ABSTRACT
This book is a collective effort, built on shared research and analysis by an international, interdisciplinary team from Norway, Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Although individual chapters have specific authors, the entire team has been involved in the collection and analysis of the data. Originally organized around the themes of approaches to care, work organization, accountability and governance, and financing and ownership, the team applied a broadly defined political economy perspective and employed a range of research methods, including rapid, site-witching ethnography. As we neared the end of the project and after multiple publications and workshops, we came to see privatization as an overarching process. This chapter sets the context, explaining what we mean by privatization by analyzing some of the overall developments in long-term residential care.
