ABSTRACT
Significant demographic, political and social changes continue to carry important ramifications for older people and social work. For example, an increasing proportion of older people within the United Kingdom (UK) and many other high-income nation-states, suggest that demand for greater social work support remains inevitable. Despite this, such principal welfare provisions for ever more diverse groups of older people continues to shrink. Until fairly recently, the welfare state provided many older people with a socially legitimate source of stability for later-life concerns and, in part at least, forms of identity management (Phillipson, 1998). Such stability, however variable, now continues to remain under significant strain: not least due to political pressures within seemingly ‘post-welfare’ states to interpret care through a crude economic lens. Indeed, such largely neoliberal-inspired outcomes generate uncertainty, distrust and deep insecurity for many citizens (Carey, 2015).
