On the relational dynamics of caring: a psychotherapeutic approach to emotional and power dimensions of women’s care work

Care is double-edged and paradoxical, inspiring a vast range of strong feelings in both care-givers and care-recipients. This paper draws on ideas about psychotherapeutic relationships to offer a theorisation of the complex emotional and power dynamics and imaginative geographies of care. Examining the humanistic approach developed by Carl Rogers as well as the psychoanalytic tradition, I advance an interpretation of psychotherapeutic practices that foregrounds the fundamental importance of the emotional and power-inflected relationship between practitioners and those with whom they work. I show how different traditions offer conceptualisations of the shape of therapeutic relationships that are highly relevant to consideration of the emotional and power dynamics of giving and receiving care. Against this background I discuss current debates about care, emotions and power, drawing especially on feminist and disability perspectives and arguing that psychotherapeutic approaches offer a powerful lens through which to understand the emotional and power dynamics of caring relationships. I conclude by emphasising how this theorisation helps to illuminate ubiquitous features of women’s care work

Thinking about the production and consumption of long-term care in Britain: does gender still matter?

This article suggests that the literature on care, which originally was heavily influenced by a gendered perspective, has now taken on other important variables. However, it is argued that if we look at the particular impact of the marketisation and privatisation of long-term care, we can see that gender is still a useful perspective on the production of care, especially paid care. The reordering of the delivery of domiciliary care within the ‘mixed economy of welfare’ is having important effects on the labour market for care and is likely to lead to further inequalities between women, both now and in old age. The article proceeds to look at the impact of these inequalities on the consumption of care in old age, particularly by elderly women and considers factors that may provide women with the resources to purchase care and/or pay charges for care. The article argues that gender does still matter, but that its impact has to be understood within a context of growing inequalities between women, and an analysis that takes account of wider social and economic relations within kin networks and between generations

The production and consumption of long-term care : does gender matter?

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Give them the money: is cash a route to empowerment?

This article suggest it is important to unpack the notion of "empowerment" in community care so that the position of those who provide "hands-on" care is scrutinised alongside the empowerment of "users" of care. The particular case of the forthcoming Direct Payments legislation, whereby disabled people will be able to opt for cash rather than services and become employers of personal assistants, is considered. It is argued that both employers and employees in these care relationships are likely to be on low incomes, that the work is likely to be insecure and possibly unregulated, that there might be a problem of labour supply, and that in the long run, this form of employment might generate hardship for the workers so employed. Other forms of reconciling the interests of both users and "carers" are considered

Personal assistants and disabled people: an examination of a hybrid form of work and care

Welfare states are developing forms of payment for care such that the boundary between ‘work’ and ‘care’ is breaking down. Various types of payment are being introduced, but one of the most interesting is the widespread development of direct payment schemes whereby disabled people are given cash instead of services, and expected to use these monies to purchase directly the services of personal assistants. This paper uses the evidence of a small qualitative study of personal assistants to investigate the question of control and power within the care relationship, and the issue of boundary setting between employer and employee. The paper also considers how far this new type of paid care work is different from other forms of paid care which impinge upon the body

Policy is personal: sex, gender and informal care

The last ten years have seen an enormous upsurge in interest in policies for community care in all countries of the developed world. They all have ageing populations and most have governments committed to tight control of welfare expenditure. A major consequence has been the growing attention paid to the position of 'carers' - those who find themselves caring for their relatives in their own homes and for no pay. A considerable academic literature now exists documenting the problems of such carers, and pointing out that it is women who largely bear the burden of care. This book looks at the problem of care from a different angle and asks the question 'Why do people care?'. Using findings from her study of carers living in Canterbury, England, Clare Ungerson discusses the many different kinds of answer to that question.In particular she draws attention to how men and women carers explain their motivation differently, how women, especially, are 'negotiated' into caring by their relatives, and how men and women make sense of the caring they do using different kinds of language. The book develops our understanding of the complicated issues of familial love, duty, and kinship-based responsibility, and of masculine and feminine identity in the context of informal care. It will appeal to a wide audience, including students and teachers of social policy, sociology, women's studies, community care planners, social workers, and carers themselves

Social politics and the commodification of care

The capturing of "unpaid work" as a concept has probably been one of the major successes of second-wave feminism. The impact of that idea has been profound, both in analytical and in policy terms. Within policy, the struggle to name and quantify such work has been worldwide, and the campaign to include domestic labor within public accounting has recently become an important issue both in the United States and in the United Nations (Himmelweit, 1995). At national levels too, welfare states and policy makers within them have learned to pay at least lip service to the way in which welfare delivery is dependent on the continuous presence of mothers and other carers within the domestic sphere (see for example, in the British context, Griffiths 1988)