ABSTRACT
This book set out with two main aims: firstly, to take a geographical approach to the exploration of change between the formal and informal sectors within the process of care restructuring; and, secondly, to explore change through the conceptual frame of the dependency network. While chapters six to nine have been concerned to examine the experience of care restructuring as viewed by actants located within the network, as noted in chapter four, networked approaches to the analysis of care restructuring maintain that an actant’s experience of care reform cannot be understood in isolation. Change, and the manifestation of change, is viewed as arising from the inter-relationships between actants and the ways in which these inter-relationships are played out on the ground. As a consequence, it has not been the role of these chapters to draw out, specifically, how the social and spatial implications of these processes are manifest within the two areas studied. In turning to consider these, there are three sets of issues with which the chapter seeks to engage:
an examination of the geography of care restructuring at an empirical level and within specific places;
issues of methodological significance to the analysis of care restructuring; and
an exploration of care restructuring from within the dependency network.
