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I have observed, as a matter of fact, that it is only people who exceed the age of ninety who attain euthanasia—who die, that is to say, of no disease, apoplexy or convulsion, and pass away without agony of any sort; nay, who sometimes even show no pallor, but expire generally in sitting attitude, and often after a meal—or, I may say, simply cease to live rather than die. To come to one's end before the age of ninety, means to die of disease, in other words, prematurely.—Zygmunt Bauman (1992, p. 19, fn 6)

This paper elaborates upon the emergent social psychology of social endings and explicates how culminating behaviors associated with role conclusions in general and with retirement in particular can contribute to both social and personal order. Now that role careers are typically concluded by design rather than by death, invidious comparisons are being drawn and ending strategies rank‐ordered in terms of their desirability. It is hypothesized that some retirements are recognized as being better than others and that our social system is coming to recognize and celebrate those who excel in their role performances until the very end. As illustration, we consider American professional team sports as the cultural totem dramatizing modern work relations and examine how the quality of athlete's career conclusions affect how they are remembered.

One widely recognized indicator of minority assimilation into the majority society is intermarriage between minority & majority groups, but there are costs for minority members entering into exogamous unions with a spouse from a majority culture. Age differences are used as a measure of spouse power inequalities to test the hypothesis that Mexican Americans entering into exogamous marriages yield the age advantages they would have had in endogamous unions. Data drawn from marriage records of Bexar & Hidalgo Counties, Tex, & Bernalillo County, NM, between 1964 & 1973, confirm this hypothesis for Fs but not for Ms. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 11 References. Modified HA

This paper examines the emergence, reification, and dissemination of the "midlife crisis" from a sociology of knowledge perspective. Two decades of articles on the subject from both professional and mass media sources (n = 233) are content analyzed. Upon elaborating the various biological, psychological, and social psychological theories of this biographical phenomenon, we address such questions as how different disciplines portray the event, what patterns of interdisciplinary citations there are, and how these professional depictions lead into the mass media. The results suggest longitudinal declines in the frequency of reductionist explanations from the biological and psychiatric paradigms and increasing attention given to the interplay between social dynamics and personality structures. From this, a new sociocultural theory is posited, one portraying this subjective experience deriving not simply from age, but from external social temporalities. Specifically, we consider the particular cohort that most midlife research is based upon as well as the particular historical period when it reached middle age.