Care: Personal Lives and Social Policy considers how normative assumptions about the meanings, practices and relationships of care are embedded in our everyday lives. It explores the ways in which these shape our sense of self and the nature of our relations with others. At the same time the book examines how social policy and welfare practices construct these relations and give or deny them meaning and validity. 
The authors draw upon a range of theoretical approaches and research evidence to bring into focus some of the different spaces and places where questions about care, in all its different dimensions, have been lived out, debated and struggled over. Each highlights the significance that class, 'race', gender, sexuality and age play in the analysis of care relations.