Social Policy & Aging : A Critical Perspective

This groundbreaking book provides a comprehensive treatment of the political economy of aging. From the founder and key thinker in the field comes a work that aims to contribute to the understanding of old age and aging in the context of problems and issues of the larger social order in America. Since Carroll Estes′ first writing on the political economy of aging in 1979, there has been growing recognition and incorporation of her critical perspective as one of the major paradigms in the field of aging.

The only comprehensive book-length treatment of the subject, Social Policy and Aging addresses the globalization of capital and developments in health care restructuring. Combining social gerontological theory and major theoretical advances in work on the welfare state, this text keeps readers abreast of the new development within the discipline. Students and researchers alike will appreciate this critical perspective, widely acknowledged as one of the major paradigms in the field of aging.

 Carroll L. Estes is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the founding and former director of the Institute for Health & Aging (1979-98) and the former Chair of the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing, UCSF. Dr. Estes is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences and past president of the Gerontological Society of America, American Society on Aging, and Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. She has served as consultant to the U.S. Commissioner of Social Security and the U.S. Senate and House committees on aging for more than two decades. Her career and theoretical perspective were firmly established with the publication of The Aging Enterprise (Jossey Bass, 1979), which became an instant classic in the field of aging research. She subsequently published two books with Sage: The Long Term Care Crisis (1993) and Social Policy and Aging (2001). In 2001, she received the Distinguished Scholars Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course (a sort of life-time achievement award) and has received other major awards such as The Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Pacific Sociological Association (1989), The Donald Kent Award of the Gerontological Society of America (1992), and The Beverly Award of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (1993). The original version of the proposed book has been credited as the foundation of her work in the citations for each of these awards, and her work is nationally and internationally recognized.