For undergraduate courses in sociology and psychology which examine ageing and adulthood. This book focuses on the dramatic changes to the nature of post-retirement life experienced by people at the end of the twentieth century. It examines age and ageing in terms of the key preoccupations of contemporary sociology - citizenship, the body and the self. The book provides a platform for a new social gerontology that sees ageing as central to our understanding of social change. It examines social, cultural and political changes in Europe and North America to address the need for a text that moves the study of ageing from social policy towards the mainstream of social science.

1. Introduction
2. From Political Economy to the culture of personal identity
3. Retirement, identity and consumer society
4. Identity, self-care and staying young
5. The old person as citizen
6. Senior citizenship and contemporary social policy
7. Ageing and its embodiment
8. Bio-ageing and the reproduction of the social
9. Ageing, Alzheimer's and the uncivilised body
10 The inevitablity of the cultural turn in ageing studies