Search results

This paper considers cash for care as reflected in direct payments and the more recent development of individual budgets in England. While the momentum to roll out individual budgets gathers pace in England, Wales has embarked on a more cautious approach in wishing to evaluate the impact of individual budgets on social services. The paper identifies some of the far reaching implications of cash for care in general and individual budgets in particular, for service users, carers ‐ both paid and informal ‐ and for the social work profession. The policy incoherence in relation to risk and safeguarding is highlighted. This paper supports the approach currently adopted by the Welsh Assembly Government in relation to the ‘rolling out’ of individual budgets. The Assembly's 10‐year strategy for social services focuses on the rights of citizens and the needs of communities. This paper argues that fulfilling that vision should not be wholly contingent upon an unproven extension into the field of individual budgets.

There are clear theoretical, policy and practice tensions in conceptualising social or long-term care as a “right”: an enforceable choice. The purpose of this article is to address the following questions: Do disabled and older citizens have the right to long-term care? What do these rights look like under different care regimes? Do citizens have the right or duty to *provide* long-term care? It is already known that both formal and informal care across all welfare contexts is mainly provided by women and that this has serious implications for gender equality.

In this article, the author takes a conceptual approach to examining the comparative evidence from developed welfare states with formal long-term care provision and the different models of care, to challenge feminist care theory from the perspective of those living in care poverty (i.e. with insufficient access to long-term care and support to meet their citizenship rights).

Drawing on her own comparative research on models of long-term and “personalised” care, the author finds that different models of state provision and different models of personalised care provide differential citizenship outcomes for carers and those needing care. The findings indicate that well-governed personalised long-term care provides the best outcomes in terms of balancing potentially conflicting citizenship claims and addressing care poverty.

The author develops new approaches to care theory based on citizenship and care poverty that have not been published elsewhere, drawing on models that she developed herself.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a typology of different family policy systems in Europe and evaluate their impact on the employment strategy of mothers with care responsibilities for dependent children.

The paper outlines a typology of family policy regimes in Europe – covering the 26 countries. A typology based on a cluster analysis of macro indicators of family policy – coverage of childcare, effective parental leave and spending on family policies. The cluster analysis is based on data from OECD family data base. Then follows an analysis of the impact of the different family policy regimes on mothers' employment strategies when they return into gainful employment, based on data from the European Social Survey, 2008.

The authors have identified four different family policy models: extensive family policy, long parental leave, family care, and cash for care. For each of the models, different strategies are found for take up of employment for mothers with dependent children.

The paper includes 26 European countries, thereby covering the East and Central Europe, which is not the case in most welfare typologies. Furthermore, the authors distinguish clearly in the analyses between the institutional dimension and the outcome – mothers' employment strategies.

Since the 1990s, the importance of childhood and children within the political agenda of advanced welfare states has grown rapidly. For example, in 1989 the Canadian House of Commons launched a resolution aimed at eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000. With the help of the National Children's Agenda and the National Child Benefit the situation of children should be improved. Nearly 10 years later in the UK, New Labour heralded the political goal to halve child poverty within 10 years and to eradicate it within 20 years. A wide variety of measures and programs like Sure Start and the National Childcare Strategy were started to improve the welfare and well-being of children. In 2002, a new paradigm was established in Germany concerning family policy. The aim was to improve the reconciliation of family and work, the material welfare of young families by a new parental leave scheme, as well as supporting the development of young children by increasing the number of places for children under the age of 3 in early childhood education and care. Additionally, international organisations contributed to this trend. For example, the OECD (cf. 2001, 2006) propagated the development of early childhood education and care (ECEC) as an important contribution to a successful transition into the knowledge society. According to the Lisbon-Strategy, the EU announced new goals for policies concerning children and families as well as introduced benchmarks for evaluating the implementation of these goals in the member states. Finally, in an influential evaluation for the EU President, Esping-Andersen (cf. 2002) and his colleagues argued for a concept of a “child-centered social investment strategy.”

Care of older persons in their own homes has in recent years received much attention in Ireland. The proponents of domiciliary care draw on both economic and quality of life arguments, many of which are identifiable in policy documents since the 1950s. However, little detailed analysis of the evolution of the formal care services for older persons, and the shift in emphasis from institutional to domiciliary care, has been presented. The paper aims to focus on the issues.

Using archival, administrative and policy sources, the authors traced the changing nature of formal care policies in Ireland, and analysed changes in key organising principles and features, including subsidiarity, the role of the Church and the basis of entitlements (residual vs universal).

The first type of formal care to emerge was institutional, and did not adhere to the subsidiarity principle as it was mostly delivered by the State. Subsidiarity came to the fore more clearly with the establishment of the earliest home care services by religious and voluntary organisations. The current trend towards cash‐for‐care (home care packages) is arguably a modern‐day manifestation of the arm's length attitude that the subsidiarity principle recommends the State take.

The fact that care services are increasingly delivered by private sector companies and informal carers operating in the grey market increases the complexity of the care regime and therefore makes the task of developing social care regime classifications more complicated; it also means that regulation of the care sector in Ireland is a particularly urgent task that is yet to be undertaken in a comprehensive manner.

The policy challenges involved in attempts to regulate the complex care mix are considerable.

The paper utilises both historical methods and policy analysis to highlight the changing meaning of key concepts such as subsidiarity.

This chapter reports on a hybrid sector of disability provision in Australia and the changes to the sector due to the shift to person-centred care in Australia. It explains the significant changes to the way the sector will respond to government and to client demands and how the organisations are responding to this by re-structuring and building new performance measurement systems including Social Return on Investment.

The first part of the chapter is descriptive of the change to person-centred care in the Australian disability sector using public reports. The second part of the chapter looks at the change at a micro level using an analysis of the literature.

Findings illustrate how the National Disability Insurance Scheme has brought about significant change between sectors of government and between providers, both government and non-government. Organisations have had to make significant changes to adapt to the government’s policy and especially funding change. This includes setting new governance and leadership models, changed human resource management practices and performance measurement systems.

The paper is a report relatively early in the transition phases, and therefore, more evidence is needed as the system change progresses. Still, the Australian disability sector provides a powerful example of significant hybridisation changes as a result of a shift to person-centred care.

This is a dramatic change from the Australian government to impose person-centred care. The adaptations of Australian organisations provide an interesting insight for the international community.

This article provides an overview and analysis of care as a concept and object of policy makers' attention in Europe, mindful especially of the lessons that can be drawn from the European experience. The aim of this paper is to set out a framework to understand care and also to offer an account of the way that different European countries have provided for care (of children and older people) and how existing policies are being reformed and rethought.

The article underlines the complexity of care as a concept and domain of policy and suggests the need for a broad‐ranging approach to its analysis.

It shows that the policy configuration has to be thought of as being embedded in and in many ways a function of the primary location and forms of care, the values and culture surrounding care and the arrangements around the mix of providers and modes of governance. While there are many positive lessons from the extent to which European states have become involved in making provision for care – offering financial and other forms of support to families and those needing care and enabling women to pursue a life not completely defined by their care‐related obligations – there are also negative ones such as the outstanding need to connect up policies for care across the life spectrum (in the term used in this article: a care configuration) and to view care in a global way.

This article takes an overview of recent developments in Europe and draws out the implications of developments in Asia.

Purpose: The aim is to explore how family relations are affected by societal changes in relation to informal and formal caregiving and self-determination of older adults.

Design/methodology/approach: Care managers (CMs)/social workers (SWs) (N = 124) participated in a comparative vignette study including Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. Systems theory was used.

Findings: Japanese CMs/SWs clearly describe their efforts to create networks in a relational way between formal and informal actors in the community. South Korean CMs/SWs balance between suggesting interventions to support daily life at home or a move to a nursing home, often acknowledging the family as the main caregiver. In Sweden, CMs/SWs highlight the juridical element in meeting the older adult and the interventions offered, and families primarily give social support. Regarding self-determination, the Japanese priority is for CMs/SWs to harmonize within the family and the community. South Korean CMs/SWs express ambivalent attitudes to older adults’ capability for self-determination in the intersection between formal and family care. Swedish CMs/SWs adhere to the older adult’s self-determination, while acknowledging the role of the family in persuading the older adult to accept interventions. The results suggest emerging defamilialization in South Korea, while tendencies to refamilialization are noticed in Japan and Sweden, albeit in different ways.

Research limitations/implications: In translation, nuances may be lost. A focus on changing families shows that country-specific details in care services have been reduced. For future research, perspectives of “care” need to be studied on different levels.

Originality/value: Using one vignette in three countries with different welfare regimes, discussing changing views on families’, communities’ and societal caregiving is unique. This captures changes in policy, influencing re- and defamilialization.

This chapter addresses the grand challenge of an aging society and the subsequent growing demand for in-home care for the elderly – often referred to as homecare. It examines how emergent homecare models in England differ from the “time and task” model and how they are shaping the care market. These models offer new approaches regarding what, how, and when care is delivered at home. Homecare providers face rising demand driven not only by population aging but also by market demand for personalized care, choice, continuity of care, and real-time availability. The landscape presents an opportunity for innovative models to become established, by offering a more inducing service design and value propositions that respond to customers' needs. Using the “business model canvas” to guide data collection, this study presents an ethnographic case analysis of four homecare organizations with distinct emergent homecare models. The study includes 14 months of field observation and 33 in-depth interviews. It finds that providers are becoming increasingly aware of evolving customer needs, establishing models such as the “uberization,” “community-based,” “live-in,” and “preventative” described in the chapter. These models are becoming more pervasive and are mostly market-driven; however, some of their innovations are market shaping. The major innovations are in their value propositions, partnership arrangements, and customer segments. Their value propositions focus on well-being outcomes, including choice and personalization for care users; their workforces are perceived to be a major stakeholder segment, and their networks of partners offer access to complementary services, investments, and specialist knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the rather large difference in the take-up of the cash-for-childcare (CFC) benefit between Norway and Sweden.

A quantitative approach is employed, including the analysis of descriptive statistics of data on parents’ attitudes concerning the distribution of paid work and care and a robust regression analysis of data on parents’ behaviour regarding the distribution of paid work and care.

The results show that attitudes regarding childcare and mothers’ and fathers’ employment differ in the two countries. Swedish parents support public childcare and a gender equal employment distribution more than Norwegians. Thereby, attitudinal differences explain why Norwegian parents use the benefit more frequently. The findings indicate that in Sweden, parents’ socioeconomic background affects the duration of public childcare to a lesser extent than in Norway. Nevertheless, the economic incentives of the CFC benefit are more attractive for families with lower socioeconomic status. This explains why Swedes respond less to the incentives of the CFC benefit than Norwegians.

While previous research has focussed on the effect of policies on the take-up of the CFC benefit, this study shows that parents’ attitudes and behaviour are important explanatory variables to explain differences in the take-up of the benefit.