Ageing, Lifestyles and Economic Crisis. The New People of the Mediterranean

This work, the fruit of a wide-ranging international research programme, analyses the ongoing changes in lifestyles and life cycles in various societies in the Mediterranean basin. Drawing on empirical research in several disciplines (sociology, demography, geography, economics), exploiting the most recent data available and setting the present in historical perspective, the originality of this book is that it studies Mediterranean societies in relation to three major challenges which they now confront, whose outcome is largely uncertain – demographic ageing and its implications for mutual help across generations within families; the growing precarity of adult occupational and familial trajectories, impacted by economic crises and their consequences for the evolution of social gender roles; and the role of the public policies of the nation states in the social reproduction of these gender inequalities. These three major dimensions – demographic, sociological and political – form the keystone of this work for understanding the ongoing lifestyles changes in Mediterranean societies.