The Social Reconstruction of Care: From the State to the ‘Community’

Abstract

The period from 1945 to 1996 has seen the social reconstruction of forms of care in and by the community. But as in all reconstructions the form of community care in the 1990s is vastly different from that which appertained before 1945. Yet the society within which this reconstruction has taken place bears some similarities to that which has existed since the nineteenth century. This chapter reviews the passage of this reconstruction over the past fifty years from the high noon of state-centred care provision to the slowly developing move towards the fragmented supply of care within the mixed economy. The shift towards a different method of supply of care did not just ‘happen’ in 1990; it was slow but perceptible from the 1950s onwards. It was a move which was accompanied by discourses on social equality and democracy in a ‘civilised’ society, followed in the 1980s by an individualistic dedication to ‘roll back the state’. Within all these discourses there was a different identification of the concept of ‘community’. It was argued in the previous chapter that by the outbreak of war in 1939 many areas of British industrial production and organisation had become Fordist in orientation. This process will be seen to have accelerated during the war and to have become dominant in the post-war period. The move away from Fordism was remarked upon by writers during the 1980s (Murray 1989), and by the 1990s the new concept of post-Fordism was being applied to descriptions of the change in the supply of services and goods. The main differences between these two processes may be made clearer by Table 3.1.