The ability and knowledge to manage financial tasks may be compromised in old age, especially when the need to navigate the care and social benefit systems increases. Managing financial tasks may consist of a variety of actions of both the older people themselves and their representatives, often family members. This study explored how financial tasks related to the care and everyday life of older people who need long-term care are managed by using the ideas of modalities of agency and distributed agency. We analysed interviews of 19 older persons and their family members with a qualitative case analysis. All the older persons who participated in the study distributed the agency in financial tasks among their family members, but to different levels and for different reasons. We identified three types of distributed agency – inevitable, assimilated and minimal distributed agency – in which the older persons’ knowledge about financial tasks and their ability to manage financial tasks differed. Within these types, the cases differed in terms of the know-how of the family members and the reasons why the older people’s knowledge about financial tasks or their ability to manage their financial tasks were diminished. We conclude that older persons with long-term care needs require help in regard to financial tasks, and the older people’s and their family members’ ability to manage financial tasks could be enhanced by making the benefit systems and online banking more user-friendly and by improving the help from care staff.

In this paper we contribute to the body of work on agency and institutional transmission by proposing two new concepts: distributed agency and dialogue. Distributed agency is a companion concept to that of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’. Whilst institutional entrepreneurship emphasizes the deliberate institution-building by a select few, distributed agency highlights the emergent institution-building that involves any and every organizational member. In turn, dialogue supplements the models of institutional diffusion by drawing attention to the situated interactions between the ‘champions’ and the ‘recipients’ of institutional innovations, to the frictions that accompany institutional transmission, and to the deviations that emerge from those interactions. We use these concepts to analyze the micro-discursive processes during a crucial event in the institutionalization of a new organizational template in a UK public–private partnership. We found that the implementation hinged upon enabling the audience (i.e. the employees expected to apply the template in their work) to act as agents (hence, distributed agency) by engaging in a dialogue that sought to define the audience's identity vis-à-vis coercive pressures, articulate and address its interests, and recognize its rights to modify the template to suit the local circumstances.