Paper short abstract:

This contribution presents a theoretical approach to the analysis of the contested market and community shift in elderly care provision and discusses the socio-political embedding of live-in-care and caring communities on the empirical basis of care regime analyses in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Vienna

Paper long abstract:

The way in which elderly care is provided has become an increasingly controversial topic for contemporary societies. In this context and in response to the care crisis, a market- and community-shift can be observed. These tendencies are accompanied by changing responsibilities of the state, the market, the community and the family, as well as a transformation of the meaning of care. As part of the project “The Contested Provisioning of Care and Housing” (www.contestedcareandhousing.com) this contribution, in a first part, draws on Polanyi, to reflect the market- and community-shift in the field of elderly care as “double movements” and with regard to the hybrid interaction of “market-exchange”, “reciprocity”, and “redistribution”. Furthermore, an Institutional Logics perspective is used to show how these economic principles correspond to the institutional order of society. Foucault’s analysis of power and governmentality will be taken up in order to focus on subjectivation, power relations and technologies of government. The second part discusses the socio-political (de)regulation of the interplay between the state, market, civil society, and family based on empirical results of care-regime analyses in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Vienna. This shows how live-in-care - as an exemplary case of the marketisation of care - and caring communities - representing the community-shift - are embedded in each regime. The aim is to present insights into the contested configuration of market- and community-based care arrangements within the context of intersecting movements, economic principles, institutional logics, power relations, images of care, and social inequalities.