&quote;Management of Aging&quote; and the Dark Side of Modernity

Health, care and welfare have emerged as key vehicles used to legitimize and position the identities that older people adopt in contemporary modernity. Both contain continually changing technologies that function to mediate relations between older people and the state. Medico-technical, victimization policies and care management discourses, have been presented as adding choice and reducing limitations associated with adult aging. However, they also represent an increase in professional control that can be exerted on lifestyles in older age and thus, the wider social meanings associated with that part of the life-course. This book presents a theoretical analysis based on a critical reading of the work of Michel Foucault. It identifies the inter-relationship between managers and older people in terms of power, surveillance and normalization. The book highlights how and why older people are the subjects of legitimizing professional gazes through the dark side of modernity: being managed, being victimized and asking the existential questions of death.

Health, care and welfare have emerged as key vehicles used to legitimize and position the identities that older people adopt in contemporary modernity. Both contain continually changing technologies that function to mediate relations between older people and the state. Medico-technical, victimization policies and care management discourses, have been presented as adding choice and reducing limitations associated with adult aging. However, they also represent an increase in professional control that can be exerted on lifestyles in older age and thus, the wider social meanings associated with that part of the life-course. This book presents a theoretical analysis based on a critical reading of the work of Michel Foucault. It identifies the inter-relationship between managers and older people in terms of power, surveillance and normalization. The book highlights how and why older people are the subjects of legitimizing professional gazes through the dark side of modernity: being managed, being victimized and asking the existential questions of death.