Life Cycle

Leo Simmons's is the first major work to explore the relationship between culture and the experience of old age. Using existing ethnographic works, Simmons evaluated the effects of selected societal traits on the social roles, treatment, and status of the aged across seventy-one globally distributed tribal groups. This work set the stage for further investigation into the sources of cross-cultural variation in the status of older people. In part drawing upon Simmons's work, Donald Cowgill and Lowell Holmes formulated one of the first substantive theories on variation in the life cycle and aging processes. This collection drew upon ethnographic examples from both tribal-and state-level societies and theorized that modernization was the driving force behind the wide range in elder treatment. As societies become increasingly drawn toward modernization, the productive and social roles available to older adults concomitantly grow fewer and less prestigious. With modernization, the status of elders decreases, the proportion of elders within society increases, and the responsibility for elder care is transformed from a domestic to a public sphere; cross-culturally, all elders are channeled into less physically demanding roles, and all cultures place a high value on a good and long life. Critics of modernization theory point to the ethnocentric bias inherent in modernization's naturalization of Western social structure.

The differentiation between what is biological and what is cultural in the aging process continues to drive research into the experience of aging as well as social theories of the aging process. Older adults' disengagement from social and economic life was first understood as a natural process predicated upon decreasing physical and mental capacities; later theories emphasized the importance of reciprocal relationships in determining an elder's likelihood of social withdrawal. Marxist approaches postulated that elders' circumscribed relationship to the means of exchange was the underlying cause of their social alienation. Carroll Estes's groundbreaking work on the "aging enterprise" introduced and explicated the political economic production of elders' relative disadvantage. The aging enterprise is the invention of new needs for the elder population, which are provided by new technologies, services, medications, and goods. This process exploits elders' economic and political power and works to isolate them further from the rest of society.

The 1980s brought a new direction in life-cycle research, one that focused less upon macrosocial functionalism and the ways in which elders as a group function within society and instead directed attention toward the effects of lifelong experiences and social locations on the status and experience of older age. The double-jeopardy hypothesis proposes that elders are first disadvantaged by age and that this disadvantage is intensified by other layers of their identity, such as ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference. In contrast, the life-course perspective seeks to understand elders' status as a product of their lifelong interaction with systems of discrimination and privilege as well as their individual personal experiences. The experience of older age is often positively affected by elders' social support system or their social networks. Social support networks can be characterized by the amount of reciprocity among members, the intensity of exchange, the complexity or number of activities performed by members, or the level of interconnectedness among different members of the network. Elders who possess intense, complex, reciprocal, and dense social networks experience greater social integration and may have greater relative status within the elder population.

Elders' relative status in society may often be predicated upon the various roles they fulfill. Some roles, such as grandparent, provide a high status, while other roles available to elders, such as the sick role, connote low status. All societies possess some unwritten rules for which roles are accessible to older adults. These age norms, while generally not formalized, can serve as a form of social control to discourage older adults from engaging in activities deemed unfit for their age. Another term used to describe this phenomena is "social clock," the culturally defined time of life for particular social activities to be performed. Marriage, employment, childbirth, grandparenthood, and death are just a few of the human activities governed by social clocks.