摘要 : In his manuscript, "Social Theory, Aging, and Health and Welfare Professionals: A Foucauldian 'Toolkit'," Powell (2009) draws on Foucault to illuminate antagonistic relationships between professionals and service users in local-le... 展开 In his manuscript, "Social Theory, Aging, and Health and Welfare Professionals: A Foucauldian 'Toolkit'," Powell (2009) draws on Foucault to illuminate antagonistic relationships between professionals and service users in local-level human services. Powell contends, "The processes by which older people are made subjects are related to powerful 'managerial' actors in health and social care." Foucault does assist us in recognizing local relationships of power and agents of state govemmentality as well as identifying historically the birth and growth of gerontology as a field of science. Yet gerontological theory also must attend to power at the macro level, in this case the market ethos behind the monitoring, assessment, and surveillance in the form of deregulation to the local level. Moreover, older individuals not only are subjects within the system but also are subjects of power and agents of resistance. In the next few paragraphs, I detail these observations on Powell's analysis.Powell (2009) implicitly recognizes the deregulation of human services to the local level in the form of state oversight of nonprofit and for-profit entities whose bottom line is essential to survival and success. In this market ethos, human services are perceived by business and government as an economic product rather than a social good (Estes & Associates, 2001; Iglehart, 1982). The shift in recognition of social goods as a commodity, in contrast to a social right or entitlement, absolves the state of responsibility for access, quality, and costs and places the onus of responsibility on the consumer through the choices they make. The processes of surveillance, along with the notion of "care management" and "consumer," elucidate the growth of the capitalistic model of privatization and commodification that has ensued since the Reagan years in the United States and Thatcher years in the United Kingdom. 收起