Does providing care mean anything? For Bernhard Weicht, meaning is a social concept. The ‘meaning of care’, he argues in this book, is ‘constructed through discursive practices, which are shaped by and based on concrete relationships between people’ (p.208). His field of investigation concerns moral attitudes and moral concepts – the elements of what he calls the ‘moral grammar’ of care. In what to me represents a sort of phenomenological analysis wrapped in the clothes of a social discourse analysis, Weicht is concerned in this work with often profound questions of how these attitudes and grammar are constructed and reproduced.

His approach to the topic of care involves a sort of broad discourse analysis of normative values associated with attitudes to one quite specific form of care – the informal care of elderly people. He addresses six specific sets of questions, devoting an entire chapter to each. The chapter on ‘Who should care?’ concerns the construction of caring relationships. ‘Where should care be given and received?’ focuses on the question of whether care is best provided at home or in a specialised residential setting. When addressing the question of ‘how should communities care?’ he explores attitudes towards community responsibility for the wellbeing of intimates and strangers. The chapter on ‘Who is seen to need care?’ addresses the social construction of the older recipient of care. And in the final substantive chapter, ‘buying and selling of care’, Weicht explores concerns about markets and the bureaucratic organisation of care. Each issue or question is approached through an extensive, and generally discursive, literature review, intertwined with citations from focus group discussions with carers and others the author has conducted in Austria and the UK.

The strength of the approach is evident in the extensive citation of care theory and research in nearly every chapter. This book is a marvellous resource for anyone wanting to update themselves on the now extensive writings on the topic, with an extensive bibliography, including a number of references in German and one or two in Dutch that are perhaps not so well known in the Anglophone world. Sadly, though, there is little in the way of critique of any of the literature, or any attempt to summarise the key points from the discussions or to develop a core argument drawn from the existing research. Much the same can be said of the citation of his focus group research. Snippets of conversations with carers collected during focus group sessions are introduced throughout most chapters. Yet the empirical research is not used to test hypotheses derived from the literature. Nor is it used to develop an original or alternative account. Rather, the focus group research is selected and presented in such a way that it serves mainly to illustrate points raised by theory.

If these aspects of the work disappoint, it is nonetheless a significant achievement to draw together so much material and to identify the broad normative consensus about care as a core value and a key activity that not just arises from but actively constitutes family as a sphere of intimate social relations. Insofar as this work has an argument, it is that the way that care is arranged, how it is experienced and imagined is shaped by specific social relations and therefore needs to be understood as a fundamentally social issue. While there are probably few social scientists who would disagree with this stance, many would suggest that it needs to be taken further.

In some ways Weicht's research recalls the approach taken by Finch and Mason (Reference Finch and Mason1993), who in a landmark study explored how responsibilities for care were negotiated amongst families, within a broader cultural contest in which women were typically assumed to bear primary responsibility as a duty. Their attentiveness to the disagreements about family responsibility for care, their critical feminist gender aware stance and their emphasis on the need for negotiation of these responsibilities, stands in contrast with the more bland consensus approach that seems to emerge from Weicht's account. While he was clearly aware of the emphasis that most care research places on gender, Weicht gives the issue surprisingly little attention.

One of the more surprising results for me is the absence of any clear differentiation between the norms evident from the focus group discussions amongst British participants and those in Austria. In contrast to the findings of researchers such as Chamberlayne and King (Reference Chamberlayne and King2000), neither national culture nor contemporary welfare regime seems to have emerged as a significant determinate influence on the normative values expressed about care. Perhaps it would have helped if Weicht had sought a more systematic exploration of this question, but the evidence he produces suggests that Austrian and British carers have far more in common than might be thought by those whose primary focus is on social policy.

For those who see care of older people primarily through the lens of social policy, this book offers a refreshing alternative perspective. It is only towards the end that policy issues receive attention, and then only obliquely. Weicht's concern with the elusive concept of meaning offers an entirely different perspective. Although he hints at the need for a political ethic of care in the epilogue, his account is far more concerned with philosophical and ethical issues than with political programs. When it is discussed around the family table or in certain focus groups, perhaps this is, indeed, what care means.