ABSTRACT
It has been suggested that there has been a dialectical progression advancing the understanding of the social position of the elderly. The original thesis was provided by the first generation of social gerontological theories such as disengagement and activity theories. These approaches, as outlined above, are individualistic and psychological in orientation. The antithesis came with second-generation theories such as age stratification and structured dependency, which saw elderly people within a social structural framework and within a modernizing context. The thirdgeneration or synthesis theories are theories that can bridge both structure and action (Hendricks & Leedham 1991). This synthesis is the kind of theory which this book seeks to define.
