ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, the emergence and growth of political interest groups based on race, gender, sexuality, biological age, and disability, have posed a considerable challenge to the deeply embedded, stereotypical assumptions of ‘normality’ that have shaped the development of UK social policy. The hegemonic construct of the nuclear family, headed by an able-bodied, white, adult male has traditionally informed policy decisions as to which groups were identified as ‘welfare’ subjects (Hughes 1998). Older people and disabled people were socially constructed as ‘dependent’, and categorised on the basis of their lack of conformity with this universal representation. As recognition of the pluralist make-up of society increases, so the legitimacy of this stereotype is increasingly questioned as a means of defining needs, especially older and disabled people’s needs, as ‘special’ or ‘different’.
