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Toward a Social Phenomenology of Aging: Studying the Self Process in Biographical Work

In recent years, the study of aging has come to be increasingly multidisciplinary and to encompass the whole life course. The well established life history approach has been reformulated to include the macro-structural and cultural context of aging. Over the past decade research on adult development and aging, cohort differences in aging patterns, and historical changes in life course differentiation has challenged the validity of the established “stability” and “ordered change” theories of aging. An “aleatoric” account of aging, which calls attention to the flexibility of developmental patterns, has been proposed in their stead. Consistent with this development is the need to replace the old conception of the self as a passive object of outside social forces with a new conception of the self as an active, self-reflexive agent in society. The author demonstrates the utility of certain core concepts in social phenomenology and ethnomethodology, in particular Schutz's concept of biographical work, for developing this new conception of the self. It is proposed that more attention to the practical procedures of reality construction involved in biographical work would provide the epistemological basis and conceptual clarity needed for empirical research on the dynamics of life histories.