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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the argument that scholars' imputations of agency serve modern professional/institutional purposes other than the refinement of testable theories.

Data include articles from twenty‐first century issues of four gerontological journals. Content analysis involved coding articles for imputations of agency, constructivist analysis thereof, and the parties to whom authors directed their imputations.

Most authors rehearse theories of “structuration” and call for more imputations of agency to old people. They do this without imputing agency to privileged groups or to policy makers; and without settling theoretical question of how much agency people have or how scientists could demonstrate that. One article in ten provides constructivist critique.

Patterns in imputations of agency in other scholarly realms (such as books) may support another interpretation.

Scholars should treat their imputations of agency as political activities and not refinements of testable theories. They position professional scholars as advocates for an oppressed group.

This paper provides a sociological context for interpreting routine imputations of agency in social scientific and humanist scholarship.

The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight into how an individual enters a career as a gerontologist.

The paper is an invited opinion piece and comment based on the author's experience and career choices. It is a brief autobiographical account focused on occupational opportunities and the influence of family commitments.

Career choice can often be a mix of opportunity and chance. Having good colleagues and a supportive research community is the secret to success. Retirement for an active professional brings further opportunities to learn new skills and knowledge.

Personal insights from professionals at the height of their career can help young researchers understand what it means to take opportunities when they arise.

The purpose of this study is to investigate older shopper behavior in a retail environment. The study focused on how the environment elements of supermarket stores influence older customers to interact with other customers when they shop for groceries.

Various qualitative research techniques were undertaken, including interviews with retail architecture experts, store employees, a psychologist and a gerontologist; in addition, five interviews followed by three focus groups were conducted with older shoppers in Brazil.

Customer-to-customer interactions that are related to the environment elements of supermarkets tend to influence the shopping experience of the older shoppers, which has an impact on satisfaction. Although some customers may value social contact, some interactions can involve discomfort and embarrassment.

The study sheds light on the understanding of the influence of the environment elements of supermarket stores on customer-to-customer interactions, and it proposes such interactions to be a relevant strategy that is used by older customers to maximize their satisfaction, although such strategies can also lead to dissatisfaction.

The findings provide insights regarding the specific needs of older customers in a supermarket context, associated with the design and ambient elements of the store environment, which can be valuable for retailers and policy-makers.

Considering the limited understanding of older shoppers and their experiences, this study provides a thorough understanding of how the retail environment can influence customer-to-customer interactions that involve older shoppers. Moreover, the study captures how interactions, which are influenced by the retail environment, can result in dissatisfaction; however, such interactions can also be used by older customers to modify their satisfaction with the shopping experience.

The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight into how an individual enters a career as a gerontologist.

The paper is an invited opinion piece and comment based on the author's experience and career choices. It is a brief autobiographical account focused on occupational opportunities.

Career choice can often be a mix of opportunity and chance. Having good colleagues and a supportive research community is the secret to success.

Personal insights from professionals at the height of their career can help less experienced researchers understand what it means to take opportunities when they arise.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Dutch innovative care environments for older people, including those living with dementia, from the perspectives or an architect and a social gerontologist.

The authors visited three care environments for older people, each offering an innovative approach to living housing older people, including people with dementia. The settings are discussed from two disciplinary perspectives, facilitating an understanding of the influence of the built environment on daily life for residents.

The three facilities were all architecturally varied and resembled “real” homes to varying degrees. Additionally, each entrance offered a different welcome to the external community, ranging from full accessibility to a closed and fortified appearance. Within each facility, the built environment afforded residents opportunities to participate in valued activities, including interacting with members of the wider community.

The inclusion of two disciplinary perspectives offers a richer discussion of the physical and social aspects of the care environments that would be offered by one perspective alone.

As the workforce is aging and becoming increasingly age diverse, successful aging at work has been proclaimed to be a desirable process and outcome, as well as a responsibility of both workers and their organizations. In this chapter, we first review, compare, and critique theoretical frameworks of successful aging developed in the gerontology and lifespan developmental literatures, including activity, disengagement, and continuity theories; Rowe and Kahn’s model; the resource approach; the model of selective optimization with compensation; the model of assimilative and accommodative coping; the motivational theory of lifespan development; socioemotional selectivity theory; and the strength and vulnerability integration model. Subsequently, we review and critically compare three conceptualizations of successful aging at work developed in the organizational literature. We conclude the chapter by outlining implications for future research on successful aging at work.

The number of years a person has lived is a poor indicator of their self‐perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. For these reasons, gerontologists have looked to alternative measures of age, including self‐perceived or subjective age. While American researchers have built up a body of knowledge pertaining to self‐perceived age for more than half a century, little is known about the concept in the UK. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into the self‐perceived age of a group of UK citizens (n = 356) aged 50‐79 (mean age 60.2 years). Using the cognitive age scale, respondents were asked how old they perceived themselves to be on the dimensions of feel, look, act and interests. Overall, respondents indicated a self‐perceived age of more than 10 years younger than their chronological age. These results suggest that the phenomenon is at least as extensive as in the US, where it is frequently argued that youth is valued over age. Policy and practice implications are discussed.

The ageing process is often discussed as though it is unique to humans. However, it can be observed throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. In every species in which it occurs, the ageing process has common traits. It is a progressive, intrinsic, cumulative and deleterious process that eventually gives rise to physiological frailty, morbidity and death. Historically, biogerontology had a slow start but the last 10 years have seen exceptional progress in understanding both why and how ageing changes occur. As a result of this new knowledge, interventions that could produce longer, healthier human lives are close to becoming clinical realities. Unfortunately, the speed and scale of these advances is not well understood outside the relatively small community of biological gerontologists. This article reviews some of these advances for a non‐specialist audience, speculates on their potential impact and identifies current barriers to future progress.

Purpose: The aim of the study is to consider the use of the Internet as a potential facilitator of positive health-related perceptions. Specifically, we propose that online health information seeking fosters positive perceptions of health. Using path modeling, we theorized several mechanisms through which information seeking could be conducive to positive health perceptions, which we conceptualized into the following four dimensions: (1) sense of empowerment in managing health, (2) self-reported ability to take better care of health, (3) sense of improved health-related quality of life, and (4) self-reported improvement of health.

Methodology: Our sample consisted of respondents who have used the Internet as a resource for health information (n = 710), drawn from the largest national probability-based online research panel. Our comparison subsample consisted of older respondents (age ≥ 60; n = 194). We used Internet-specific measures and employed structural equation models (SEM) to estimate the direct, indirect, and total effects of health-related use of the Internet on subjective health perceptions. Based on our review of the literature, competent health communication with healthcare providers and sense of empowerment in managing personal health were modeled as mediator variables. We assessed whether the proposed mediational relationships, if significant, differed across our indicators of positive health perceptions and whether any differential associations were observed among older adults. We run parallel models for each indicator of positive health perception.

Findings: Provider-patient communication informed by the Internet resources were perceived to impart a greater sense of empowerment to manage health among our respondents, which in turn, was associated with perceived contributions to better self-reported ability to provide self-care, increased health-related quality of life, and improvement in self-reported health. The SEM results revealed a good fit with our full sample and subsample.

Research Implications: Conceptualization of the multidimensional aspects of online health information seeking with separate multi-indicator analyses of the outcome variable is important to further our understanding of how technology may impact the pathways involved in influencing health perceptions and as a result health outcomes.

The purpose of this article is to explore Maggie Kuhn's theoretical and analytical contributions to social gerontology and more broadly to the advancement of critical and public sociology.

This paper is an theoretical exploration of ageing. Maggie Kuhn's and the Gray Panthers theoretical contributions include analyses of, and related to: identity politics, intersectionality, cultural and media studies and the cognitive sciences, the forces and factors in the developing political economy of ageing including critiques of the ageing enterprise and the medical industrial complex, the sociology of knowledge of gerontology and globalization and world imperialism. The concluding section argues that the post‐retirement career of Maggie Kuhn was one of a Public Sociologist.

Maggie Kuhn fulfils the promise of the Project of Public Sociology, which “is to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these organic connections as part of our sociological life”. Maggie Kuhn's example moved forward the work of multiple generations of scholars. She lived and produced critical social analyses in pursuit of emancipatory knowledges. Her work is one of the earliest forms, if not the first, of critical pedagogy in gerontology; she promoted and advanced discourses of resistance. Maggie Kuhn was an engaged and outraged, practicing organic intellectual – the epitome of what bell hooks means by “teaching to transgress” and “education as the practice of freedom”. In the 24 years after her involuntary retirement, this was Maggie Kuhn's full‐time transformational agenda.

The paper looks at how the biography of Maggie Kuhn helped to engender the rise of radical social gerontology.