Jason L. Powell is divisional head of social sciences at University of Central Lancashire.
John Martyn Chamberlain is a lecturer in criminology and social policy at Loughborough University.

Social Welfare, Aging and Social Theory explores how we can understand the changing relationship between social welfare and human aging. The book begins by reviewing how historical changes in society impacted on shaping emergence of scientific approaches to understand and problematize and bio-medicalize aging as akin to an illness and disease. The discussion moves to trace how particular social science theories were developed to reinforce negative perceptions of aging. The book also develops its own reflexive approach with in-depth examples of social welfare in national, international and global contexts in how aging is theorized in the postmodern world were alternative possibilities can be encountered.

Chapter 1: The Relationship of Social Theory and Aging: A Critical Exegesis
Part I. Modern Constructions of Aging
Chapter 2: From Galen to the Clinic: the Birth of Biomedicine
Chapter 3: Occidental Modernity, the Biomedical Gaze, and Aging
Chapter 4: Theorizing Aging: Critical Explorations of Modernist Sociological Approaches
Part II. Postmodern Deconstructions of Aging
Chapter 5: Postmodernism, Culture, and the Aging Body
Chapter 6: The "Foucault Effect" and Aging: Relations of Power, Surveillance and Governmentality
Chapter 7: Aging in the "Risk Society"
Chapter 8: Narrative and Aging
Chapter 9: Reconstructions of Aging: The Case of Global Aging
Chapter 10: Conclusion: Reconstructions of Aging