ABSTRACT
This book focuses on the knowledge tools and technological means used to understand and manage ageing in contemporary societies. It takes as a point of departure the idea that while science and technology are mainly perceived as solutions to the ‘problems of ageing’ they have also contributed significantly to defining and articulating ageing as a societal issue, that is to say, to shaping the institutions and practices of what we usually label the ‘ageing society’. The book investigates this interactive, co-productive relationship between science, technology and the ‘ageing society’. As a consequence of this approach, it proposes that the concept of the ‘ageing society’ should refer not only to the socioeconomic transformation associated with demographic ageing but also to the shifting relations between knowledge making practices, innovation processes and life course institutions. The ‘ageing society’, I argue, is first and foremost a collective predicament, a swelling uncertainty concerning how to deploy procedures of scientific research and technological innovation in addressing ageing as an issue. Ageing unsettles the scientific and technological apparatus of contemporary society. In contrast to other sociological approaches to this issue, which emphasise the increased encroachment of science, technology and medicine on the life course, this book stresses the controversial, unstable character of those ways of knowing and managing ageing. It does so by exploring the composition, the difficult coming together, of particular features of the epistemic and technological infrastructure of the ‘ageing society’: the disputes within population science on how to explain and address demographic ageing, the convoluted and still unsuccessful search for new age standards to measure individuals’ evolving abilities and needs, the negotiated attempts to develop new research methods to measure individuals’ unique ageing trajectory, the troubles associated with developing tools to support longer working and active lives, the unsteady character of the relationship between the care of older people and technologies aiming to support it, the critical challenges posed by ageing science to the social, economic and political organisation of contemporary biomedicine and health care, and the related moral and political divergences arising from proposals to extend human longevity. Taken together, these provide a conceptually robust analysis of how experts, policy makers, commercial and civil society
organisations and citizens bring ageing to bear on the normative and material contexts of contemporary science and technology.
