“Old age” as a social location: Theorizing institutional processes, cultural expectations, and interactional practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The graying of societies and growing inequality call for increased attention to age relations and their implications for power, status, and constraint in late life. In this paper, I argue old age is a distinct—and devalued—social location that exists amid intersecting relations of inequality. Using an integrative approach, I synthesize selected sociological research on the institutional processes, cultural expectations, and interactional practices underlying the social construction of old age. I then review research in the areas of family care work and employment to illustrate some empirical contexts where age relations intersect with gender, class, race, and ethnicity to structure divergent opportunities and constraints among older people. This paper maps out significant theoretical and substantive signposts in the sociology of old age to build connections across levels of analysis, and to provide a nuanced, comprehensive approach to patterned inequalities in late life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".