ABSTRACT
One aspect of health promotion as it has emerged in the late twentieth century is the concern to establish a relationship between health, healthy living and positive ageing into old age. Attempts to establish connections between lifestyle and health have resulted in increasing attention being paid to the adult ageing process and techniques for combatting the more deleterious consequences of biological ageing in later life. The concept of ‘positive ageing’ therefore focuses attention on an issue which is of interest both to sociologists of health promotion and social gerontologists: namely, the emerging tendency to construct moral distinctions between styles of ageing and old age, and it is this aspect of the conjunction between health promotion and social gerontology that is the subject of this chapter.
