Series Editors’ Preface

Summary

Global ageing and the increasing numbers of older people in all world regions raise new issues and concerns for consideration by academics, policy makers and health and social care professionals around the world. Ageing in a Global Context is a book series, published by Policy Press in association with the British Society of Gerontology, that aims to influence and transform debates in what is a fast-moving field in research and policy. The series seeks to achieve this in three main ways. First, the series publishes books which rethink key questions shaping debates in the study of ageing. This has become particularly important given the restructuring of welfare states, especially in the Global North, alongside the complex nature of population change. Each of these elements opens up the need to explore themes which reach beyond traditional perspectives in social gerontology. Second, the series represents a response to the impact of globalization and related processes, which are contributing to the erosion of the national boundaries that originally framed the study of ageing. This is reflected in the increasing scope and breadth of issues that are explored in contributions to the series, for example: the impact of transnational migration, growing ethnic and cultural diversity, new types of inequality, and themes relating to ageing in different environmental contexts. Third, a key concern of the series is to explore interdisciplinary connections in gerontology. Contributions provide a critical assessment of the disciplinary boundaries and territories influencing the study of ageing, creating in the process new perspectives and approaches relevant to the 21st century.

Against this background, we are grateful to the editors of this book, Amanda Grenier, Chris Phillipson and Richard A. Settersten Jr, whose book aligns so closely to the aims of the Ageing in a Global Context series. Exploring the emerging topic of precarity and ageing, the book offers a fundamentally new perspective on the ways in which later life is shaped within the context of a redefined welfare model and deepening inequalities. With a strong conceptual grounding in critical gerontology, the book's chapters, written by leading scholars from a range of countries, considers the multiple and intersecting pathways that lead to precarity in older age, the different spheres of life that are becoming more precarious under the influence of profound structural change, and the role of social policy in framing and responding to precarity.