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The Structured Dependency of the Elderly: A Creation of Social Policy in the Twentieth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Peter Townsend
Peter Townsend
Affiliation:
Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex.
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Abstract

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If we are to develop better methods of integrating elderly people into society then above all we need a better sociology of the ageing and the aged. In this paper I wish to put forward the thesis that the dependency of the elderly in the twentieth century is being manufactured socially and that its severity is unnecessary. The process can therefore be revised or at least modified. Certain major influences, which will be discussed below, are steadily deepening, or widening that dependency. There is the imposition, and acceptance, of earlier retirement; the legitimation of low income; the denial of rights to self-determination in institutions; and the construction of community services for recipients assumed to be predominantly passive.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 5 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

References

NOTES

1 It is not easy to trace the origins of such a theme and explain why I now choose to attach such importance to it. The choice arises from work I have done with colleagues and alone and from the work of others. The dependency created by institutions is documented in my book The Last Refuge, London, Routledge, 1962Google Scholar; and the dependencies of retirement and poverty in The Family Life of Old People, London, Routledge, 1957 (summarily)Google Scholar, in later publications and, most recently in Poverty in the United Kingdom, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1979Google Scholar. With Ethel Shanas, Dorothy Wedderburn and others I participated in a wide-ranging cross-national study of the elderly in Denmark, Britain and the United States, the chief conclusion of which was to call attention to the ‘dual’ relationship of the elderly to industrial society. Many of their problems, we stated, ‘arise as the consequence of formal actions on the part of mass society that confirm their separate retired status’ … They comprise ‘a special category in society…a potential or embryonic class accommodated uneasily in the present class structure’. There was a ‘balance between the integrative impulses of informal primary relationships and the segregative relationships of formal industrial society’… (Shanas, et al. , Old People in Three Industrial Societies, London, Routledge, 1968, pp. 425–6Google Scholar). I also tried to bring some strands together within the concept of the ‘structured dependency’ of the elderly in recent papers (‘The Changing Status of the Elderly in Industrial Society’, Bologna, 1977Google Scholar; ‘The Care of the Elderly in Britain and Japan’, 1978Google Scholar; ‘Structured Dependency in Old Age’, unpublished paper to Research Officers of Social Services Departments, 03 1978Google Scholar). I gained much from the work in the 1960s of Yonina Talmon and C. C. Harris in relation to the development of this theme and latterly from the work of Anne-Marie Guillemard (for example, La Retraite, Une Mort Sociale and La Viellesse et l'Etat) and Alan Walker (particularly his paper on the creation of dependency in old age, 1980). I am glad to acknowledge with gratitude the help of Alan Walker and Malcolm Johnson in revising this paper (first presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Gerontology, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 18 October 1980).

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