Relationship-based social policy: personal and policy constructions of `care'

This article stems from a constructionist understanding of community care, drawing on the work of Bytheway and Johnson on the social construction of community care and Heaton's Foucauldian analysis of the visibility of the informal carer. The article develops an understanding of how care is represented in contemporary social policy and what appears to be missing from such constructions. This builds on the work of Lloyd who identifies a lack of consideration of the multidimensional aspects of care in policy. The Department of Health's National Strategy for Carers is problematized, and issues of what is and is not visible in this policy are discussed in the light of research into care relationships by the authors. We argue that, while emotional labour and the relational component of informal care are highly salient in the constructed accounts of both carers and cared-for people, they are invisible in the National Strategy.