This book argues that concepts such as successful, active, positive, healthy and productive ageing - ubiquitous terms in research, marketing and policymaking concerned with older adults – are paradigms that reflect and exacerbate inequalities in older populations. The book presents a new theory to make sense of the popularity of this family of successful and active ageing concepts. Readers are invited to view them through the prism of model ageing – a new social theory that throws light on the causes and consequences of attempts to model ageing as a phenomenon and stage of the life course that ... More

This book argues that concepts such as successful, active, positive, healthy and productive ageing - ubiquitous terms in research, marketing and policymaking concerned with older adults – are paradigms that reflect and exacerbate inequalities in older populations. The book presents a new theory to make sense of the popularity of this family of successful and active ageing concepts. Readers are invited to view them through the prism of model ageing – a new social theory that throws light on the causes and consequences of attempts to model ageing as a phenomenon and stage of the life course that is in need of direction, reshaping and control. The term model ageing encapsulates systems of ideation pertaining to the question of ‘how to age in contemporary Western society’: these systems amount to a distinctive and coherent social construction of what it is to live like a model older person in 21st-century welfare states. Model ageing comprises policy ideals, commercial depictions and academic conceptualisations of what model old adults are or ought to be like. The theory of model ageing offers an explanatory account of the origins, mechanics and consequences of this ubiquitous activity of modelling ageing. This is an interpretive theory that seeks to make sense of how later life is socially constructed and moulded in contemporary aged societies.