This textbook shows why sociological enquiry is essential to understanding social care.
It explores the socio-historical factors that have shaped the development of social care as a profession and, crucially, highlights the complexity of service users' everyday lives.
Drawing on both classical and contemporary sociological theories and concepts, chapters examine the challenges and opportunities that shape social care practice both now and into the future, including care systems, housing, migration, race, deviance, technology, artificial intelligence and changing regulatory contexts. Looking ahead, the book also emphasises the importance of emotions and the senses, power, the environment, gender, human rights and research, to reveal the multidimensional nature of social care practice in the twenty-first century and the importance of theory-practice interchange.
Written specifically for social care students, educators, practitioners and policy makers, this is the first sociology textbook of its kind to foreground the interlinking roles of history, identities and relationships to social care work. In doing so, it enables readers to understand how inequality and wellbeing must be understood in the social, economic and cultural contexts in which they arise.
