Cultures of Care

This work compares the experiences of unpaid family carers in three different welfare systems. It is based on narrative interviews in which carers were invited to speak freely about their caring situation, how it unfolded, what support they had, and what caring meant for their lives. The book investigates the inter-relatedness of the personal and the social, how individual lives are shaped by different social systems, and how individual life-paths are forged, even in the most constrained situations. Its purpose is to bring alive and extend abstract models that are used in comparative social policy by: showing how the social relations of caring are structured within and outside the home environment; using separate analyses of "lived" and "told" stories to highlight personal processes of continuity and change in meeting the challenge of caring; and comparing the case links of individual strategies to the structural features of welfare societies.