ABSTRACT
Within the last two decades, the fi eld of elderly care in Denmark, as in the rest of the Nordic countries, has experienced major reorganizations inspired by the ideas of New Public Management (NPM). In NPM the political focus was upon effi ciency, changing recently into a concern with the quality of care. Major reforms related to this drive for quality have been implemented, such as compulsory standards of quality for the municipalities (1999) and, for service users, the free choice of provider (2003). Quality was seen to be improved through the citizen’s free choice between providers of home-based care-private and public. This in turn required the introduction of a provider-performer model where the estimation of needs was split off from the concrete production of care. This new story of the state as concerned with quality contains a new rationality with a strong seductive force. Quality signifi es the laudable and lasting, and it becomes impossible to be against quality.
