De-standardising ageing? Shifting regimes of age measurement

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. De-standardising ageing? Shifting regimes of age measurementAbstract: Departing from the proposition that in the sociological debate about whether there has been a shift towards a de-standardised life-course in advanced economies, little attention has been devoted to the infrastructural arrangements that would support such a transition, this paper explores the changing role of standards in the governance of ageing societies. In it, I outline a sociological theory of age standard substitution which suggests that contradictory rationalities used in the implementation of chronological age fuelled the emergence of a critique of CA within the diverse strands of gerontological knowledge during the 20th century. The paper analyses how these critiques were linked to a proliferation of substitute, 'personalised' age standards that aimed to conjoin individuals' unique capacities or needs to roles or services. The paper suggests that this configuration of age standards' production, characterised by uncertainty and an opening of moral and epistemic possibilities, has been shrouded by another, more recent formation where institutional responses to decentred processes of standardisation moved research and political investment towards an emphasis on biological age measurement.

Anti-aging technoscience & the biologization of cumulative inequality: Affinities in the biopolitics of successful aging

“…While functional age does engage with physiology under the guise of phenotypes (particularly behavioral), it pursues a broader approach to age in terms of psychological and social considerations. Biological age is principally concerned with biomarkers that denote senescence rather than questions of functionality per se and is thus indebted to Comfort's aforementioned work ( Moreira, 2016 ). The turn to biology over chronology was evident in the British Society of Gerontology's recent statement on Covid-19, which “urge[d] the Government to reject the formulation and implementation of policy based on the simple application of chronological age” because population-level associations between chronological age and mortality “[would] not be the case for all individuals, amongst whom biological age and immune responses vary greatly” ( BSG, 2020 ).…”

Unsettling Standards: The Biological Age Controversy

“…Curiously, less attention has been devoted to understanding the role of age measurement in this process (but see Settersten and Mayer ; Katz and Marshall ; Bytheway ). Historical analysis of the scientific fields engaged in age measurement and standardization suggests that, during the 20th century, epistemic and normative uncertainties about the validity of CA as a universal metric combined with wider shifts in standardization processes in late modernity (Busch ), whereby measures and scales promise individualization and/or “personalization” of technologies or services (Moreira ). In the remainder of this section, I explore how these two became interlinked.…”

Prudence, pleasure, and cognitive ageing: Configurations of the uses and users of brain training games within UK media, 2005–2015

“… Moreira (2015) has demonstrated the key place of functional age within biomedicine, and has further noted a similar trend in popular discourses (e.g. in internet tests promising people the answer to the question: ‘what is your real age?’) ( Moreira, 2016 ). This notion underscores conceptions of age and ageing as things people can (be expected to) more or less influence to maintain health and vigour ( Jones and Higgs, 2010 , Mykytyn, 2006 ).…”