Introduction

What do people, including of course particularly governments, mean when they expect communities to be involved in care? The answers that are given to that question depend on what communities are understood to be. This chapter will therefore examine some of the problems about uses of the concept of community, particularly when it is related to issues about care. What kinds of assumptions are made about what communities are, and how various subgroups and families are (or are not) embedded in them?

Community

Community is a concept that is used very widely and very loosely. That is a topic the author explored many years ago in a book with Ruth Issacharoff (1971). We identified a range of problems with uses of the concept of community. We reported an American article that claimed to have identified 94 different definitions of community (Hillery, 1955) and we quoted Halsey as suggesting that usage of the concept of community tends to involve:

Since those days the water has been further muddied by the rise – and to some extent fall – of an official usage directly pertinent for this book, the use of ‘community’ in tandem with ‘care’ to describe, in effect, either all care outside institutional settings or, more confusingly still, all care outside hospitals. These usages carry with them meanings that it suits government to imply. As Means et al (2003, chapter 1), among others, have pointed out, the wider implication is that the ‘community’ is intrinsically a better place for care, with the implications that it is cheaper for the government as far as possible obscured. Now of course that usage has largely been replaced by ‘social care’, but the questions remain about the caring capacity of the community (or perhaps more appropriately of the many different social contexts) and of the role of the government in supporting and sustaining this. Dawn Stephen and Peter Squires (in Chapter Seven) explore a related usage in the field of criminal justice, where the word ‘community’ is used similarly very loosely (in this case to describe control measures outside prison) but again carries implications of inclusion and care.