The discursive politics of marketization in home care policy implementation in Ireland

Abstract

Ideational and gender discursive approaches are used to examine how implementing actors discursively engage with processes of marketization within home care policy in Ireland. Front line service providers, including private actors, non-profits and migrant care workers' problem representations, solutions and underlying assumptions about what a care market is and should be offer insights into how practical experiences of market mechanisms are perceived to shape policy implementation. A focus on how implementing actors mobilize discursively on home care underlines how implementation should be viewed as a process that continues to be negotiated, often contested or even resisted, as it is implemented. Implementing actors' legitimize, contest and adapt to the marketization of home care in divergent and overlapping ways as discursive agents that mediate between policy design and implementation reproducing in turn gendered and racialized ideas about care and care work.

The growth of private home care providers in Europe: The case of Ireland

“…In Ireland, as in many other countries, commercial home care provision remains under‐researched notwithstanding a few studies that have addressed certain aspects of it within the context of social care marketization (Cullen, 2019; Lolich, 2017, 2019; Mulkeen, 2016; Timonen & Doyle, 2008; Timonen, Doyle, & O'Dwyer, 2012). The only study that focused directly on private providers was conducted before the significant expansion of the commercial sector over the last decade (Doyle, 2006).…”

Responses to the COVID‐19 crisis in Ireland: From feminized to feminist

“…In Ireland, the pervasive undervaluing of care and poor care infrastructure impacts on women's access to paid work, while the concentration in low paid care work in turn increases women's risk of poverty. The state pursuit of the marketization of the care system has also played a role in relieving the state of its responsibility to find a public solution to care needs (P. Cullen, 2019). Austerity marked an intensification of a process where the state shifted human dependencies from public to private concerns.…”

Care policies in practice: how discourse matters for policy implementation

“…Implementation involves power struggles among a plurality of stakeholders with different aims: those that want to implement the policy as originally intended, those that aim to modify its goals and those that will try to slowdown or impede its implementation. Assessing who is invited to take part in the implementation process and whose claims are represented is a fundamental task in the assessment of policy implementation (Cullen, 2019;Engeli & Mazur, 2018).…”

“…It involves power struggles among stakeholders with different aims: those that want to implement the policy as originally intended, those that aim to modify its goals, and those that will try to slowdown or impede its implementation (Ahrens, 2018). The article by Cullen (2019) in this special issue shows that both public and private actors engage in discursive contestations around the meaning of care and the role of the market in elderly care provision in Ireland. Such contestations did not only occur during the process of implementing the new homecare regulation, but continued after the policy was implemented as a vast array of private and civil society actors tried to negotiate alternative framings of the policy problem.…”

“…The study of a wider range of actors is also relevant for mapping resistance and contestations in the implementation phase by identifying and analysing collective actors mobilising in favour and against specific measures and the arguments they put forward (Cullen, 2019). While judicial actors are generally absent in gender policy implementation studies, civil society actors are more commonly found in research on the implementation of international regulations such as gender mainstreaming or gender violence policies.…”