Introduction

Discussions about the role of social class in the lives of older people have, it might be argued, occupied a tenuous position in social research into ageing. This might seem a surprising statement given the concerns of many researchers with issues focused around financial resources, inequality and social exclusion (Scharf and Keating, 2012). Despite the importance of such themes, the tendency has been to examine these only loosely through the lens of social class, with researchers often preferring to emphasise individual characteristics or life histories, other major social statuses (eg gender and ethnicity), or general features associated with the social organisation of age. In consequence, social class has been somewhat marginal to the range of concepts deployed to understand the lives of older people (see Formosa, 2009, for a discussion of the relevance of class analysis to ageing). This chapter develops a number of arguments as to why this might be the case. In addition, it considers whether it tells us anything of wider significance about the way social gerontology has developed. Would a fuller appreciation of social class add anything to our understanding of later life?

Social class and social gerontology

Taking class out of analysis

A starting point – at least in the case of the UK – concerns the position of class analysis within the social sciences and sociology in particular. Debates about social class were of considerable significance in the early history of sociology, drawing upon pioneering surveys undertaken by Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree in the 19th and early 20th centuries, together with the economic and political theories of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Savage (2000: 5) argues that adoption of the techniques associated with social class allowed the relatively new discipline of sociology access to a ‘recognizable tradition of social scientific enquiry’. This focus served to provide legitimacy to sociological research as well as access to a wider political debate about the social consequences of class-based inequalities, discussions that were especially important in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (Sandbrook, 2005). The role of social class was an important theme running through work in the field of social policy and was reflected in research on ageing populations during the 1950s. Class inequalities in occupational benefits underpinned the warning from Titmuss (1958) about the likely emergence of ‘two nations in old age’.