Demographic change in the 21st century – with the rise of ageing populations across the Global North and South – is setting moral as well as political and economic challenges for the range of countries involved. On the one side come complex issues about the distribution of resources between generations and groups, with pressures placed on the shoulders of individuals in determining how to manage life in old age. On the other side has come a strong sense of the possibilities of new areas of choice in later life, notably with debates around the rise of the so-called ‘third age’ and the growth of leisure and cultural industries targeted at older people. These different sides to growing old – constraint on the one side and choice on the other – are the subject of detailed study and exploration in the various contributions to this book.

Ageing, meaning and social structure aims to bring together a fruitful interface between two approaches that have been relatively insulated from each other, although both have been shown to be highly relevant to understanding processes of human ageing. One aspect has emphasised the analysis of structural mechanisms such as social inequality; another has focused on the interpretation and articulation of meaning in later life. The former often operates under the rubric of ‘political economy perspectives on ageing’ (Baars et al, 2006),the latter as ‘humanistic gerontology’ or ‘humanistic ageing studies’ (cf Cole et al, 2010). This volume prepares the meeting ground for these two paradigms that have developed separately, with each drawing on their own traditional resources. The purpose of this volume is to explore the extent to which they presuppose and complement each other.

Critical gerontology as structural analysis

Social critiques, such as those associated with ‘critical gerontology’, are usually responses to structural mechanisms that work in ways that contradict official discourses that emphasise freedom, social justice or equality. The structural character of such mechanisms implies that the social problems that trigger the critique were not caused by inevitable results of senescing, or by the irresponsible actions of those who suffer from them or through mere chance, but that they have a persistent and systemic character.