ABSTRACT
Despite the increased interest in informal care in recent decades, the concept itself is not new. The UK for example, as with many advanced capitalist countries, has long had a mixed economy of care in which the state, the family, the voluntary sector and the market are seen to play different roles at different times. Indeed, Offer (1999) went so far as to claim that the ‘classic welfare state’ (as epitomised by Britain between 1945 and 1976) should be seen as exceptional rather than a culmination of earlier ideas and practices. Rather than a recent ‘discovery’, then, the ‘re-discovery’ of informal care by political and academic communities – particularly since the late 1970s – has emerged at a time when idealist conceptions about the nature of ‘real welfare’ have been discarded.
