appeal. Aging is a constant in the human equation, and the fear of old age motivates both taxpayer and politician alike to keep the money flowing in hopes of "finding some answers." In addition, our work is informed by personal and family experience. We are not merely tourists through the land of the old, measuring and observing. Each of us knows that we will one day live there as permanent residents, learning our topic from the inside. That knowledge, I believe, tends to focus our attention. Finally, in ways not shared by the other interdisciplinary fields, the natural association of those of us in social gerontology with our biological and medical colleagues has conferred on us an aura of importance and scientific credibility. Certainly we deserve everything we get, but natural science's weak association with other worthy fields, such as ethnic studies and women's studies, probably has not helped the credibility of the latter.
A further mechanism in the development of social gerontology is the steady intrainstitutional political effort by thousands of teachers and researchers from many disciplines across hundreds of campuses. While not normally studied or written about, such labor has formed a key segment of the larger social movement known as "the aging movement." While much of the advocacy and action aimed at turning the nation's attention toward aging was being played out in Washington and state capitals or in the national media, academics have been pushing at the campus level for recognition and funding for their teaching and research efforts in gerontology. We are long past the day when few of our colleagues knew how to spell the word gerontology and often confused us with geography and geology. That small victory happened only because, as Bob Binstock urged us early on, we paid attention not so much to large national trends and politics, but to the local nodes of power, where the bulk of decisions are made. Until very recently, most gerontologists have been lonely, embattled fighters for their field. While other faculty members in chemistry, education, or business could devote their whole energies to doing their work, gerontologists were forced first to define and create their field, to advocate for it with skeptical administrators, to defend it in hard times, and only then to pursue answers to its questions.
The Good Book
It is perhaps too much to say that the Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences is the bible of social gerontology. We have, after all, a multitude of wonderful reference works that form the gerontological canon and support our work. No fewer than three major encyclopedias (and a slew of minor ones), a dictionary or two, and, as Howard Cosell used to say, a veritable plethora of other handbooks, ranging from the two companion volumes in this series—devoted, respectively, to the psychology (e.g., Birren & Schaie, 2006) and biology (e.g., Masoro & Austad, 2006) of aging—to others on ethnicity, humanities, clinical gerontology, and retirement. For a quick take (say, two pages) on a narrow topic, such as intergenerational equity or geographic mobility, it is hard to beat Richard Schultz's recent fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Aging (the Springer reference shepherded through its first three editions by George Maddox). No broad handbook that intends to define and explore the various social scientific treatments of aging can possibly do justice to the many subfields and topics in the social sciences, each receiving only a chapter's worth of pages.
However, every chapter of this Handbook is, to the extent possible, a paragon of both extensiveness and economy. Most authors are well known for their earlier work on the assigned topic, for example, James Schulz on economic security in retirement, Angie O'Rand on stratification and the life course, Charles Longino on migration, and Melissa Hardy on older workers. Others are extending a recent interest (e.g., Steve Cutler on technology, Binstock on the social implications of anti-aging medicine and science) or applying their own considerable conceptual and theoretical talents to what is for them a new area of thought (e.g., Joe Hendricks and Laurie Hatch on lifestyle and aging).
Regardless of the approach, all the authors are superb scholars who are skilled in organizational clarity and energetic writing. The editors note in their preface that this edition "was planned and implemented so as to enlist predominantly new contributors from among the rich variety of distinguished scholars and path-breaking perspectives now constituting the field" (p. xix). The 5th edition had used 44 authors to produce its 25 chapters; all but 12 of these writers are missing from this edition, and 24 of the 37 6th edition authors are first-timers. This speaks well, not only for Binstock and George's commitment to presenting the sharpest of cutting-edge thought, but also for the vitality of the field that, in 5 years, can generate so many new perspectives that are "path-breaking." The editors also note that 17 of the 25 6th edition chapters are on subjects not included in the 5th. Notable among these are Carol Haber's chapter on understanding aging through family history, Merrill Silverstein's on intergenerational family transfers, Steve Cutler's on technology and aging, Ellen Idler's on religion, Hendricks and Hatch's chapter on lifestyles of the old, and Linda George's chapter on quality of life. Further, seven of the remaining eight chapters have been assigned to different authors this time, yielding a significantly different perspective. For example, writing on diversity and aging in the United States, Ronald and Jacqueline Angel cite only 3 of the 83 references used by Williams and Wilson in their 5th edition chapter on race and ethnicity 5 years earlier but bring over 80 new sources to their task, more than half of which were published before the earlier chapter was written. Clearly the Angels bring new ideas and a new slant to their topic. On the other hand, given the price of this book (still a bargain at $75), readers should be thrilled to realize that the older edition is not necessarily obsolete, as are earlier editions of most textbooks. Because these new chapters have not superseded much of the 5th edition, the latter is still highly useful as a source of ideas and even references.
What Else is New?
A small gesture has been made in this edition toward the global nature of gerontology. The inclusion of chapters by three eminent non-American gerontologists (Allan Borowski from Australia, Alan Walker from the U.K., and Martin Kohli from Italy) is a step forward for this volume. Borowski helps Jim Schulz review developments in state pensions in Chile and elsewhere; Walker brings a decidedly European flavor to his chapter on the politics of aging; and Kohli compares European and American notions of social justice in his treatment of the public generational contract. Given the surging interest in gerontology in both developed and developing countries (especially in Asia and Africa), American gerontologists will remain insular and gerontologically "Ameri-centric" at their peril. Already the European Union (EU) offers a "European master's degree" in gerontology, aimed at training European students in aging in the EU context. African universities in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa now offer coursework in aging and, in one case, at least (Kenya), an educational credential in gerontology. Renmin University in Beijing, China, has that country's first institute of gerontology and offers the only doctorate in gerontology in China. African and Chinese students coming to the United States to study gerontology will want to know more than just the facts and theories of American aging. This Handbook takes a small step in the direction of globalizing gerontology, but I suggest the next edition will need to include significantly more international material if it is to do justice to this important trend.
I do have one more significant criticism of this edition of the Handbook. As in so many textbooks, one can see the ghettoization of ethnic minorities and women. Often, if a book has one chapter on race and one on gender, the feeling is that due attention has been paid. Originally, I suspected that many, if not most, writers had included race and gender as a natural part of their research narrative. Unfortunately, I found only three chapters, other than the Angels' on diversity, that referred to race or ethnicity: Kenneth Land and Yang Yang make one brief reference to the race–morbidity link. George devotes eight lines to her dismissal of race as a possible variable of interest in quality of life research, citing primarily a work from 1976. Neal Krause, alone among these writers, attempts to review what we know about social relationships among minority groups and concludes we don't know very much and what data we do have are not very clear. Some topics, of course, do not lend themselves to a "race section." But many chapters appear simply to have overlooked or excluded such literature. Idler's welcome treatment of religion in old age mentions Shakers, Mormons, and Seventh-Day Adventists, but not African Americans. Similarly, Silverstein does an excellent job of including studies of intergenerational support and transfers in several Asian nations, including Bangladesh, but finds nothing on the African American family. Perhaps this is stark commentary on the poverty of our research, but at least that point could be made.
If anything, the treatment of women is even less overt. Aside from Phyllis Moen and Donna Spencer's creative analysis of the growing ambiguity at the intersection of age and gender roles in later life, only Carol Haber describes the role and status of older women in any detail. I noted that George, Cutler, Hardy, and Karen Holden and Charles Hatcher make brief mentions of gender differences in their chapters, although I might easily have missed a few others. Nevertheless, it seems that gender, like race, is often treated as simply a structural variable to be controlled. Age, in truth, is our touchstone, our core variable of interest. All roads lead to age. But there is no age without gender and race. There is no understanding age without understanding gender and race, as well. Almost every chapter in this volume could have been strengthened and made much more useful had the authors been instructed to attend to the joint impact of age, race, and gender on the variable of interest.
I will go further. One of the most powerful variables in all social science is social class. The impact of life changes on practically every facet of life, and certainly of aging, is unquestioned. It might be argued that the essence of social science is inequality, and the essence of inequality is social class. Given the importance of economic determinants and class differences in social gerontology, every study should report them. Yet, precious few do. In their chapter on the economic status of the old, Holden and Hatcher render an interesting portrait of well-being in late life in America, yet most other authors do not attend to class differences, especially as they involve the poor. I believe this too is more a commentary on the state of our field than on these writers. If the studies have not been done, they cannot be reported. Richard Douglass and his colleagues (Douglass, Blair, Gilmore, Lavery, & Stefankovic, 2004) reported recently that the vast majority of all published studies of nursing home care in the United States—and thus our understanding of nursing home quality and proper care—have been carried out in nonprofit, Medicare-funded rehabilitation centers, or hospital-based institutions (i.e., those catering to the middle class). Yet, most residents of nursing homes (about 70%) are Medicaid dependent and live in for-profit facilities not often represented in our research samples. If we want to find answers to our most pressing aging problems, we must look at the people who are the most pressed.
Who's on First
If comedians Abbott and Costello revealed nothing else about the human condition, they showed more vividly than any two people, before or since, how easy it is to misunderstand a clear statement of fact. I believe Who was on first, and What was on second. So, let me remake the points above in a different way. This book, and all the chapters in it, is a telescope through which we can see our field a little more closely and detect our flaws more clearly. Despite a few foibles, I do believe the field of social gerontology and this book are functioning as they should by energetically subjecting every aspect of social life to rigorous inspection to learn its reciprocal relationships with age. I have saved discussion of one of the chapters for last, however, because I think it best illustrates my point. In fact, it accomplishes far better than this essay my assigned goal of placing this book in the context of the field of social gerontology.
Buddy, Can You Paradigm?
In the Handbook's opening chapter, Richard Settersten builds on his own recent, masterful discussion of the life-course perspective, which has become, since the book's first edition, a dominant (if still underutilized) paradigm for both gerontologists and scholars of other life stages. Settersten explicitly acknowledges his debt to the groundbreaking work of the authors of chapters on the life course in earlier editions—Bernice Neugarten, Gunhild Hagestad, and Dale Dannefer—who, along with Matilda Riley and Glen Elder, among others, pioneered development of this notion. Like a good life-course scholar, he shows how his current views of life course and its impact on the field of gerontology were influenced by and developed from theirs. He also highlights one of the fastest-growing areas of life-course research, that of the "intersections between individuals, family environments, and social change." The life course, he says, "places families center stage in research, and intergenerational models are natural to this perspective" (p. 12).
I must also credit Settersten for disagreeing with one of the icons on the field, Bernice Neugarten, about her provocative prediction of "the end of gerontology." Neugarten, you may recall, once challenged gerontologists to stop ignoring lifelong development or face extinction at the hands of those who did not (Neugarten, 1996). She also felt that age was a poor predictor of the need for public benefits and would (and should) weaken and eventually disappear as a meaningful social indicator (Neugarten, 1982). Although Settersten clearly agrees with Neugarten's basic argument in favor of a life-course perspective, he denies its embrace must be suicidal. He argues instead for "the development of new theories and methods, as well as further commitments to gathering and analyzing longitudinal and archival data" and says we must "monitor advances in knowledge on all [emphasis added] life periods, sift through mounting evidence, and make connections and build theories that transcend age- and discipline-based divisions" (p. 13). It makes me tired just thinking about it. But Settersten is clear that social gerontology has a marvelous future if it can accomplish one little thing: "... if gerontologists are to take the lead on these tasks, a major paradigm shift will be required; that is, we will need to transcend the very thing that now defines our field: age" (p. 13). I would very much like to associate myself with that position, even if I don't claim to be capable of taking the medicine he prescribes and don't know many who are. Nevertheless, Settersten—like all the authors who contributed to this wonderful resource—gives us something to think about and a goal to strive for.
References
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