Tangled webs? Managing local mixed economies of care

Abstract

This article addresses two main issues about the emergent forms of social care provision in the development of a more mixed economy of welfare in Britain in the 1990s. The first concerns patterns of inter-organizational relationship within local mixed economies of care, paying particular attention to the inter-section of competitive and collaborative models of such relationships. The second concerns the emergence of a'managerial mode of co-ordination'as the dominant force in ordering intra- and inter-organizational relationships in such mixed economies. The article draws on research conducted in two such local mixed economies of care and addresses some of the theoretical problems involved in trying to analyse these new patterns of relationship