The contributions of Calasanti, Clark, and Crigsby, and Light and ... Clark's effort to map the causal linkage of exercise as ..... Samuel G. Jacobson, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright 1996 by The Cerontological Society of America The Gerontologist Vol. 36, No. 2,174-177
Section II: Age Norms and the Structuring of Consciousness
The Social Organization of Diversity, and the Normative Organization of Age Dale Dannefer, PhD1
This contribution discusses the three articles that address the "Challenge of Heterogeneity/' and it also serves as an introduction to the topic, "Age Norms and the Structuring of Consciousness." As someone who had the opportunity to participate in both of these sessions at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Los Angeles, I find that this is an occasion to consider the conceptual articulation of two major and sometimes opposed organizing principles, diversity and normativity. Although long popular as a maxim among gerontologists, the general notion of diversity and the recognition of a tendency for interindividual heterogeneity to increase with age have been relatively neglected as research problems. When these phenomena have been noted, few rigorous efforts have been made to think about them in explanatory or causal terms. Rather, the tendency has been to consider diversity as simply something to celebrate (which it hardly is in many cases), or the result of chance events. The task of developing a systematic understanding of the character, causes, and consequences of the diversity of the aged, and its ramifications for policy and the practical matters of everyday life thus remains largely undeveloped. Yet, if it is empirically the case that interindividual differences among cohort members tend to increase with age, with considerable regularity in cohort after cohort, then this is an aspect of aging that cannot be neglected, but requires attention and explanation. The contributions of Calasanti, Clark, and Crigsby, and Light and Bligh are significant as early installments of the more general project of understanding the forces that regulate heterogeneity production and that lead, at least for the most readily measured characteristics, to what in principle is a much larger
project of understanding how physical, psychic, and social forces interact to regulate patterns of diversity over a cohort's collective life course. I will discuss each of the articles briefly before turning to the issue of the articulation of diversity with normativity. Relying heavily on the ubiquitous ethnicity-classgender trio, Calasanti rightly draws attention to the consequences of different levels of resources available to retirees as shaping the personal experience of retirement and, by using examples from traditional societies, to the inescapable complexity of the personal meaning and experience of retirement. Her comments on the significance of cross-national comparisons for developing a systematic understanding of diversity identify a central strategy for furthering our knowledge of diversity and aging (cf. Dannefer, 1987). Yet, the examples she provides of differential meanings for what are behaviorally or semantically similar phenomena should remind those who undertake such cross-cultural work of the difficulties that authentic cross-societal comparison entails. Calasanti's intent to contribute to developing a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamics underlying differential outcomes (as she suggests at points in her essay) is to be applauded, although her effort to advance discussion is inhibited by a lack of acknowledgment or mobilization of the cumulating body of work that has attempted to come to terms with the phenomenon of diversity in later life (e.g., Maddox & Douglass, 1974; Neugarten, 1982) and the general processes underlying the production of diversity both in later life and across the life course (Crystal & Shea, 1990; Dannefer, 1988b; Maddox, 1987; O'Rand, 1990). Progress toward developing the kind of international comparisons Calasanti advocates will be enhanced by a review of the strategies proposed and empirical techniques utilized in these earlier discussions. As recent research has clearly demonstrated (Fiatarone, Marks, Meredith, Lipsitz, & Evans, 1990),
1 Address correspondence to Dale Dannefer, PhD, Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627.
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amount of exercise is a key factor influencing physical health in later life, and a good exercise regimen is a key factor in sustaining physical health in later life. Exercise heterogeneity and health heterogeneity appear to be clearly linked realities in later life. Thus, Clark's effort to map the causal linkage of exercise as a potential source of heterogeneity production is especially welcome, as is his empirical focus on lower SES subpopulations, where risk for inactivity is highest. As is often the case with efforts to trace out the relationships in territory that is largely uncharted, some of the postulated effects may well be oversimplified. Especially notable in this regard is the notion that " . . . female gender and minority status" are associated with " . . . reduce(d) access to material and non-material resources" among the aged. While this is clearly true for material resources, the situation with respect to non-material resources is more complicated. Women are probably more skilled in asking for assistance and in sustaining and mobilizing networks of social support than are men. Some minority subcultures often function more like traditional cultures in which relatively high levels of social support and obligation are inherent aspects of social relationships (Stack, 1974), and in which the practice of spirituality may be regarded as a resource (McFadden, 1995). These points suggest that the dynamics of material and non-material support are embedded in different dynamics, and indicate caution in assuming that they can be treated as part of the same linear process. It is interesting that focus group members identify sociality — having others to exercise with — as a key incentive to engage in exercise. To the extent that this is generally true, however, it would seem to raise questions about the explanatory usefulness of selfefficacy. Even if self-efficacy were enhanced as a consequence of feeling part of an exercise group, and hence functioned as an intervening or correlated variable, its explanatory significance could be quite modest relative to that of social opportunities. Thus, parsimony would suggest the hypothesis that the operative link is from the independent variable of the exercise-supporting social situation to the dependent variable of exercise, with self-efficacy as an incidental link in the causal chain. While a role for self-efficacy might well survive such a test, the emphasis placed on sociality by the focus group members suggests that the specification of this causal link requires careful scrutiny. A final cautionary point concerns the likely bidirectional interactions between self-efficacy and exercise: While exercise has been well established as a consequence, it is also a likely cause of self-efficacy, a circumstance which dictates caution in the interpretation of correlations between these factors. These cautions notwithstanding, the conceptualization that Clark contributes in mapping these postulated relationships is a valuable example of how social and social-psychological processes produce heterogeneity. Light, Grigsby, and Bligh attempt the ambitious task of presenting a comprehensive mapping of the mulVol. 36, No. 2,1996
tidisciplinary conceptual terrain that must be traversed to gain a complete and adequate picture of the dynamics of heterogeneity over the life course. They chart three essential types of forces involved in the regulation of heterogeneity production over the life course which they term individual, social, and genetic. They then attempt to synthesize these into the skeleton of a comprehensive, multicausal model of the production of heterogeneity. As one might expect with an early effort at such a daunting undertaking, their effort at synthesis is not altogether successful. Although the general effort is laudatory, in my view it is premature to attempt a synthesis at this point because of a lack of adequate development in their discussion of each of the three types of explanation to be synthesized — individual, social, and genetic. I discuss each of these in turn. Since it receives the largest share of attention from Light, Grigsby, and Bligh, I begin with a consideration of their treatment of behavioral genetics, which offers a useful review of some significant and relevant recent work in this field. However, the attention accorded the conception of "species-normal" development introduces a paradox in relation to the topic of heterogeneity. Here as elsewhere, "normality" covers what is empirically a wide range of variation in life style, life chances, and even life expectancy. Further, the definition of the "normal" is known to be the result of perceptual processes of typification (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1967) which are integral to the most fundamental dynamics of social reality construction. Moreover, as Calasanti notes in the paper discussed above, normality is partially defined by the interests of dominant groups. Thus, the concept of "species-normal development" reintroduces some of the key ideological assumptions that have blocked the challenge of variability from view (Baars, 1991; Dannefer, 1988b; Morss, 1990), and in my view, these authors are right to question whether it should have a place in such a synthesis. Accepting the traditional G-»E model as a starting point frames the debate with behavioral genetics in terms of the conventional nature-nurture polarity. Since nutrition and other environmental factors are now known to induce fairly rapid and significant shifts in the expressed genome (Malan & McClure, 1984), it is appropriate to approach with caution the assumption that the genome is a fixed platform upon which development is built. More generally, it is becoming increasingly recognized that "genes and environment .. . loop out into each other and feed back onto each other in a complex way that we have just begun to understand" (Kenneth Kendler as quoted in Mann, 1994). Light and colleagues' brief discussion of what they term "Social Allocation/Socialization" processes focuses mainly on what can more generally be called social reality production processes. This includes both socialization and the production of cultural stereotypes and attributions that make particular statuses (e.g., ethnicity, gender, social class) the basis for selection rather than the social-system-level dynamics that are involved in the question of social
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allocation (Dannefer & Perlmutter, 1990). Although their effort at synthesis utilizes Sorensen's (1986) distinction of different types of positions, they focus primarily on the relation of the position and individual characteristics such as ethnicity or gender. In short, their discussion of the social bases of heterogeneity focuses on (a) the social shaping of individuals, and (b) the contextually relevant characteristics of individuals, which can serve as barriers to opportunity. These two emphases are both anchored at the individual level, and a discussion of the problem of allocation in social systems, of fitting cohorts of individuals to existing positions or roles in social systems and social structures, remains to be developed (cf. Dannefer, 1988a; Easterlin, 1980; Riley, Kahn, & Foner, 1994; Waring, 1976). Drawing on Sorensen's (1986) notion of open and closed positions, Light, Crigsby, and Bligh propose the interesting hypothesis that genetics would have more explanatory power in open systems, where social constraints do not operate, whereas social explanations would be more relevant in closed systems, where constraints are present. While this notion is intriguing, it risks the error of assuming that social influences are limited to the overt and intentional aspects of specific organizational forms and practices. By definition, the role of the social includes the influences of all social institutions, including the most fundamental institution, language (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). A moment's reflection on recent historical changes in the cultural level of awareness of sexism and ageism should provide sufficient clarification that something like the existence of a "closed" organizational position scarcely scratches the tip of the iceberg of the social constraints upon the constitution of the self, and upon the shaping of individual volition and action. Evidence to be presented in the articles that follow, regarding the existence of largely unspoken "age norms," provides another important example of the deep influence of social-constitutive processes. This general point also applies to the first source of heterogeneity discussed by these authors, which they term "individual differentiation." This discussion takes as its point of departure the individual's "already-existing personality," leaving aside the question of how the personality was initially formed, as the authors note. But, unless one intends to introduce a celebration of the unique personhood of each individual (a default explanation for large error terms) as a factor in the production of diversity, such discussions ultimately reduce "individual differentiation" to (a) a conception of a social process of cumulative amplification, or (b) to a notion of the life course as a working out of fixed personality processes. In either case, this approach can be subsumed under either the categories of behavioralgenetic or social explanation. I turn now to the topic of the second set of articles, concerned with "Age Norms and the Structuring of Consciousness." In my view, age norms warrant more attention than they have received in the sociology of age. As noted in the above discussion of 176
heterogeneity, the emphasis on statistical norms in psychology and on consensual social norms in social theory has had the effect of obscuring the realities of diversity and the need to study processes underlying diversity. The power of taken-for-granted age norms, which has increased historically with the institutionalization of the life course (Chudacoff, 1989), has also contributed to the neglect of diversity. More generally, age norms are important because they serve to mystify the social structuring of age through the process of naturalization — by making conditions that are the result of social organization or culture appear to be part of nature. In general, the task of any social analysis is to discover the contribution of social forces to the phenomena under study. Despite the reality of the diversity of individuals' experiences with aging, as illustrated by the previous set of articles, both popular culture and the views of many behavioral social scientists continue to include assumptions of the naturalness of, for example, a yearning of young women to be mothers, a psychological "mid-life transition" experience for men, of the "three-box life," of a feeling of disengagement after retirement. While such phenomena are real for many individuals, they are far from universal. The sociological hypothesis is that each of these can be accounted for through the construction of normative expectations that produce psychological and interpersonal pressure on individuals to conform to agespecific behavior that expresses "human nature" as it should. Each of the four articles that follow contributes fresh conceptual reflections and new empirical data to the question of age norms. The opening discussions of all of these studies, and especially Settersten and Hagestad's, offer testimony to the conceptual complexity of the phenomenon of age norms. Without resolving the attendant issues, the data presented in these analyses offer clear evidence that this is a field in which social forces operate subtly and powerfully to organize individuals' expectations about their life courses. Taken together, a key issue raised by this set of papers is the extent to which age norms operate locally as opposed to nationally. The analyses of Settersten and Hagestad and of Lashbrook deal with national data; those of Burton and Lawrence deal with local data. Since age norms develop their plausibility and efficacy as part of people's everyday life experience, it is perhaps not surprising that their existence can be discerned with the greatest clarity in the firm-specific and communityspecific samples studied by Burton and Lawrence. At the same time, the evidence for quite general norms for job promotions found by Lashbrook suggests that a broad sense of age-appropriateness for promotion exists not only within industries, but is surprisingly consistent across industries and across organizations of varying sizes. The lack of clear normative patterns found in the survey reported by Settersten and Hagestad suggests that, at least in the domains covered in the survey, norms about some details of some life domains may be localized or difficult to measure on a national level. The Gerontologist
Extrapolating from the pattern that appears across these studies taken as a whole, one might be tempted to hypothesize that norms themselves can be characterized as varying in their scope of applicability. For some factors (e.g., transitions into school or retirement), there may be a "national norm" in highly age-institutionalized societies such as the U.S.A., whereas age-normative expectations for more specific events such as parenting or job promotion may be specific to organizations (Lawrence), or localities (Burton), or occupational subcultures (Lashbrook), and cancel each other out in general surveys. Whether or not such a hypothesis is worth pursuing, the studies that follow provide a diverse array of ideas and data for those interested in and contemplating the further study of age norms.
Dannefer, D. (1988b). What's in a name? An account of the neglect of variability in the study of aging. In J. E. Birren & V. L. Bengtson (Eds.), Emergent theories in aging (pp. 128-150). New York: Springer. Dannefer, D., & Perlmutter, M. (1990). Development as a multi-dimensional process: Individual and social constituents. Human Development, 33, 108-137. Easterlin, R. (1980). Birth and fortune. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fiatarone, M. A., Marks, E. C , Meredith, C. N., Lipsitz, L. A., & Evans, W. J. (1990). High intensity strength training in nonagenarians: Effects on skeletal muscle. Journal of the American Medical Association, 263, 3029-3034. Maddox, G. (1987). Aging differently. The Gerontologist, 27, 557-564. Maddox, C , & Douglass, E. R. (1974). Aging and individual differences: A longitudinal analysis of social, psychological and physiological indicators. Journal of Gerontology, 29, 555-563. Malan, R. P., & McClure, W. R. (1984). Oral promoter control of the "Eschericha coli lactose operon." Cell, 34, 173-180. Mann, C. C. (1994). Behavioral genetics in transition. Science, 264, 1686-1689. McFadden, S. (1995). Aging, spirituality and health. In J. E. Birren (Ed.), Handbook of the psychology of aging (4th ed.). New York: WileyInterscience. Morss, J. (1990). The biologising of childhood: Developmental psychology and the Darwinian myth. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Neugarten, B. L. (Ed.). (1982). Age or need? Public policies for older people. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. O'Rand, A. (1990). Stratification and the life course. In R. H. Binstock & L. K. George (Eds.), Handbook of aging and the social sciences (3rd ed.; pp. 130-148). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Riley, M. W., Kahn, R. L, & Foner, A. (1994). Age and structural lag. New York: Wiley Interscience. Sorensen, A. B. (1986). Social structure and mechanisms of life-course processes. In A. B. Sorensen, F. Weinert, & L. Sherrod (Eds.), Human development and the life course (pp. 177-197). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Stack, C. (1974). All our kin. New York: Harper Colophon. Waring, J. (1976). Social replenishment and social change. American Behavioral Scientist, 19, 237-256.
References
Baars, J. (1991). The challenge of critical gerontology: The problem of social constitution. Journal of Aging Studies, 5, 219-243. Berger, P. L, & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A systematic treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor. Chudacoff, H. (1989). How old are you? Age consciousness in American culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crystal, S., & Shea, D. (1990). Cumulative advantage, cumulative disadvantage and inequality among elderly people. The Gerontologist, 30, 437_443. Dannefer, D. (1987). Aging as intracohort differentiation: Accentuation, the Matthew effect and the life course. Sociological Forum, 2, 211-236. Dannefer, D. (1988a). Differential gerontology and the stratified life course: Conceptual and methodological issues. In C. L. Maddox & M. P. Lawton (Eds.), Annual review of gerontology, vol. 8 (pp. 3-36). New York: Springer.
Received September 17, 1995 Accepted October 6, 7995
Scheie Eye Institute Department of Ophthalmology University of Pennsylvania Health System presents
THE 11TH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON LOW VISION Saturday, June 15, 1996 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. TOPICS INCLUDE: Current Therapeutic Trials for Macular Degeneration Hereditary Retinal Degeneration - Present and Future Physiatry and Vision Rehabilitation Occupational Therapy and Vision Rehabilitation Coordinating Low Vision Rehabilitation with Occupational Therapy Workshops:
Problem Solving Techniques in Vision Rehabilitation Evaluation and Management of Homonymous Hemianopsias The Visually Impaired Child The Auto-Focus Telescope - It's Here! What's New and Exciting in Low Vision Rehabilitation
Fitting and Prescribing Telescopes
COURSE FACULTY:
Chairman - Janet DeBerry Steinberg, O.D. Richard Brilliant, O.D. Henry Greene, O.D. Alexander J. Brucker, M.D. Samuel G. Jacobson, M.D., Ph.D. Abbe Dantzig, OTR/L Keith Robertson, M.D. Paul Freeman, O.D. Bruce Rosenthal, O.D.
CME Credits: Fee: Location: Information:
6 credit hours in Category 1 $125 for practicing O.D./M.D./D.O. (includes breakfast, luncheon & coffee breaks) Scheie Eye Institute, 51 No. 39th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Diane Lutz, CME Coordinator (215) 662-8141
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