Change in welfare state policies on social care has been often neglected in the cross-national research on welfare state restructuring in Europe in recent years. In current discourse and research on welfare-state policies in relation to gender, as well as on the question of social exclusion and social integration in relation to care, this issue plays a more important role.

In general, however, analyses have mainly focused on the question of to what degree social care has been formalised and transformed into formal employment, and how this has contributed to an increase in the social integration of women (Kröger, 2001, p 3), while less emphasis has been put on the way informal care work itself has changed, and how such changes can be explained.

In this chapter, we discuss on a conceptual/theoretical level what it means to analyse change in informal care work, as well as, in a comprehensive conceptual framework, processes of the formalisation of care work.

Concepts of ‘care’

As an initial approach, the concept of care should be understood empirically thus:

With the concept of care in social sciences research, or the established English term ‘social care’ (Daly and Lewis, 1998), scientific concepts of welfare production were broadened with a critical intention: to emphasise the dichotomisation of societal life into public and private spheres, whereby care is included in the latter (secondary) private sphere, with the consequence of downgrading social care – also in its occupational or professional form – and with that, the work of women (Lewis, 1992; Daly and Lewis, 1998). Social science and economic gender research on ‘care work’ in the family and labour-market has been carried out (and received) by multiple disciplines from the beginning, and that applies equally to the welfare state debate.

‘Care’ is not just a comprehensive, descriptive approach to the analysis of the work of accompanying and educating people and attending to their personal needs.