Hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people: The Finnish case and wider social implications

Abstract

This article brings together societal debates on digitalisation and analysis of governmental policy on older people, through the theoretical frame of hegemonic digitalisation, and the empirical case of Finnish policy. With changing demographics in many countries, old age has gained high-profile focus in governmental policy in recent years, which has in turn become increasingly constructed in relation to digitalisation, often via an interventionist logic that positions new technologies as solutions to problems of ageing. In this analysis, material-discursive power relations are highlighted, with policy understood as material-discursive in its formation, form and effects. Specifically, the article critically examines: the conceptualisation of hegemonic digitalisation, often assumed, even across political differences, as an efficient solution to declining resources within neoliberal governance, with reference to policy on/and older people; how digitalisation and older people are constructed in governmental policy documents in Finland; and the applicability of hegemonic digitalisation to Finnish policy on older people. The article concludes with discussion of the implications that follow for everyday life, policy, social analysis and social theory. Regarding theoretical implications, with hegemonic digitalisation, the hegemony of digitalisation is emphasised, as in national policy contexts, rather than whole-society or global hegemony seen as digital. Additionally, tensions persist between foregrounding hegemonic digitalisation, and the co-constitution of older people and digitalisation policy. Specificities of ageing and older age impinge on and present challenges for both analysis of digitalisation and social theory. Theorising materiality-discursivity is a fertile perspective for studies on age, policy and digitalisation, including how future-orientation figures in policy and research.

Introduction

But I am pretty tired of the whole digitalisation. For all of us, who are old, it is so unfair, because there are so many of us who do not really manage. ¹

With changing demographics in many countries, old age has become a high-profile focus in governmental policy in recent years. Policy debates on older people often centre on health, well-being and care, even while ageing and older age concern many other, perhaps all, policy areas, including housing, economy and mobility. Meanwhile, digitalisation is now an established part of welfare provision and everyday life in many societies, with increasing digitalised access to services, especially health, care and related services for older people often replacing in-person services. Governmental policy on older age has widely become constructed via digitalisation, mobilising efficiency in managing the state and governing populations, offering a neoliberal ‘solution’ to austerity, and signifying shifts from previous social welfare models. In some countries, this conjunction has become entrenched – arguably hegemonic – spanning other political differences.

In this article, we bring together debates on hegemony and digitalisation, and analysis of neoliberal governmental policy on older people and digitalisation, via the Finnish case and the conceptual frame of hegemonic digitalisation. We show how technological embeddedness and taken-for-grantedness, as with hegemonic digitalisation – the hegemonic deployment of digitalisation as a policy solution – entrench dominant policy conceptualisations of older adults. This hegemonic process entails simultaneously treating older adults as a homogeneous group and attributing to them responsibility for resolving increasing demands for care under current demographic conditions and with retrenchment in welfare state support structures. Accordingly, the article examines key implications for policy, professional practice, and indeed everyday life of older adults, as hegemonic digitalisation is often assumed, even across political differences, to be an efficient solution to declining resources within neoliberal governance. It also addresses social theoretical questions of wider interest beyond the particular policy focus on older age and the national context of Finland.

Terms such as digitisation and digitalisation are sometimes used loosely and interchangeably. However, digitisation is best limited to conversion of information into digital format, organised into discrete units of data (bits) that can be separately addressed, as in multiple-bit groups (bytes), then processed through, for example, optical character recognition, rather than the wider social/societal processes arising. In this article, we are concerned not so much with techno-digital infrastructures themselves as with digitalisation as social, economic and political processes in which digital socio-technologies are – often increasingly – used and valued. Digitalisation operates across social scales, from global to national and societal to everyday interactions. Here, we focus on digitalisation and its deployment in national governmental policy discourse, as a material-discursive policy object, with consequent implications for older people, for example, in everyday service access.

Policy on digitalisation and older people can be seen as part of the longer history of policy on older people and technology (Peine & Neven, 2019). Age technology or AgeTech or gerontechnology refer to technologies aimed at instrumentally assisting and improving the policy object of older people (Liu et al., 2022). Digitalised ways forward have been positively proposed in terms of, for example, active ageing (De Angeli et al., 2020), age-appropriate design (Lee, 2022) and positive ageing relative to place (Kim et al., 2017). However, as Peine and Neven (2019, p. 15) stress, there are problems in constructing ‘an interventionist logic that positions new technologies as interventions or solutions to the problems of aging’. Meanwhile, digitalisation can impact on, and be used or not, by older people and a growing critical literature examines how digitalisation figures in multiple ways in their lives (Hirvonen et al., 2022). In policy that relates to older people, digitalisation can have many uses, abuses (Trittin-Ulbrich et al., 2021) and unintended consequences, for example, in service access, and in challenges for human and digital rights.

There are also wider societal questions that are germane for our concerns around how usage of digital technologies can transform social, economic and political processes. In particular, in analysing digitalisation, policy and older people, we highlight material-discursive power relations; policy on digitalisation and older people is material-discursive in its formation, form and effects. ² In everyday life, virtual/disembodied, yet material, digital dealings are routine, often appearing simple, yet socio-technologically, materially and discursively complex in their production and impacts. We also consider the extent to which digitalisation, ageing and older people are materially-discursively (co-)constituted, for example, with older people sometimes constructed as homogeneous or even as an absent social category. Inspired by Latour’s (1993) critique of the (over-)separation of technology (things) and society (people), Peine and Neven go much further regarding (bodily) co-constitution in arguing that ‘aging is already co-constituted by gerontechnology design, the socio-material practices it enacts, and the policy discourse around them’ (2019, p. 15). As with technology more generally, digital technology develops through human action and usage; likewise, older people are constructed and live in relation to technology, including digitalisation.

In this article, we specifically analyse recent governmental policy on older people and digitalisation, in the Finnish case. As a well-resourced, high-income society, with relatively small income and gender gaps, a high level of internet coverage and digital development, and long-established national policy on digitalisation, promoted by state and business, Finland is an especially interesting case. As many as 93% of the population aged 16–89 report having used the internet in the past three-month period surveyed, and 88% having a smartphone for their own use (Statistics Finland, 2021a). For cohorts up to 64-years-old, there is close to 100% use, but use declines thereafter. Furthermore, 85% of 65- to 74-year-olds and 57% of the 75- to 89-year-olds had used the internet in the previous three-month period; corresponding figures for daily use were 78% and 42% (Statistics Finland, 2021b).

Similarly to other Nordic nations, Finland developed a relatively positive relation of citizenry and state, and relatively fluid boundaries between state, private sector, civil society and family. State and civil society merge more closely than in many countries: ‘[p]eople are used to organising but their idea is to act on behalf of their issues through the state, to pressure “the state to do something”’ (Rantalaiho, 1997, p. 23). The country is often seen as an exemplary ‘Nordic welfare state’; yet, as we shall see, this significantly oversimplifies the situation. Indeed, the developing relations of welfare, digitalisation and neoliberalism are contradictory. On one hand, the digital economy is not easily controlled by the neoliberal state (Cayla, 2022); on the other, digitalisation can strengthen the power and span of the neoliberal state and its management, commodifying, individualising and governing digital citizens (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018), including older citizens. Within this complex and changing context, our work has been driven by the following research question:

• How are older people, and the relations of digitalisation and older people, constructed in governmental policy documents in Finland?

In addressing this question, we came to realise the extent to which digitalisation has become hegemonic in such policies in Finland. Seeking to make conceptual and theoretical sense of this in turn led us to explore the broader relations of hegemony and digitalisation. Thus, we examine the hegemony of the digital and digitalisation or hegemonic digitalisation, for short, as a material-discursive – if provisional, open-ended – concept to consider the implications of digitalisation in policy in relation to older people.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. The next section reviews key issues concerning older people, digitalisation, policy and hegemony. This is followed by the methods employed. Thereafter, two avenues of investigation are used on Finnish governmental policy documents: general policy documents on digitalisation, with their implications for older people; and policy documents focused on older people and their implications for digitalisation. The concluding discussion reviews wider implications of hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people, and beyond.

Hegemonic digitalisation: Digitalisation, policy and older people

To develop our theoretical and conceptual framing for examining digitalisation, policy and older people, as summated in the concept of hegemonic digitalisation, we need to take a step back and consider the nature of hegemony. We highlight three key aspects of hegemony – taken-for-grantedness, persuasion and leadership; formation of social groups; the fundamental outlook of society – along with their implications for older people, as a basis for conceptual clarification.

First, according to formulations of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1971) and in rejecting economic determinism, hegemony addressed how a dominant class controls society, contingently, in part by pressing the taken-for-grantedness of the social order. Building on this, Donaldson (1993, p. 645) described hegemony as about how:

. . . the ruling class establishes and maintains its domination. The ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality is an essential part of the process. Hegemony involves persuasion of the greater part of the population, particularly through the media, and the organization of social institutions in ways that appear ‘natural’, ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’.

As theorised by Gramsci, the governing class achieves hegemony, and thus becomes hegemonic, through leadership and persuasion. This is often interpreted with negative connotations, although, theoretically at least, hegemony can also be positive, even liberatory. Hegemony is not achieved by direct imposition upon subordinate or subaltern classes, but by acquiring their active consent (though backed by force, especially of the state) or consent as forced compliance. Gramsci pointed to the webs of collective political actors in the construction of hegemony – state, law, capitalists, intellectuals and so on: ‘[t]his leadership is not exercised solely or even primarily from the seat of government, but also . . . within the sphere of civil society where consensus is generated’ (Buttigieg, 2005, p. 38). Similarly, Butler (2000, pp. 13–14) has discussed how hegemony ‘emphasizes the ways in which power operates to form our everyday understanding of social relations, and to orchestrate the ways in which we consent to (and reproduce) those tacit and covert relations of power’. As we will see, such powers can often involve strategic ambiguities.

Digitalisation is promoted by techno-optimism or techno-enthusiasm, privileging technological rationalistic logics, ‘digital technology solution’ discourse (Nilsson et al., 2024) and datafication (Dalmer et al., 2022). As well as dealing with user interfaces, aspects of digitalisation affecting older people include digital infrastructures and AI systems often not immediately apparent on an everyday basis. Via mobile technologies, such as smartphones, sociality is increasingly constructed via the internet, including for older people and those around them. Hegemonic digitalisation – the tendency to take digitalisation and its advancement for granted – is increasingly relevant in policy, not only in the non-questionability of digitalisation, but also its promotion as providing ‘new opportunities’ for older people and forced compliance to use it, as in service access.

Second, hegemony is ‘about the winning and holding of power and the formation (and destruction) of social groups in that process’ (Donaldson, 1993, p. 645; our emphasis). For current purposes, these social groups include those who create/control digital infrastructures and policies, ‘digital literates’ using and accessing digital services, those seeking but unsuccessful in accessing such services, those with varying degrees of ‘digital literacy’, and those unable to access such services thereby excluded. Formations of and distinctions between social groups of older people derived in relation to digitalisation, by, say, functional capability, are complicated by living conditions, family situation and intersectional power relations. Moreover, digital users, including older users, are increasingly becoming produsers or prosumers, rather than mere consumers of e-content. Notions of agency may, hegemonically, both seem to increase in effect, yet be more circumscribed. Socio-technologies offer older people new ways of being and communicating, and finding information, including sensitive information on health issues, through social media and platforms.

A third key aspect of hegemony concerns how ‘the intellectual, moral and philosophical leadership provided by the class or alliance of class fractions which is ruling successfully achieves its objective of providing the fundamental outlook of the whole society’ (Bocock, 1986, p. 63; our emphasis). However, the historicist idea of society having a ‘fundamental outlook’ is nowadays much more problematic, not least as digitalisation is one powerful means of transcending national boundaries. Increasingly, the national and the transnational intersect in the structures and processes of digitalisation. A small number of transnational capitalist companies dominate global processes of digitalisation, and can be a means for advancing US, sometimes Chinese, digital hegemony regarding global economic dominance. These companies owe much of their success to their alliance with their respective states and supportive governmental strategies. National governmental strategies frequently gear to economic competitiveness within this transnational hegemonic order, with hegemony operating through softly coercive power of digitalisation (Chatzistavrou, 2024). Such macro-issues affect older people, perhaps most clearly in national policy on health and medical big data, where people’s biopolitical aspects become information, even after death, with challenges for control of data and its processing (cf. Zuboff, 2019). These are both collective population issues and matters for individuals.

The ostensible goal of digitalisation is often presented, in government policy and business innovation, as improving efficiency, accessibility and effectiveness (Hoppania et al., 2024). Many commentators see digital technologies as benefiting older adults, both collectively and individually (Makanjuola-Akinola, 2021; Marston & Musselwhite, 2021; cf. Nierling & Domínguez-Rué, 2016). As Liu et al. (2022, p. 296) put it: ‘More than ever, everyday digital technologies adopted by the mainstream population also benefit older adults.’ To what extent this is so is an open question (Alvsåker & Ågotnes, 2022). Various international reports note the positive benefits of digitalisation for older people, with the requirement for maintaining and enhancing digital skills; and some also consider older people’s potential marginalisation and the need for their inclusion in digitalisation processes. ³

Having discussed key features of hegemony in relation to digitalisation and older people, we now review possible conceptualisations of how digitalisation and hegemony can be intertwined. As a strong claim for the impact of the digital in/on hegemony, the concept of digital hegemony could stand for how broad-based societal hegemony, at a general national, even transnational, level, can be enacted digitally or become digital(ised). An example here would be understanding ‘the current hegemony of digital as vector for globalization’ (Hassan, 2020, p. 122). A more particular interpretation of digital hegemony focuses on US efforts to influence cyberspace policy internationally or US–China struggles to control the internet. Digital hegemony there refers to who/what is a hegemon regarding control of the digital sphere(s) itself (Jun, 2022; Keyser, 2020). Other usages of hegemony in analysing digitalisation include those developed in terms of: digital divides, separation of and inequalities between the elite and the many (Bagchi, 2019), the internet (Neudert, 2016) and platform economy (Khattak, 2022). Digital hegemony has also been framed more particularly as: ‘the societal prioritising, or systematically presented popularity, of digital communication choices, particularly through digital data structures as the culturally dominant mode of communication’ (Bluma, 2016, p. 24; cf. Poster, 1990). This is close to our usage of hegemonic digitalisation. However, our use of the term is more limited, and different in scale, as it is not so much about the societal prioritisation of digital communication but rather how digitalisation has become deployed hegemonically in policy as a policy solution with material-discursive effects. In this context, it is digitalisation that has become hegemonic, that is, the hegemony of the digital and digitalisation in policy, rather than a whole-society or global hegemony becoming digital(ised) or enacted digitally.

Methods

Before turning back to the research question, we describe the methods used in analysing the policy material. In conducting detailed analysis of Finnish policy documents (Sjögren et al., 2023), an initial analysis of seven major documents on later life, living alone, care and digitalisation was conducted. ⁴ These comprised: national policies; regulations; ministerial guidelines; laws directed at the older population; and reports on older people, care and digitalisation. Our analysis followed the ‘What’s the Problem Represented’ (WPR) approach and analytical questions developed by Carol Bacchi (1999, 2009), focusing on references to ‘digital/isation’, ‘online’, ‘automation’, ‘technology’ and similar (including translations), along with relevant absences/silences, to critically examine the effects that policy documents bring for discourse, subject positions and material lives. The analytical questions are: What is the problem the policy targets? What presuppositions or assumptions underpin the representations of the problem(s)? How has this representation of the problem come about? What is not mentioned? What are silences? Are there contradictions? What effects are produced by this representation of the problem? How can these representations be challenged?

The second stage entailed a schematic analysis of a further 24 policy documents, reports and legislation, published by the government and ministries during 2009–2024, which, together with three from the first stage (n = 27 in total), addressed older people.

Finally, from this data bank, the most relevant texts giving information on the research questions on policy on digitalisation and older people were selected, forming a pool of key documents (n = 11) for this article. Five of these were framed by general national policy on digitalisation, but with limited information on older people; six focused on older people, with some information on digitalisation.

More theoretically, and mirroring moves beyond the human–non-human divide, ⁵ we build on Bacchi’s approach in seeing policy, digitalisation and policy on digitalisation and older age as material-discursive in formation, form and effects, in addition to seeing them in terms of material-discursive practices (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014). Although both policy and digitalisation work through the discursive, representational and virtual, they have embodied material effects. In this, we are influenced by transversal methodological approaches, recognising the ethico-onto-epistemological nature of reality. ⁶ Material-discursive theorising is highly relevant in studying policy and digitalisation, understood as material-discursive, emergent processes, well beyond ‘initial’ texts.

We now return to the main research question: How are older people, and the relations of digitalisation and older people, constructed in governmental policy documents in Finland? Through this empirical case, we can interrogate the concept of hegemonic digitalisation.

Document analysis

The policy landscape

Before spelling out the document analysis, some words on how digitalisation is not new in the Finnish policy landscape are in order. The first national strategy document on digitalisation and information society was published in 1995 (Suomi tietoyhteiskunnaksi, 1995), followed by reformulated strategies in 1998 and 2006 (Statistics Finland, 2006). In the wake of the early 1990s recession in Finland, with GDP sinking by about 15%, digitalisation was represented as a partial solution to austerity, with moves towards economic efficiency and neoliberal governance to an extent cutting across party policy. Once initiated, with the necessary infrastructure, digitalisation in policy seems difficult to retract, with multiple path-dependent social impacts. The tendency to hegemonic digitalisation sits alongside public sector retrenchments, marketisation and individualisation of care in the context of rapid demographic shifts (cf. Hoppania, 2019). Meanwhile, citizens are expected to cope with the practical demands of digitalisation. Complicating the earlier welfare model, a hybrid neoliberal policy landscape in which digitalisation is a central pillar has made it increasingly difficult to disentangle the spread of digitalisation in public welfare from neoliberal policy.

Policy on older people is framed by national laws ⁷ and guidelines (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health [STM], 2020a [see Appendix]) on service provision. These include access to free of charge, low-cost or subsidised healthcare, and home services, informal care support, services supporting mobility and institutional care (STM, 2021). Recent legislation on tendering has affected service producers, combining public, private and family provision. Further recent welfare reforms (SOTE; Social and Healthcare Services) have impacted how care is organised and provided. After regional elections, political management and steering of the new (officially, ‘well-being services’) counties were established, with knock-on effects on health and social care from municipal, private and third sectors. While responsibility for many services for older people lies with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, other ministries are involved in policy development in relation to older people, including Environment, Economy, Justice (responsible for voluntary work) and Finance (responsible for digitalisation).

General national policy documents on digitalisation: From digitalisation to older people

In reviewing general national strategy documents on digitalisation, we, first, work from more general documents on digitalisation to then focus on older people. As already stressed, throughout this analysis we see policy and policy documents as material-discursive in their formation, form and effects. Finnish national strategy on digitalisation, including infrastructure, is managed and led by the Ministry of Finance (MoF), with which most citizens would have little or no direct contact. National Principles of digitalisation applying to all public services were set out in 2017 (MoF, 2017) (A1), ⁸ including that ‘we will’:

. . . provide services based on customers’ needs . . . cut unnecessary red tape . . . build easy-to-use and secure services . . . produce benefits for our customers quickly . . . ask for new information only once . . . make full use of the existing public and private online services . . . provide open data, open access to information and open interfaces for businesses and citizens.

The first issue to mention is that digitalisation is often deployed in these policy documents as a unitary phenomenon and process. This feeds into the binary of, on the one hand, the creators/controllers of digitalisation, and, on the other, the users and customers of digitalisation. A second notable feature is that, despite the repetition of the prioritisation of ‘customers’ and customer orientation, of customers ‘to be served’, as in the National Principles noted above and since, older people are simply and noticeably absent. Rather, when older people are mentioned in relation to digitalisation, digitalisation is generally presented positively as an opportunity, such as for participatory healthcare. There is little explicit attention to strategies to include, and ensure access for, older people, and other customers. Moreover, the ‘serving’ of customers is predominantly self-service, building on the assumption that most people can and want to be ‘digital customers’. Thus, in reproducing the ambiguity of such ‘service’, the discursive text has clear material effects, both immediate and longer-term. In several documents, life stages and life events are mentioned in relation to customer orientation, usually as opportunities for digitalisation to make life easier.

As regards national strategy, three additional documents, offering a characteristic future-orientation, are especially relevant. The first of these was the 2018 Digital Finland Framework (MoEE, 2018) (A2) produced by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, Business Finland and VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland). This was directed to ‘effective coordination of sustainable digital transformation in Finland’, focusing on business. In this, there is one reference to ageing: ‘growing healthcare costs together with aging population demand for a paradigm shift for prevention of diseases and a new [unspecified] kind of participatory healthcare’ (p. 7; our insertion).

Second is the ‘Digital Compass’ (MoEE, 2022) (A3) set out a ‘national strategic roadmap extending to 2030 that provides an overview of Finland’s digital transformation and provides the direction for national development work’, with ‘four cardinal points: skills, secure and sustainable digital infrastructures, the digital transformation of businesses, and the digitalisation of public services’:

The accelerating climate crisis, an aging population that is geographically concentrated to certain areas, digitalisation and the change in work that digitalisation entails and new types of security threats in the digital environment challenge governance structures and ways of doing business that were created in the last century. We are also faced with a need to solve the economy’s sustainability deficit because the increase in the older population as the population ages brings pressure on health, care and pension expenses and the reduction of the working-age population impairs economic growth opportunities. Digitalisation and automation of public services help us respond to these challenges. (p. 7; our translation)

Third, and most recently, is Finland’s National Roadmap EU Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030 (Finnish Government, 2024) (A4). Despite the 2023 governmental change, older people are represented in a remarkably similar way to the 2022 and 2023 documents:

The accelerating climate crisis, an ageing and geographically concentrated population, the transformation of work resulting from digitalisation and new kinds of security threats in the digital environment are challenging governance structures and operating methods created over the last century. We also have the sustainability gap in public finances to solve as the ageing of the population increases the number of senior citizens and creates pressure on health, care and pension expenditure and the decrease in the working-age population impairs economic growth opportunities. (p. 11)

Attention should be paid to digital skills among all age groups, including the adult population and older people whose educational path may not have equipped them with the requisite basic digital skills. . . . We must move from basic technical skills towards a more versatile and deeper understanding of digital skills in the digital era. (p. 13)

. . . the ageing population of Finland necessitates a greater focus on teaching and maintaining digital skills among the older population. (p. 25)

To summarise, current national policy under the direction of the Ministry of Finance (MoF, 2024) (A5) presents a strong positive relation of digitalisation and older people:

. . . studies show that the digital skills of Finns are the best in the EU. This proves that the prerequisites for success in digitalisation are excellent.

. . . by means of digitalisation people and businesses take centre stage in the development of public services. Welfare of senior citizens can be improved by means of intelligent health services. (our emphasis)

Everyone’s needs vary according to their life stage. . . . Digitalisation helps create better and more reliable service chains to meet the requirements of good life and varying circumstances. It is also a means to look after our wellbeing and success and can ultimately work as a kind of restructuring [of] protection.

At the national policy level, digitalisation is presented as a way to deal with the problem(s) of an ageing population, materially and discursively. It is seen as providing opportunities for older people, even if they are often ‘represented’ by their absence, as customers to be served, but not included in policy processes. Indeed, some sections of the documents, in referencing the ‘sustainability gap/deficit’, could be said to present an inculpatory discourse towards the older adults and the older part of the population, which might further argue for, and legitimise, hegemonic digitalisation with its material consequences, as older adults are positioned as the ones to blame for the unsustainable economy and rising costs. Meanwhile, older people are required to maintain and enhance their digital skills and are constructed by an interventionist, binary logic to digitalisation transcending governmental change. Digitalisation is a taken-for-granted good.

National policy documents focused on older people: From older people to digitalisation

We now turn to policy documents that focus more directly on older people, with six documents that address older people and digitalisation. These texts have a somewhat different emphasis to the general policy documents on digitalisation. The focus on the positive aspects of digitalisation to solve the problems of ageing is more explicit, more pronounced, and presented in greater detail, discursively materialising both neoliberal policy and hegemonic digitalisation, and their close compatibility. Older people are largely presented in relation to digitalisation in terms of individualisation, functional capability and independence (cf. Nilsson et al., 2024), and are encouraged to act independently to improve their own health and functional capacity (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health [STM], 2020a, p. 24) (B1). The contribution of digitalisation is naturalised, integrated and taken-for-granted:

. . . the share of older people is increasing rapidly, and this creates challenges for countries’ national economies. That is why it is natural, that technology is turned to, in order to enable living at home for as long as possible. (Ministry of the Environment [MoE], 2017, p. 147; translation, our emphasis) (B2)

The benefits of age technology are revealed when it can be integrated into wider social welfare and health care structures. . . . it is not the only solution to the challenges of ageing, but, instead, used as part of a greater whole. (STM, 2020b, p. 35; our emphasis) (B3)

Sitra’s Megatrends 2020 [Dufta, 2020] list the ageing and increased diversity of the population as one of the key trends. The megatrends related to ageing also include the integration of technology in everything, the strengthening of relational power and a search for a new direction in the economic system. (STM, 2020b, p. 13; our emphasis and insertion)

Two key broad-ranging documents on older people expand on these sentiments. First is the policy report, Quality Recommendation to Guarantee a Good Quality of Life and Improved Services for Older Persons 2020–2023 (STM, 2020a) (B1), produced under the previous centre-left government:

Digitalisation and new technologies create new types of possibilities to promote both good health and well-being, and offer alternatives for the implementation of services. Using proven solutions from the field of technology, artificial intelligence and robotics, they improve the well-being of elderly people and improve the efficiency of the service system. (p. 30)

Citizens are expected – or even required – to have the skills, the willingness and the ability to use electronic services. This is why the continuous availability of digital support shall be ensured for everyone, since elderly people in particular who are not involved in digital development are unable to use electronic services independently. (p. 32)

Second, there is the recent Strategy for Digitalisation and Information Management in Healthcare and Social Welfare (STM, 2024) (B4), produced under the current coalition-right government:

The vision of the strategy describes digitalisation as the foundation for healthcare and social welfare. The four main objectives . . . are . . . : information-based foresight and digital services help people independently maintain their health, wellbeing and ability to work; digital services are the primary choice in all wellbeing services counties whenever appropriate or for those clients who are able to use them; the workload of healthcare and social welfare personnel has been reduced by making better use of information and introducing advanced technological solutions; and information on services and benefits is widely available to managers, decision-makers and researchers across administrative boundaries. (p. 4)

This is a strong programme for digitalisation. There is, however, no mention of older people, and only brief generalised mentions, in medical terms, of an ageing population, apart from:

. . . in the ageing population, there is a large number of individuals that for various reasons do not use digital services. It should also be remembered that there is a great deal of customer work in healthcare and social welfare services, in which face-to-face contacts with the customer are especially important. Some customers also prefer traditional local services over digital services. (p. 15)

This highlights the relevance of a material-discursive approach to policy. The programme text represents the situation discursively, even while ‘the traditional local services’, as a form of materiality that ‘some customers . . . prefer’, actually seldom exist in many local cases.

The focus on individualisation, functional capability, interdependence and non-dependence in relation to digitalisation was spelt out in more detail in the 2016 document, Digitisation to Support Health and Well-Being (STM, 2016) (B5): ⁹

Digitalisation in Finland is facing major challenges, for which the utilization of digitalization serves as one solution. (p. 4; our emphasis)

We implement health monitoring in a customer-oriented way – we change from surveillance to coaching (p. 11)

Citizens’ taking responsibility for their own health and well-being is supported with digital services. To support the promotion of health and well-being, guidance, advice, instructions and self-assessment tools are offered electronically, with which citizens can independently promote their own health and well-being. (p. 15)

 Citizen – I can do it myself

The goal is for citizens to conduct their affairs electronically and produce information for their own and professional use. Reliable well-being information and services that support its utilization are available electronically. (p. 18) (emphases in original; our translations)

While older people are typically represented, in these documents, as relatively homogeneous and stereotyped (cf. Pajula et al., 2024), with intersections of class, gender and ethnicity largely ignored, some groups are differentiated as ‘marked’. First, there are those living at home, as in Services Supporting Living at Home in the Future for the Elderly 2021–2023: Goals and Project Guidance (STM, 2021) (B6):

Living at home can be supported with housing-related technological solutions. . . . Partial replacement or supplementing of services with technological alternatives. . . . However, it requires training both for the elderly and their relatives, as well as for social and health care personnel. (pp. 14–15)

A second marked group concerns the ‘majority of elderly customers receiving regular services’:

. . . people with memory disorders, who also have a milder or more challenging impairment of functional capacity and many other diseases requiring treatment. (STM, 2020a, p. 45)

A third group concerns how younger (‘65–79’) and older old (‘80+’) may be distinguished, with the former, with stronger health and greater digi-literacy, serving the latter as volunteers:

Particularly young pensioners aged 65 to 79 are a significant resource for society. . . . Voluntary work is motivated by the possibility of supporting the well-being and good health of others, but at the same time it may improve the well-being of the volunteers themselves. (STM, 2020a, p. 28)

What is interesting about all these three distinctions ¹⁰ is that they relate to ageing as bodily functionality, not other social divisions. Socio-economic inequalities in relation to the capability to invest in and update technology are scarcely acknowledged, even if they create unequal access to acquiring services online. A striking exception is the observation that: ‘The greatest problems with functional capacity have been observed among those with little education, those doing physical work and those with a low income’ (STM, 2020a, p. 15). Other omissions include policy on gender equality, and migrant, Black, minority ethnic, non-national and LGBTIQA+ people.

Applicability of hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people

How applicable is hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people in Finland? Hegemonic digitalisation in policy concerns taken-for-grantedness, formation of social groups, and ‘fundamental outlooks’, not least in everyday life. These aspects interconnect, mutually reinforcing each other. Table 1 summarises representative sub-themes, with citations, to illustrate the applicability of these aspects of hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people in Finland.

Table 1.

Key aspects of hegemonic digitalisation.

Hegemonic digitalisation	From digitalisation to older people	From older people to digitalisation
Taken-for-grantedness	digitalisation as a way to deal with the problem(s) of an ageing population digitalisation as positive opportunities for older people ‘sustainability gap/deficit’ caused by older people	positive aspects of digitalisation to solve the problem(s) of ageing more pronounced, in greater detail ‘it is natural, that technology is turned to’ ‘benefits of age technology are revealed when it can be integrated into wider social welfare and health care structures’ ‘megatrends related to ageing . . . include the integration of technology in everything’
Formation of social groups	binary of creators/controllers and users of digitalisation older people ‘represented’ by their absence older people served as customers but not included in policy process	homogenisation of older people as users of digitalisation distinctions by bodily and functional capability distinction of younger old (65–79) and older old (80+)
‘Fundamental outlook’ of society	interventionist logic towards older people, cutting across governmental change requirement for older people to maintain and enhance their digital skills	individualisation, functional capability, independence of older people ‘citizens are expected – or even required – to have the skills, the willingness and the ability to use electronic services’

In the Finnish policy texts, both those on digitalisation, and those focused on older people, digitalisation is presented positively as a taken-for-granted, naturalised means for meeting the problem(s) of an ageing population, represented as a ‘sustainability gap/deficit’ or burden. While digitalisation is seen as integrated into ‘everything’, the wide variety and complexity of its forms are remarkably rarely analysed in the documents. Often information access is emphasised, but there are also vaguer, unspecified references to technologies that may ‘assist’ – probably indicating public and business-driven remote/AI-medical, disability-related and e-health applications and services, accessed (in practice in Finland) via personal bank codes, and that, with consent, pool all individual medical data, as well as social media. Hegemonic digitalisation has been facilitated by economic retrenchment, neoliberal governance and tendencies to political consensus. With both neoliberal policy and hegemonic digitalisation, care and care relationships are subject to individualisation, unpaid family networks, voluntary engagement, self-care and constant potential digital exclusions (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Key linkages of hegemonic digitalisation.

The policy documents typically represent and (re)produce social groups, materially and discursively, as with the binary of creators/controllers and users/customers, both homogenised, but with the latter ‘(self-)served’, and present through absence, arguably reinforcing and calcifying the longer-term position of older people as passive subjects. Older people are characteristically homogenised, even with distinctions by bodily functional capability. Differences by wider societal divisions are rarely noted. Hegemonic digitalisation can lead to digital exclusion, intersecting with other marginalisations.

In the policy documents, digitalisation is frequently ambiguous, referencing both digital infrastructures and neoliberal policy and practice. Digitalisation can be a way of (re)structuring both broad state–population power relations, and citizens’ everyday lives and experiences. It is presented as a goal in its own right, part of a fundamental outlook of society, and a term deployed ambiguously by the Finnish state, perhaps strategically so. Policy is also deployed with an interventionist logic of digitalisation on older people, constructed passively, yet as (if) active and independent. Hegemonic digitalisation feeds and is fed by wider discourses on neoliberalism, efficiency, individualisation, health, (self-)care and active ageing – often cutting across political governmental change. Independence is promoted as a virtue, taking responsibility from the state, dovetailing with the long-established Finnish cultural valuing of personal independence.

Risks around technology not working, differences in digital skills, keeping up with applications, problems in planner–user communication and risks of marginalisation from lack of skills and/or support are rarely discussed. Indeed, elsewhere there is growing Finnish research on the unintended consequences of digitalisation in policy on older people, including limited understandings of the complexity of the digital landscape for older people (Valokivi et al., 2023), technologisation of the care of older people (Hämäläinen, 2024) and lack of responsibility for involving users in design (Pajula et al., 2024).

Concluding discussion: Some wider social implications of hegemonic digitalisation

Finally, we review wider implications from this analysis of hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people, including for beyond Finland. The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns led to increases in older people using mobile technologies to communicate with family, friends, businesses and authorities, probably facilitating greater intertwining of neoliberal structuring and digitalisation of welfare. Digitalisation in policy may be promoted for several reasons, including techno-optimism, neoliberal cost-cutting, individualisation of care, reliance on unpaid informal carers (cf. Nilsson et al., 2024), as well as extending older individuals’ independence and enabling care relationships across distances. However, hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people has further implications and consequences, for both making and studying policy.

First, while digitalisation is not necessarily hegemonic, nor inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in all policy contexts, high and increasing digital embeddedness, in Finland, as some other countries, can mean that important aspects of digitalisation can be silenced as explicit topics or are approached through their indirect effects. In many contexts, policy on digitalisation is hegemonic vis-a-vis other policy, including policy on ageing, health and care. Digitalisation is also often spoken of in policy discourse as unified in the singular. Features and forms of digitalisation are taken-for-granted, rarely interrogated or problematised, but need to be made explicit in both policy and scholarship. Hegemonic processes in Finland, as a frontrunner in digitalisation, may increasingly be found elsewhere.

Second, in contrast to interventionist logics that persist in policy on older people, with the binary of policy creators/consumers, policy changes need to be evaluated without taking for granted hegemonic digitalisation itself, and its material-discursive forms and effects. Older people are widely expected to actively cope with digitalisation yet rarely granted competence or agency (Nilsson et al., 2024) or actively involved in digital design or policy development. Indeed, Dalmer and colleagues (2022) have identified how:

. . . designs, operations, scripts, and materialities of technological innovation implicate asymmetrical relationships of control and intervention: (1) aging bodies and the power of numbers, (2) aging spaces and the power of surveillance, and (3) age care economies and gendered power relations. While technological care for older individuals has been promoted as a cost-effective way to enhance independence, security, and health, . . . such optimistic perspectives may obscure the realities of social inequality, agist bias, and exploitative gendered care labour. (pp. 77–78)

More humane, inclusive ways of valuing life, life experience, equality and diversity within differently aged groups should be more central in planning and implementing age, care and digitalisation policy. Policy development and research on policy need to take older adults and their varying situations into account much more fully, including many being informal care providers, and proactive countering of ageism and age/generational disparities. To ensure citizen rights and quality of life, analogue and in-person services need retention.

Third, there are practical everyday challenges arising from hegemonic digitalisation – how to: keep people informed of new digital developments (as if putting information on a website resolves this), prevent marginalisation and being left behind from digitalisation, even find the digitally excluded, and develop policy on such issues. Simple ‘use’ of the internet is different from digital facility and the complex demands of digital life administration. Digital support often means AI-driven chatbots that do not respond to complex queries. Greater digitalisation in policy can also mean increased need for care, and greater support in handling and updating digital devices (Werny et al., 2024). Such support is often delegated to personal care networks, with older people sometimes called upon for voluntary digital work, assisting other older people.

This links to a fourth question, namely, future-orientation in policy and research. A dominant policy message is that problems around digitalisation will resolve as older people pass and new generations take over: ‘The ageing generations will also benefit from [technology] in the future, since they are more accustomed to using technology than previous generations’ (STM, 2020a, p. 34). The assumption is that problems will dissolve in the future as younger people age and older people die, but technological developments will likely continue, perhaps accelerating, with new abilities needed. Mirroring Foucault’s (1977) ‘history of the present’ (also see Garland, 2014), what might be called ‘the past-in-the-present’, ‘the future-in-the-present’ or the ‘history of the future’ needs to be addressed explicitly in digitalisation and related studies in order to understand and challenge how power struggles and expectations about the future live in the present. Furthermore, with hegemonic digitalisation, disjunctions between policy-makers and older adults, and among older adults, are likely to prevail with resources, technologies and skills unevenly distributed in the future – thus continuing to pose challenges for policy and older adults’ everyday lives, and risking further societal marginalisation.

Fifth, promotion of digitalisation can easily resonate with and cut across established political differences, including left–right divisions. Arguments for greater digitalisation in policy, for hegemonic digitalisation, can be marshalled from at least two rights and two lefts (Houtman & Achterberg, 2010) – the statist corporatist right and the individualist right, and the centralising socialist left and more localist, grassroots, even green left. This can make for strange alliances, at times mirroring strategic ambiguities. Tendencies towards centralised technological control and towards open ‘democratic’ communication, both at times facilitated by digitalisation, can appeal to opposing political factions, nationally and transnationally.

Finally, this interrogation of hegemonic digitalisation contributes to debates on wider social theoretical issues. First, with hegemonic digitalisation, the hegemony of digitalisation is emphasised rather than whole-society or global hegemony as digital; this is a matter partly of foregrounding either digitalisation or hegemony, and partly one of scale, from macro to, in this context, national policy. Second, tensions persist between a focus on an overarching hegemonic digitalisation and the co-constitution of ageing, older people and digitalisation policy. Third, how specificities of ageing and older age impinge on analysis of both digitalisation and social theory is worthy of greater development. This includes how the theorising of materiality-discursivity is a fertile perspective for studies on age, policy and digitalisation, and beyond, and how forms of future-orientation, such as ‘the-future-in-the-present’ and the ‘history of the future’, figure in both policy and research. Overall, this article addresses hegemonic digitalisation in older age policy in a relatively digitalised country, and major challenges for policy and everyday life that are increasingly relevant beyond Finland. It also prompts theoretical reflection in drawing interconnections between digitalisation, hegemony, policy, everyday life and theory itself.