4: Agency and autonomy

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The framing of old age has long been regarded as being relatively unproblematic, given that old age and decline appear inextricably linked. This connection helps to explain why concerns of the latter part of the lifecourse are regarded as the province of health and social policy. Old age was a period marked out by ‘agedness’, something constituted by both physical need and social dependency (Pickard, 2013). Even the most noticeable marker of old age, the state retirement pension, was a product of the widespread recognition that older workers (in the first instance men) needed a substitute income to compensate them for their inability to work, given the physical limitations accompanying ageing (Scheubel, 2013). Similarly, the health problems of the older population were assumed to be intractable chronic conditions that led to institutionalisation of one kind or another (Trattner, 2007; Levene, 2009). The modern welfare state categorically saw older people as a residualised group incapacitated by their social dependency and individual passivity (Carey, 2016).

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