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Social Care Diamond Analysis

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1.2 Roles of each sector in the care diamond Applying the framework of ‘care diamond’, it’s important to involve the analysis of the roles of state, market, family and community in the ‘mixed economy of care’. This part discusses roles of each sector and the relationship between these four sectors in the care diamond. Firstly, the state is an active actor in welfare states in dimensions of production, finance and regulation, especially in the field of social care. As Powell (2007) and Lund (2007) emphasized, the state is traditionally active role in the welfare delivery. In recent decades, the role of state is globally challenged across various care regimes. Lund (2007) proposes two challenges in welfare delivery: the new managerialism of welfare …show more content…

Drakeford (2007) argues that market has changed ‘from the margin to the mainstream’ in agenda of the mixed economy of welfare. As Daly and Lewis (2000) and Greener (2008) illustrated, the role of the market is increasingly greater than ever in the ‘welfare mix’ across welfare states. In the field of care for older people, the influence of market is evidently and broadly growing in the majority of welfare states (Brennan et al, 2012), especially evident in the dimensions of service provision and finance. For example, as Lewis and West (2014) illustrated, the market is dominant in the mixed economy of care in the UK, with the percentage of independent home care services rising from 5% in 1993 to 81% in 2011. Referring to direct service providers/care labour, paid care workers rather than family members are performing an active role for older people who lived in either residential care homes or at their own homes, especially in developed areas. For example, foreign care workers are widely participating in elder care provision in European countries like UK, Italy, Sweden (Shutes and Chiatti, 2012, Walsh and Shutes, 2013, Lewis and West, 2014) and some Asian societies like Singapore and Taiwan (Ochiai, 2009). In the context of extensive marketisation in various fields, the market started to play an active role in the field of care for older people services in urban China in late 1990s. As Ochiai (2009) argued, the globalisation pushes the sudden burst of marketisation of care in China. Feng, et al. (2012) propose that the growth of the private sector is increasing in urban

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