The UK welfare landscape is increasingly challenging due to ongoing austerity involving public sector cuts, service retrenchment, and withdrawal of statutory responsibilities. This article shows that as the welfare state contracts, precarity increases and responsibility for service provision is progressively devolved to front-line individuals and service users. To illustrate, the article examines the use of assistive and everyday technologies to improve social housing residents’ quality of life based on a longitudinal mixed methods study conducted between 2020 and 2022. The findings highlight how housing providers can support person-led technology interventions for older residents, where minor improvements positively impact day-to-day living. However, interventions are often limited by practicalities, capacity, and cost. This article connects technological engagement in housing to the ongoing ‘responsibilisation’ of many areas of housing provision to social landlords and tenants. This suggests an extension of responsibility where social housing providers are papering over the cracks in the welfare state.

Successful ageing continues to be a key theme in contemporary ageing discourses, where good physical and cognitive health in older age is an individualised responsibility. This paper explores how Australian aged care stakeholder discourse contributes to constructions of self-responsibility for brain health and dementia prevention in older persons. Brain health advice messages about diet, exercise and ‘brain fitness’ by aged care stakeholders are argued to construct a moral framework of ‘brainwork practices’ to prevent or delay dementia. This study performed discourse analysis of a sample of public online aged care stakeholder documents (N = 170) to reveal three key concepts in discursive constructions of dementia. The first concept characterises dementia as a disastrous force to be opposed; the second is a biomedical concept of dementia as preventable (or able to be delayed) in a ‘successful’ older age, while the third reflects neurocultural ideas that fetishise perfect memory as the best defence against cognitive decline and dementia. Identifying this matrix of responsibilising ‘brainwork practices’ messages by aged care stakeholders makes a contribution within social gerontology to revealing neoliberal conceptions of older age as an outcome of lifestyle and consumer choices, where dementia is constructed as ‘failed’ or ‘unsuccessful’ ageing.

In Finland, parenting-related anxiety increased in the 1990s during a deep economic recession and subsequent widespread cutbacks to family services. Despite these cutbacks, resources allocated to services underlining the role of parents – namely, parenting support – increased, manifesting in the establishment of family support projects in the 2000s. Employing positioning theory and pragmatic modalities, I explore how key attributes of good parenting – responsibility and competence – are discussed within family support projects (n = 310). Given discussions regarding the relationship between parenting-related anxiety and the increasing number of parenting-related experts, this article explores parents’ positions within such discussions and overall parenting support in Finland. The analysis of projects clarifies the role of the parenting-related experts, but also provides a nuanced view of the position of parents. In some projects, for instance, parents are positioned as experts whose parenting responsibilities and competence are strengthened within peer-parent relationships and shared within the surrounding community.

Responsibilisation is commonly associated with a neoliberal transfer of responsibilities from state to social actors. However, it also covers the construction of responsibility where it does not exist yet – where citizens need socialisation to manufacture responsibility so they become economically and socially active, healthy, and productive subjects. This article aims to bring more conceptual clarity in these practices. Based on an analysis of literature on contemporary welfare state policies, three different techniques are discerned: reciprocal governance in welfare state services; training and treatment of vulnerable citizens through support and structure; and choice engineering by working upon the unconscious and psychological triggers underlying decision making. These techniques of behavioural power seek responsibilisation by working upon people's understanding of responsibility as a moral imperative and upon the rational or psychological mechanisms that constitute the choices they make and the attitudes they have.