Issues of ageing, social class and poverty

This chapter examines some ethical and political challenges generated by the increasingly complex needs of an ageing society upon social work. It focuses on the UK as a case study and critically evaluates related age-graded policies and practices relating to social work and care. The chapter discusses the ongoing tensions between social diversity within an ageing society and the shrinking of formal care provision. It highlights the paradoxical extension of often instrumental professional ethical codes and related frameworks, including bioethical paradigms ideologically transported direct from medicine. The many ethical implications of important demographic, cultural and lifestyle changes affecting diverse groups of older people may fail to be adequately accommodated by narrowly focused ‘methods and skills-fetish’ centred professional training. Paradigms within codified ethics, moral theory and social work typically often lack materialist and macro-structural discursive traits, able to adequately accommodate poverty, material or power-based inequality and social class.