The Gerontologist, Vol 36, Issue 6 749-760, Copyright © 1996 by The Gerontological Society of America

ARTICLES

Tracing the course of theoretical development in the sociology of aging

RJ Lynott and PP Lynott
Department of Gerontology, University of Nebraska at Omaha 68182-0202, USA.

The emergence of sociological theorizing in the field of aging is described as a sequence of two transformations in gerontological thinking. Each transformation signals a principal change in the conception of the nature and practice of gerontological inquiry. The first transformation was marked by Cumming and Henry's book Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement (1961), in which a formal theory of aging is laid out for the first time by social scientists. This set the stage for the development of a range of alternative theoretical challenges. There is a second transformation that began in the late 1970s and early 80s which involved not so much the recognition of theory as a reflection of that recognition itself, being metatheoretical. The issues raised represented a fundamental concern with the so-called "facts" of aging themselves, focusing on the socially constructive and ideological features of age conceptualizations-social phenomenological and Marxist concerns, respectively. More recently (in the late 1980s and early 90s), social gerontologists have turned to critical theory and feminist perspectives to also examine these issues.

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