ABSTRACT
The relationship between age and the roles and statuses people occupy has long been recognized, yet it has only been over the past two decades or so that sustained, systematic efforts have been made to draw out the implications of this fact at both the societal and individual levels. In these years, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the ways in which roles are structured by age, the conflicts engendered by the age-related allocation to roles, and how and why these systems of age structuring change over time. In addition, under the banner of life-course research, there has been a flowering of studies of individual life patterns and their relationship to macrosocietal factors, such as political, economic and demographic forces.
