The aim of this paper is to review the social constructionist view of age and ageing that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It begins with a general consideration of social constructionism as an epistemological framing of the world, before turning to its use in social gerontology. It considers two distinct social constructionist approaches treating later life as a social reality: (a) as a structural consequence of the rise of the modern state and its organisation of the labour market and (b) as a consequence of shifting cultural and social representations. Arguing that the earlier more structuralist accounts have gradually become overshadowed by concerns over age as identity, socially constructivist approaches now place as much emphasis upon the social representation of age as on its social-structural organisation. The paper then reviews the costs and benefits of social constructionism in general and its becoming a key part in the study of ageing. Its benefits arise from drawing attention to the salience of the cultural and the social in fashioning age and ageing and thereby advancing the sociology of later life. At the same time, social constructionist approaches to old age risk neglecting an other personal and social reality arising from corporeal decline and fear of the body-to-come. The paper concludes by noting how, whether approaching ageing and old age as natural kinds or as human kinds, adopting biological or sociological methodologies, all such methods privilege the externality of age – whether as a social or a biological fact. What is not captured by either is the problematic internality of age. What might be called the subjectivity of age will remain a topic for cultural representation, beyond the methods of both biological and social science.

This study explores the perception of wolverines, a carnivore in decline, by youths in northern Canada, the future generation of stakeholders. To accomplish this, we analysed 165 drawings from children and 22 interviews with Indigenous adults in the Northwest Territories and Quebec. Overall, children primarily drew wolverines in healthy environments, with only a minority depicting the wolverine’s environment negatively. All children demonstrated a basic understanding of the wolverine’s physical appearance and biology/ecology, with few differences in how the wolverine was depicted among the different research areas. Among interviewed adults, the ecological role played by wolverines was less prominent among the themes explored by Naskapi participants than was their role as a thief or pest, when contrasted to Dene participants. These results indicate that information about wolverine habitat or biology is still being acquired by children in areas where wolverines are extirpated, but that a lack of exposure to this species may negatively influence children’s understanding of its ecological role. These results suggest that informing the public about this carnivore’s ecological role may improve public support and, therefore, the likelihood of successful conservation programmes.

This article presents an examination of class-based inequalities in turnout at British elections. These inequalities have substantially grown, and the class divide in participation has become greater than the class divide in vote choice between the two main parties. To account for class inequalities in turnout three main hypotheses – to do with policy indifference, policy alienation and social alienation – are tested. The results from the British context suggest that the social background of political representatives influences the ways in which voters participate in the political process, and that the decline in proportion of elected representatives from working-class backgrounds is strongly associated with the rise of working-class abstention.

The present work is part of a series of studies that primarily focus on social representations of rural and city objects in the process of constructing a social identity of the countryside. Using social representation theory, this study aimed to investigate the representational field linked to the rural and city objects for the members of a peasant community. A total of 200 members of a Brazilian rural community from four generational groups, of both sexes and aged between 7 and 81 years, participated in this study. We conducted individual interviews with semi-structured scripts. The data corpora, processed using EVOC software, consisted of free associations of the rural and city inductor terms. In constitutive terms, the results allow for the identification of antinomies between the objects discussed; in functional terms, they indicate that the process of constructing social identity is based on the symbolic field, which acts as a reference system for the preparation of the rural identity shared by the participants.

Wine, in France, is a cultural product. However, the issue of wine consumption has been at the centre of a recurring social debate. We decided to focus our study on the effect of consumption practices on this social representation as well as the variations in position-taking in very different normative contexts. Results revealed two distinct social representations according to consumption practice. Moreover, Guttman effect in principal component analysis uncovered a unique phenomenon which showed that participants (consumer vs. non consumer) were inclined to act differently only in the case of polemical issues when they perceived the investigator as a consumer vs. non consumer. Indeed, in the case of hegemonic beliefs they were inclined to act in the same way and their answers were not influenced by the status of the investigator. Results are discussed around the question of the links between social representations and social identity.

This paper is about the television representation of aging and the ensuing social discourse. We analysed the content of 756 hours of television (3 weeks from 2 television networks: Société Radio-Canada and TVA in March 1992). We found that television discourse in different types of programs (information, talkshows, fiction, advertising) uses many strategies that deny the aging process and, in doing so, reassure the public about aging. Television also talks about the exclusion of the elderly in our society. But, at the same time, it must charm these potential consumers. Old people watching several hours of television daily know that they are excluded from society, except as consumers.

This article offers reflection on the validity of relational data such as used in social network analysis. Ongoing research on the transformation of the support network of caregivers of persons with an Alzheimer-type disease provides the data to fuel the debate on the validity of participant report. More specifically, we sought to understand the factors that might influence the description of the support network by persons involved in caregiving. The issue warrants special attention, given that social relations – in their form and their content – constitute the raw material of network analysis. We propose that how persons describe their social network corresponds to a subjective process that rests, in part, on their representation of their cultural and social universe.