Graham Allan

Friendship and Care for Elderly People

In recent years policy initiatives on caring for elderly people have stressed the need for ‘care by the community’: the use of various informal relationships to provide the elderly with more effective forms of care. The present paper analyses the potential of one type of informal relationship – friendship – to act in this way and argues that, despite appearances, friendship is not a particularly suitable basis for care provision. Not only are many elderly people in need of care excluded from the contexts in which friendships are usually generated and serviced, but more importantly the normal exchange basis of friendship is undermined when there is long-term, unilateral provision of care. Similar factors apply to primary carers friendships. By analysing these issues fully, the paper shows that attempts to incorporate friends into systematic caring is unlikely to be successful. While friends will help in a crisis, in the long run such help is as contradictory to the nature of friendship as it is compatible with it.

Privatization, home-centredness and leisure

This paper is concerned with the changing relationships between home life, family life and leisure, and sets out to investigate how adequately these are captured by the familiar idea of ‘privatization’. Despite its superficial attractiveness, the privatization thesis is found to be wanting in its central proposition of a growing overlap between peoples home, family and leisure activities. There are theoretical grounds for suggesting that there must be limits to how far home, family and leisure can coincide, and evidence from a range of recent studies is drawn upon to support the argument that the growth of home-centredness is not necessarily at the expense of wider patterns of sociability. It is concluded that the privatization thesis is insufficiently sensitive to the diversity of peoples situations and goals.