NEO-LIBERAL PUBLIC PROVISIONS IN NORDIC COUNTRIES: CASE OF SENIOR HOUSING SERVICES

Abstract

The subject of this research is the assessment for approaches, reflections and mentalities of neo-liberal public provisions in Nordic countries over the case of senior housing services. The research problematizes conceptual and functional effectiveness of public provisions in Nordic countries regarding senior housing services. This research will also aim at contributing to the literature and the scholarship on senior care-work in the context of changing welfare-state arrangements in the Nordic countries’ care-work regimes. Following findings and discussion in the framework of the aims of the study, it will be finalized by making some recommendations in line with the conclusions. In the context of on-going societal transformations involving neoliberal reforms and long-term demographic developments, Nordic care regimes suffer a particularly severe deficit of care labor while the Nordic region constitutes an increasingly attractive region in the context of global mobility. Accordingly, care work organization needs to be examined in specific localities, taking into consideration both the travel of ideas and the activities of the people with whom they travel the reshaping of practices and the experiences of people affected. This study tries to call attention to the role of neo-liberal policies related with the globalization in the changing Nordic care regimes, but not as a deterministic force that transforms the different local regimes according to one model that reflects globalization. Our aim is not to emphasize the unavoidability of convergence or to celebrate divergence. Instead, the neo-liberalism with glocalisation argument calls attention to the fact that the characteristics of the social embeddedness of care work regimes are not fixed. In this vein, we argue that the impact of neo-liberal public provisions on care work regimes related with senior housing services may be best understood if we consider neo-liberalism as a dynamic mix of convergence and divergence.