ABSTRACT
In a context of social change that has highlighted lack of self-sufficiency and the reconciling of care-work as important areas of ‘new’ social risks, the spread of mechanisms of regulation centring on marketization since the 1990s has greatly reduced national differences in response to the need for care (Daly, 2012; Simonazzi, 2009). The policies adopted by European countries in this field tend to converge towards a model that combines public responsibility, market provision and family involvement (Simonazzi, 2009). A related trend is the shift from residential care to home care (Daly, 2012). Particularly where the provision of services is mainly in the hands of for-profit enterprises, the relations between public and private give priority to a logic based on the vendorpurchaser model. As well as this, the commodification of care has developed significantly in the form of remuneration for informal caregivers. Rather than copying an authentic market model, in these cases the relationship between the provider and the receiver of care takes the form of a ‘between gift and market’ contract (Ungerson, 1997), combining the logic of commodification with the actual relational aspects of care, that is, being involved ‘in meeting the physical and emotional requirements’ of dependent people (Daly and Newman, 2000, p. 283). According to the established perspective in the political area of neo-
liberalism, the quasi-markets of care are supposed to create conditions of pluralism, bringing the monopoly of the public authority to an end, both as the direct manager of services, and as financer of suppliers operating on protected markets. Along with the assumption that competition brings down costs and encourages a better quality of offer, one driving force of marketization is the idea of freedom of choice. As well as ensuring that the beneficiary has the possibility of exercising his ‘sovereign’ right as a consumer (Andersson and Kvist, 2015), this principle of free choice is supposed to encourage the provision of individualized, tailor-made services. Amongst the declared objectives is also that of promoting employment on the social markets by supporting private demand using instruments such as vouchers and tax incentives. More limited, but still significant, is the link to work-care-life strategies, for example in France (Bode, Gardin and Nyssens, 2011).
