The first aim of this book is to question current approaches to ‘community care’ in which the meaning of community is ill-defined and the concept of care is taken for granted. Although seen as a much preferred option to residential care, community care has often proved to be isolating and impersonal, offering few of the benefits of inclusion with which communities are strongly associated, hugely dependent on the unpaid services of relatives and friends and limited to meeting needs rather than supporting rights.

The book’s second aim is to identify effective strategies and practices, and the thinking that lies behind...

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 is a concept that is used very widely and very loosely. That is a topic the author...

In Chapter One Michael Hill addressed the broad concepts of care, citizenship and community and their interface nationally and globally. In this chapter the focus is on recent policy developments in the UK that have revived concepts of citizenship and community within the context of care. The next chapter from Alison Petch will then look at some of the distinctive developments in Scotland.

In the UK, central government policy has regularly emphasised the importance of community in the provision of social care. Both the Seebohm (1968) and Barclay (1982) Reports saw communities as fundamental to the provision of local social...

This chapter explores the extent to which policy and practice in Scotland in the key areas of care, citizenship and community contrasts with that presented for the rest of the UK. The extent to which there is evidence for difference, both before and after devolution, is examined. It is suggested that a succession of shifts can be identified: from a privileging of community interests evident across social welfare, housing and community regeneration to a greater emphasis currently on partnership working, and from a concept of communal benefit to individual personalisation.

Traditionally, social welfare practice in Scotland has been portrayed as...

This chapter proposes a way of thinking about care as a value relevant to contemporary concerns about the way in which we live together and decide together: concerns that are variously conceptualised within policy discourse by reference to community cohesion, social inclusion, community involvement and civil renewal. A particular aim is to offer a critique of policy discourses of civil renewal from an ethic of care perspective. Civil renewal, as elaborated in Home Office publications (particularly those written by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary), promotes normative notions of the responsibilities of citizenship. Citizens are exhorted to become involved...

Ethics and ethical dilemmas have emerged as issues of increasing interest in the human services. This may reflect wider concerns about increasing individualisation, the demise of community according to communitarians; ‘liquid modernity’ in Bauman’s (2000) terminology. There would seem to be echoes here of the ‘Third Way’ (Tam, 1998). As Marilyn Taylor (2003, p 21) has pointed out, ‘the ‘restoring community’ theme has been given a new lease of life in recent years by a communitarian movement which draws support from across the political spectrum’.

Accounts of this supposed individualisation include explanations based on the demise of grand theories in...

People with dementia require help and support to remain living in their communities, and by far the most common form of care that people with dementia receive is lay care. It is estimated that there are 750,000 people diagnosed with dementia in the UK, of whom 18,500 are under 65 years old (Alzheimer’s Society, 2003). Policy has for many years been encouraging community-based services in preference to institutionally based services (DH, 2001), and the majority of older people prefer to stay in their own homes. Because of the nature of dementia, balancing the needs of people involved in providing care...

In recent years the issue of anti-social behaviour and the policies for its control, or management, have seen a rapid rise to prominence. There has been a sequence of waves of serious political investment into the problem, very much led from the centre by Tony Blair himself (for an overview, see Squires, 2006a). Beginning with ambitions to ‘strengthen communities’ and ‘nip youth crime in the bud’ and ‘enforce’ more effectively the obligations of parents in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (and the new youth justice system emerging from this) the anti-social behaviour agenda grew and grew, prompting at least...

Domestic violence involves a pattern of coercive behaviours ranging from verbal abuse/threats, coercion, manipulation, and physical and sexual violence, to rape and homicide. On an individual level, therefore, experiencing domestic violence entails immense interpersonal struggles invoking honour, pride and shame. Such individual struggles are, however, set in a context of abstract (but very real) social structures and long-term social processes that construct gendered lives such that men in general are dominant over women. Wider community knowledge¹ supports the research evidence, which consistently finds that the majority of domestic violence in heterosexual relationships is perpetrated by men against women (for recent...

The racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and the eventual report (Macpherson, 1999) into the handling of the investigation by the Metropolitan Police is likely to be viewed by social scientists as a watershed in the way public services work with, and for, Britain’s black and minority ethnic communities. Those of us involved in promoting race equality at that time are likely to testify to widespread debate as to what is to be done among both front-line practitioners and senior managers in social care (although not always between senior managers and practitioners). But beyond generating pieces of paper from 44,000 public...

This chapter evaluates the successes and challenges experienced in developing a Community Care Development Project. In recognition of the lack of joint work on ‘community care’ and ‘community development’, a three-year pilot project was established in Hull in 1999 by a partnership of local statutory and voluntary sector agencies to find out whether the community sector could be supported in addressing unmet low-level support and care needs. The chapter begins by outlining the national and local background to the project, before moving on to document the approach taken. The extent to which the project had a measurable impact on communities...

This chapter draws on an evaluation of a Neighbourhood Care Scheme in Brighton and Hove. It presents a unique example of community and community spirit and demonstrates how volunteering can flourish in such a way that everyone benefits. Since 1998 the scheme has grown from 23 users and seven volunteers to involve over 300 users and 126 volunteers, representing in 2005—06 a total of over 2,812 visits and 5,098 volunteer hours. This scheme fits well with the philosophy of the White PaperOur Health, Our Care, Our Say: A New Direction for Community Services(DH, 2006), which calls for...

Mental health policy has made great strides in the last 20 to 25 years in attempting to shift the delivery of mental health services from the large outdated asylum system. The attempts at consolidating the closure of the asylums, while ensuring the build-up of alternative locally based community care services, have not been without their problems. Criticisms have been levelled at the fragmented and piecemeal buildup of alternative forms of community care throughout the 1980s and 1990s, where gaps in services have been highlighted and where concerns have centred around public safety in relation to homicides in the community and...

This chapter looks at issues of concern to those working in domiciliary care in Australia. As the Australian population continues to age, older people and their carers will need more formal support and care in their own homes. At present this work is done primarily by home care workers. This sector of the workforce, already growing rapidly, will continue to grow. Recent reports have expressed concern about the low wages paid to these workers, the lack of career structure, the lack of entry qualifications and the paucity of training opportunities and the effect this could have on the recruitment of...

In Selma Lagerlöf’s (1891/1997)Gösta Berling’sSaga the powerful major’s wife, Mrs Celsing, is cast out into the cold winter, both literally and socially, because of her bad behaviour.¹ Out there, in the cold, there is no responsibility on the part of the public to help or support her. Instead, this formerly powerful lady has to rely on the kindness of others for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. Lagerlöf’s fictional world, as with pre-urban communities, is rooted in an environment where farmers and crofters lived in a feudal system, and the survival of such an individual was a...

Germany is famous for the traditionally strong role of communities in the provision of personal social services. Until the 1990s, the bulk of these services, including social care, were provided by the so-called welfare associations (Wohlfahrtsverbände), non-profit organisations with deep roots in the local community. Strongly embedded in their respective socio-cultural milieu, the welfare associations were able to rely on a high degree of civic engagement. Moreover, the fact that they were organised along ideological lines guaranteed a strong cultural ‘fit’ between care givers and care receivers.

Since the 1980s, however, the role of the welfare associations in social care...

Japanese society is ageing rapidly. Currently over 20% of the people in Japan are over 65 years old, and this proportion will grow to 27.8% in 2020. How to cope with this ageing population has been on the agenda as an urgent policy issue since the 1980s, and continuous welfare reforms were made in the 1990s. The most important policy development in this field was the introduction of public Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 2000. This aimed to reduce the heavy burden on the informal care system (the family) and to socialise the care of older people by expanding community-based...

In one sense there can be no conclusion to this book. The chapters represent powerful contributions to an international debate about how to meet both the costs and complex demands of care and the rights of citizens in advanced economies and ageing societies. This debate is very likely to continue into the foreseeable future with no immediately obvious solutions. Several issues, however, are clarified in this volume and some encouraging evidence provided on potential improvements in policy and practice.

One central concern repeated in several chapters and made particularly strongly by Barnes in Chapter Four is that ‘care’ is usually...