ABSTRACT
Community care takes place in a special space – home – and a special time – that of domestic life. Time and space are two of the fundamental categories of social order, and it is within their matrixes that daily life, with its rhythms and regularities, takes place. One of the aims of this book is to reassert the significance of the ordinary and the mundane in the analysis of community care, and the spatial and temporal ordering of care are part of this. In this chapter we will explore the consequences for both clients and careworkers of the coming of care into the spatio-temporal world of home, looking in particular at issues of privacy, control and power. We will also explore a rival setting for bathing help – the day centre – showing how this reveals in reverse some of the central meanings of bathing at home.
