Social care: divergent emphases

Social care is a growing concern in welfare states and an ever more frequent object of comparative social research. A greater focus on social care is necessary to construct a better understanding of the principles and functions of modern welfare states and family life. We start out from the view that social care arrangements are an integral part of the wider order and structure of a society, as Pfau-Effinger (1998), for instance, has suggested. The forms that care arrangements take are deeply rooted in social and cultural contexts and they vary considerably across countries and even inside one country (see Anttonen and Sipilä, 1996, 1997; Anttonen et al, 2003).

In this chapter, our aim is to describe and evaluate the processes in which social care is going public. By the concepts of social care and social care services, we will underline the role of the state and local governments as well as other formal service providers. Although our main focus is in formal care providers, it is of great importance to look at changing boundaries between the private and public responsibilities. Indeed, social care as a concept comprises care-giving work done both in the informal and in the formal settings (Daly and Lewis, 2000). In this chapter, social care relates both to care as work and care as public policy. Our intention is, first, to present a classification of care production modes in a welfare mix framework; second, to describe the processes of care going public by focusing on national social care patterns in five different countries; and third, to seek cultural explanations as to why they have developed into distinct systems and to understand why these countries are now adopting partly similar ways of rearranging social care. Since social care, as both work and policy, is so pervasive in a society, we have found it useful to restrict our analysis on the two dominant sectors of social care: the day-care of small children and the care of older people. The countries included in the analysis are Finland, Germany, Japan, the US and the UK.

The conclusions of this chapter are based on a cross-cultural comparison: an international research project with five national teams has been studying how social care patterns have been developed and how they respond to the needs of social care inside different societies.