ABSTRACT
The geographical variations in care restructuring that have been explicitly unpacked in the previous chapter illustrate how the experience of care restructuring can vary both across space and within places. The localities examined in this study have been shown to be implicated in crosscutting sets of relationships that are tied to wider (non-local) processes in a number of differing ways. These linkages reveal a complex set of global-local articulations in which place is seen to be defined, in part, by a set of locally contingent factors that occur within a territorially bounded social world, but also, in Castells’s terms as the ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 1996, 423–428). Hence, the places examined within this thesis can be seen to have been constructed within broader and more complex spaces of integrative networks. As the study has revealed, however, these places can be subject to divergent care outcomes. The differences in provision and the processes through which such provision is translated between Dumfries and Galloway and Glasgow City, for example, has illustrated how local actants are tied into sets of relationships both with other local actants and with those located elsewhere. In this way, space can clearly be seen to make a difference to the social processes of care restructuring. What is evident here is that in each place space is significant in a number of ways and at a variety of scales.
