Epilogue

Abstract

The meaning of care, as I have argued throughout this book, is constructed through discursive practices, which are shaped by and based on concrete relationships between people. By analysing the discourse on care, I have tried to identify people’s associations and assumptions aboutwhatcaremeans. I have investigated how moral attitudes and moral concepts are constructed and reproduced in the context of care. It has been shown that people use this moral grammar to make sense of an important social practice, care for elderly people. Naturally, care is a very personal issue, a personal experience and a personal challenge for everyone. How care is arranged, experienced and imagined reflects people’s personal biographies, ethics, relations and constitutions. However, in this book, I have attempted to show that while the meaning of care is fundamentally shaped within concrete social relations, the construction of those relations, and thus also care, needs to be understood as a fundamentally social issue. In his conception of the Sociological Imagination, first published in 1959, C. Wright Mills (2000) urges us to investigate personal experience in relation to and in the context of wider societal issues.