In defence of care: The importance of care as a positive concept

This article is about the implications of the different uses of the concept of care in the research and debate on home care. It can be read as a comment on the British debate, seen with Norwegian eyes, and from a starting point where care is a positively loaded concept. The article begins with a definition of care, in order to try to identify some core elements, and then proceeds to examine two main lines of attack on care in the British debate. A distinction between care as an ideal and as practice is introduced, and the article tries to demonstrate how the outcome of caring can be seen as a result both of political attitudes and of different forms of organisation. The article concludes by discussing why we need to save ‘care’ as a positive concept in the evaluation of formal systems providing care as a social service.