Beyond Ageing in Networks: Networked Privilege and Classed Geographies of Ageing Well in Singapore
2026-07-18
How does social class shape the capacity to age well, and what does this reveal about the structural conditions that ageing policy tends to obscure? Drawing on focus group discussions with 45 higher socio‐economic status older adults in Singapore, this paper develops the concept of networked privilege to examine how accumulated economic, social and cultural capital shapes network formation, aspiration and place‐making in later life. We engage critically with Ho et al.‘s (2024) framework of 'ageing in networks', arguing that its emphasis on older adults’ agency and unbounded geographies rests on what we term the fallacy of universal agency—the mistaken assumption that the capacity to build and sustain meaningful networks is equally available to all older adults regardless of structural position. Through three dimensions of networked privilege—aspirations, friendship and place‐making, we show how advantage is enacted and reproduced by relational configurations that appear to result from individual choice but reflect class‐based positioning shaped by Singapore's meritocratic habitus. We further demonstrate how even well‐resourced older adults face persistent vulnerabilities that networked privilege can defer but never fully resolve, pointing towards the fundamental interdependencies that characterise human ageing across class positions. The paper argues that a genuinely caring approach to ageing policy must move beyond the promotion of individual resilience towards what Tronto (2013) terms 'caring with' that attends to care as a collective, political and redistributive project rather than a matter of individual responsibility or market provisioning.