The rest of the study is structured as follows: chapter 2 reviews past research on care, focusing in particular on its relation to political thought. It shows how care has emerged as a topic and object of academic research and political inquiry and theory only somewhat recently, even though it is connected to many questions that are subjects of long-time political struggles. Previous research is outlined in three partly intertwined strands, where care is understood in terms of social reproduction, its essence as an ethical practice, and (global) corporeal relations, respectively. The chapter also shows why and how care is so problematic and complex an issue in politics, and how the idiosyncrasies of care practices play into and disrupt the
‘politics of care’. What I also argue over the course of the study is that care as a site of political struggle is in some ways a very particular field of governance and produces specific challenges for policy (see also Hoppania and Vaittinen 2015). Previous care theorizing helps in understanding why this is so, and the case study at hand then exemplifies how these specificities play out in a practical case. In this chapter, however, I also draw attention to weaknesses in the understanding of care developed in previous research, and work towards an understanding of care suitable for the needs of the research at hand.
Chapter 3 introduces Finland as the context of this case study. Starting with a brief historical survey of elder care in Finland, it offers glimpses into the way public elder care services first emerged as a gendered institution and an object of governance over a hundred years ago, and then developed in the post-war decades as part of the welfare state. The chapter then focuses on the changes and transformations of elder care (and the welfare state more broadly) since the 1990s toward neoliberalism. It explains the development of the social and political landscape in Finland that underpins and forms the backdrop to the legislative process that is the object of this dissertation. It argues that the politics of care are increasingly being played out in particular in the realm of governance of care.
Chapter 4 introduces the case in focus in this study, and describes the process of drafting and passing the elder care bill/act. It explains the stages of the legislative process and shows how the decision to respond to the
problems of elder care with a new law was taken. It examines how the first and second drafts of the law came about at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, how the bill was discussed and debated, and how the hegemonic discourse developed to contain the critiques that were voiced against the existing practices. The chapter analyses the different, competing discourses and articulations that were produced during the process, in particular in the comments to the draft laws, and describes how the parliament dealt with the bill.
Chapter 5 analyses the policy process in depth. It evaluates and discusses the case in terms of Fraser’s three dimensions, and shows how the hegemonic order managed to twist and transform, or subsume and ignore, the demands for recognition and redistribution, and reframe them as a problem of regulation. It argues that this law project, and the initial situation it stemmed from, presented a potential opening to transform and openly debate the political commitments regarding elder care, but that this potential was not realized. The logic of difference, I show, was in operation, and the hegemonic order managed to avert and contain the critiques challenging its power, through the utilizations of a range of nodal points. Instead of answering the challenges and demands presented concerning elder care, the law was turned into a steering tool of governance, which aims to manage and rationalize elder care relations to fit them into the existing order, which is characterized by the hegemonizing neoliberal agenda introduced earlier (in chapter 3). This chapter also discusses the way the structures of representation and mechanisms of participation served to delimit this process.
Finally, the conclusion (ch. 6) brings together and outlines the results of the study, and discusses its implications and importance to care research, policy and political science. The dissertation argues that the policy process and the enactment of the elder care act in fact disregards and sidelines the most crucial questions of the politics of (elder) care, that is, everyday care relations and the practical organization, resourcing and provision of care services, and highly political questions of responsibilities, rights and value of care. The crucial decisions concerning these topics disappear from the national political agenda, and are seemingly depoliticized and made elsewhere. The material and corporeal aspects of care also disappear from view. Instead, a discourse focusing on procedural issues and abstract, formal, rather symbolic care rights dominates the process.
This research shows that elder care politics in Finland today are increasingly characterised by an unstated neoliberal agenda, promoted by the dominating governance regime. This existing order (which still, to be sure, retains some elements of the welfare state universalism) held its hegemonic position in the legislative process under critical analysis in this study. In the light of post-structuralist and feminist political (care) research, the logic of neoliberal governance, with its particular orders of worth and logics of operation, is exposed as both highly political and problematic from the
Introduction
perspective of care relations: It silences and stifles the many other kind of realities, logics and practices which define elder care.
2 CARE AS AN OBJECT OF INQUIRY
Introduction 2.1
Whilst care as a concept now refers to a specific field of study within the social sciences, it only emerged as such after the ‘ethics of care’ tradition in moral theory and developmental psychology began in the 1980s. The concepts of care and caring were used to argue for a shift in ethical thinking away from a focus on the abstract question of ‘what is just’ towards a more practical concern of ‘how to respond’ ethically. Beyond the ethics literature, the political questions stemming from care relations have been an object of academic inquiry since feminist theory took up questions regarding domestic work in the 1970s. But care is a wider concept than what housework, domestic work and care work denote. I would argue that it is also a more fruitful object of political analysis than for example the related concepts of emotional and affective labour, precisely because it extends beyond the realm of work. As the ethics of care approach maintains, care refers not only to work, but is also understood as a relational approach and practice, and an ethical attitude and orientation. Furthermore, the most recent research emphasizes that care also exemplifies a logic of its own, one based on human dependency, which means it always implies a relationship, specifically, a relation of corporeal interdependency. It is this embodied relationality involved in care, and not only its connection to the sphere of paid work, that inevitably makes it a question of power, and consequently a political issue.
This interpretation of the political nature of care also challenges the understanding of political subject relations in traditional (liberal) political theory, where the political relation is typically presented as one between, in principle, equals.
This chapter engages with previous research on care to produce an understanding of care suitable for political analysis and the purposes of the present study. The focus is on research that specifically deals with care, but the discussions on domestic work, social reproduction and the ‘women-friendly welfare state’ are also reviewed in brief. While earlier discussions centered on the analysis of (mainly) women’s unpaid domestic work as a key element in the reproduction of the public workforce, and on the role of state institutions in the maintenance or redefinition of the gendered division of labour, the ethics of care tradition has broadened the discussion by examining how different ethical approaches pertain to power relations. To expand and get beyond these two dominant strands of care research, which I henceforth refer to as care as work, and ethics of care respectively, I examine the more recent attempts to theorize care in novel ways. These include investigations into the logic of care, and care in relation to the global political economy, for example in terms of global care chains and neoliberal
Care as an object of inquiry
governance. The relations of care in a broad sense are at the center of this analysis. I argue that the (attempts at) governance of material care relations, on different levels, is where the most significant site of the politics of care today is located. Power is at play in the modes and techniques by which human beings are made care/caring subjects (cf. Foucault 1982, 777).
Moreover, this chapter discusses the implications of understanding care in particular ways, in relation to political thought. Indeed, searching for an understanding of how care relates to and is of significance to the political was what guided this literature review. The need for an understanding of political subjectivity and relationality that encompasses the insights of care theorizing is emphasized. Care is articulated here as a necessary concept not only for political analysis that concerns social policy, but for any consideration about (the preconditions of) citizenship and political agency. It is a concept that disrupts traditional distinctions and boundaries of political theory and political science, and contributes to an enhanced understanding of human interdependency and of political life. Governance of care is thus inevitably a broader and more intricate issue than what its marginal place in political studies as a subsection of social policy, or in gender research, would suggest.
Brought to the level of policy analysis (which I discuss in chapters 4 and 5), the understanding of care conveyed in this chapter demonstrates how implicit assumptions about care and the role of care in our society shape in a particular way both the causes of and the (proposed) solutions for the problems of elder care in present day Finland and elsewhere.
The rest of this chapter is structured as follows: first, I discuss care in terms of work, with references to the socialist feminist debate on domestic labour in the 1970s, and the more recent revival of social reproduction research. Second, I discuss the ethics of care literature, where the concept of care has been broadened and defined as multifaceted ethical practice. I focus in particular on Joan Tronto’s work on the relation of the ethic of care to politics, and then draw on other feminist theorists to suggest why care has not (yet) entered the core lexicon of political thought. Third, I review the most recent care research and observe that the field has expanded from the reference points of work and ethics to a focus on the relations of care. These relations are shaped both through increasingly globalized governance and by the idiosyncratic logic and embodied nature of care. This strand of research brings to light care as a global corporeal relation. Finally, I conclude by positioning my research in relation to these existing literatures, highlighting the major affinities between my political analysis and this most recent strand of research – particularly when the logic and global corporeal relations of care are situated and examined in relation to the increasing governance of care.