Institutions in Community Care

Abstract

This chapter sets the context of the debate over the place of residential care within community care. It describes the anti-institutional rationale of the past three decades from Erving Goffman in the early 1960s, with his devastating critique of mental hospitals, to Michael Oliver’s equally powerful indictment of the inadequacy of the residential response to people with disabilities in the 1990s. Whilst acknowledging the eloquence and perceptiveness of this ‘literature of dysfunction’ in relation to residential care, the methodological and conceptual inadequacy of such a ‘dualistic’ conception — ‘residential care is bad, community care is good’ — is described and discussed. An alternative, ‘systemic’ view of residential care within caring communities is developed, and, on the basis of the past 30 years’ experience of alternative provision and recent research, the conclusion is drawn that residential institutions are an integral part of how communities care and that there will always be a place for this form of care in a civilised society.