Constructing the care consumer: Free choice of home care for the elderly in Denmark

Traditional welfare institutions are challenged by the desire to design our own individual welfare packages. Politically, the response can be to introduce choice in social policy, also from the aim that the pacified welfare client should re-materialise as an active welfare consumer. This paper analyses the development of the form and concept of consumerism in social policy, taking the domiciliary care for the elderly in Denmark as an example. It seems that consumerism has become part of the logic of governance, and new forms of responsibility have been created which not only empower but also condition the individual citizen. The consumerist approach implies a new social construction of social policy; a second-generation do-it-yourself social policy in which the imperative is to secure the right to choose, more than equality of opportunity to choose or equality of outcome.