Social Works! – Research & Innovation Talks
Health and Everyday Life in Old Age: Agency Manifestations Across Diverging Welfare Regimes
Invited Speaker: Glenn Möllergren (Lund University, Sweden / Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu)
📅 Thursday, 11 December
🕙 16:00–18:00
📍 Room 312, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work (FSAS), UBB
Glenn’s presentation introduces a research project exploring how older adults in Romania manage everyday life while facing unmet age-related support needs. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in participants’ homes, the study examines strategies of self-reliance, resourcefulness, and resilience among older people with limited access to social services, comparing these practices to manifestations of agency observed within Sweden’s more institutionalised home-care regime. The aim of this small-scale pilot study is to identify knowledge gaps that may be addressed in the framework of a larger research project.
The event will be interactive and will include a Q&A session with participants.
All faculty members, MA, and BA students are warmly invited.
Abstract
This study investigates how older adults exercise agency in organising their everyday lives amid scarce welfare provisions in Romania. Building on previous research on home-care users’ competence and agency in Sweden, the project extends the analysis to a markedly different welfare regime. It examines how older persons aged 65 and above, living with age-related functional limitations and restricted access to public care, navigate poverty and limited institutional support. Based on qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted in different regions of Romania, the initial findings reveal a dominant theme of material deprivation. Participants describe pensions insufficient to cover essential needs, forcing continuous engagement in manual and agricultural labour, even in advanced age – effectively contradicting the notion of “retirement”. Strategies include reducing living costs, generating supplemental income, and maintaining informal safety nets. Despite chronic insecurity and declining health, respondents express pride in their self-sufficiency and reluctance to request help, particularly in relation to formal care services typical of Scandinavian welfare regimes. By analysing the Romanian data alongside ongoing research in Sweden, the project seeks to theorise agency across diverging welfare regimes and calls for a broader societal recognition of older adults as competent actors whose often invisible strategies sustain life in conditions of systemic scarcity.
Short Bio
Glenn Möllergren is a doctoral candidate in Social Work at Lund University (since 2022), with a background in public radio journalism and a master’s degree in social work. His work focuses on ageing, eldercare, and the everyday strategies through which older adults organise and adapt support to fit their lives. His doctoral research examines these practices within Sweden’s fragmented home-care system, and he is extending this line of inquiry to Romania, exploring agency and problem-solving in weaker welfare contexts, building on earlier fieldwork in Moldova. He is also involved in projects on biographical work in dementia care and in international collaborations on food practices in eldercare and later-life learning. He is additionally affiliated with Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu. Selected publications: Learning the trade of navigating and tinkering… (2025); The Home Care Home – An Un-Total Institution (2024); Life Story Templates in Dementia Care (2024); Discretion and People-Production in Home Care (2022).
