The distinctiveness of human aging II: social processes and the regulation of aging.

This paper builds upon the principles and dimensions presented in the paper, "The distinctiveness of human aging I", which is intended to provide a foundation for apprehending and understanding variation in individual and population patterns of human aging. Given the clearly established role of contextual factors and context-related dynamics as key explanatory factors to account for such variation, this paper sets forth key dimensions of the socioenvironmental regulation of processes of human aging and their interactions across micro, meso and macro levels of social organization. We focus on one specific domain of age-related challenges and one (albeit broad) institutional domain: rapid population aging and on the institutional level, the attendant expansion of geriatric diagnoses and elder care institutions, focusing especially on nursing homes. Through this discussion, we demonstrate that human aging entails a distinctly flexible and in key ways modifiable set of processes. It is thus continually reconstituted for individuals and for social groups and populations as existing social arrangements are continuously reproduced, regardless of the value (positive or negative) of such arrangements for human aging.