ABSTRACT
Considering the importance of care in human existence – in our lives from beginning to end – ‘care’ (or ‘social care’) as an activity and concept attracted little attention in the social sciences for a long time, remaining overlooked, under-researched and under-theorised.1 Caring responsibilities and activities were perhaps so much taken for granted as not to be in need of special notice, embedded in the good deeds of common life, and especially in the private sphere of domesticated family women – the ‘haven in a heartless world’ (Lasch 1977). Only since the 1970s and 1980s, when ‘care’ came to be accepted as a challenging field for social research and welfare state analysis, have analytical distinctions been made between ‘care’, on the one hand, and ‘domestic work’ or ‘social reproduction’, on the other. Since then, research on care has flourished, spread out across disciplines and specialised in subdisciplines, with attempts made to develop general social theories based on an all-encompassing care ethic at one end, and, at the other, empirically orientated, comparative care policy studies.2
