ABSTRACT
Municipal home care for the elderly provides a good example of the recent welfare policy shift in Finland and its implications for care work cultures and professional agency. Since the 1990s, the scope of public services aimed at the elderly has been narrowed down through policies formulated under the infl uence of neo-liberal ideologies and the deepest recession in the Finnish economy since the 1930s. The restructuring of public sector services has been aimed at breaking down institutional care and limiting elderly care to the so-called basic services and reallocating these services to the frailest elderly (Julkunen 2001; Paasivaara 2002; Wrede and Henriksson 2005). The logic guiding the narrowing down of the public services is economic and technocratic. That is, the production of public services now relies on a logic of cost-effectiveness as well as medical and managerial criteria and expertise.
