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Social care to assist with the activities of daily living is a necessity for many older people; while informal care provided by family members can be a first step to meeting care needs, formal care provided by professionals is often needed or preferred by older people and their families. In England, the number of older people paying for formal care is set to rise, driven by an ageing population and the limited resources of local authorities. Little is known about how older people and their families experience the potentially disruptive processes of deciding upon, searching for and implementing such care, including the financial implications. This paper explores accounts of seeking self-funded social care in England, told by older people and their families in 39 qualitative interviews. These accounts, which we call 'care chronicles', include stories about the emergence of care needs and informal care-giving, the search for formal care, including interacting with new systems and agencies, and getting formal (paid) care, either as the recipient or an involved family member. Stories are analysed through the lens of biographical disruption, and analysis demonstrates that such disruptions can occur for older people and their families across the entirety of the care chronicle. Needing, seeking and getting care all have the potential to cause practical and symbolic disruptions; moreover, these disruptions can be cumulative and cyclical, as attempts to resolve or minimise one disruption can lead to new ones. While the concept of biographical disruption is a mainstay in medical sociology, it is less frequently applied to issues relating to social care, and most often takes embodiment as a key focus. This study is novel in its application of the concept to experiences of seeking self-funded care, and in its introduction of the concept of 'care chronicles', which invite a longer and broader view of biographical disruptions in the lives of older people with care needs and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supporting people to 'age in place' – to live independently at home and remain connected to the community – is an international policy priority. But the process of ageing in place is mediated in a socio-cultural context where neoliberal tropes of successful ageing reproduce a pervasive model about 'ageing well' by elevating ideals of individualised choice and self-governance. Based on two waves of qualitative interviews and interim observations, we employ a Bourdieusian logic to explore the ramifications of this context on the experiences of 46 people in later older age (80+) ageing in place in North East England. All participants enacted everyday improvisatory practices to render their homes habitable. But our participants – most of whom were located in middle-class social positions – supplemented such improvisions with a strategic disposition to plan for and actively shape their ageing-in-place futures. Our participants conveyed a distinct sense of agency over their ageing futures. Underpinning their orientations to practice was an awareness of the value attached to individually 'ageing well' and a distancing from the agedness associated with the fourth age. Our analysis demonstrates the role of capital, accrued throughout the life course, in bringing such future trajectories into effect. The central argument of this paper therefore is that the embodiment of (neoliberal) ideals of successful ageing in place requires the deployment of classed capital. In sum, contrary to the individualising narratives ubiquitous in policy pertaining to ageing well, we show the importance of classed structural moorings in this process. • Regardless of class, older adults (80+) tinker to render their homes habitable. • Bourdieusian analysis shows how class shapes (successful) ageing in place. • Focusing on middle-class experiences deepens insight into ageing inequalities. • Dispositions to plan for and actively shape ageing futures requires capital. • The individualising focus of successful ageing ideals is inherently classed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tells of the social constructs surrounding young children with learning difficulties in their home, 'special' early education setting and 'inclusive' or mainstream early education setting in England. The exploratory study focused on how three- to four-year-old children made sense of their environments and how their identities were constructed by different parties in the different contexts. Ethnographic case studies were conducted using semi-structured and informal interviews with parents and practitioners, documentary analysis, fieldnotes, and live and video observations. Shared constructions across the contexts for each child were common, with constructions of them being happy and making progress pervasive across the children and settings. Differences in constructions across settings indicated that qualities could shine or negative constructions be tempered, thus showing the role of the environment and the culture of inclusion in socially constructing children with special needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws parallels between the market trend in the English NHS and Polanyi's (1957) The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press: Boston (originally published in 1944 in the United States as The Great Transformation, Rinehart: and Co: New York, and in 1945 in England as Origins of our time, Gollancz: London) account of how the rise of markets provokes a self-protective counter-reaction that tries to re-embed economic relations in social relations. We report findings from a qualitative study of NHS contracting, which examines the recent move to harder-edged contracts with greater use of financial penalties and incentives. In practice, use of these techniques tended to be confined to nationally-mandated sections of the contract rather than emerging from local bilateral agreements, and when things went wrong the parties relied more on cooperative behaviour than on the provisions of the contract to find solutions. Making the current contracting system work depended more on existing relational networks than on the incentive structures created by recent 'marketisation' initiatives, but the inability of the market to evolve as expected has encouraged policy makers to publish plans for further radical reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a qualitative study of UK mental health practitioners' experiences of working with the contested condition, dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD). Our interviews focused on the issues of treatability, risk assessment and decision-making in multi-disciplinary teams. We discuss the approach of values-based medicine (VBM) as a useful framework for interpreting the data: respondents cited both explicit values (based on occupational training) and implicit values (based on personal beliefs and subjective perceptions). There was evidence of conflicting values -- within individuals, between occupational groups, and between individuals in occupational groups -- which led to widespread uncertainty and caution about whether and how those with 'dangerous' personality disorders could be treated. These disputes were resolved by a 'slide to pragmatism', whereby practitioners, reluctantly acknowledging their own empowerment in the process, sought to make whichever choice was least risky for their own professional reputation, and most pragmatic, given the resources available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper seeks to make sense of the sleeping practices of people who are recovering from heroin use. It brings together two hitherto unrelated literatures: the sociology of sleep and studies on heroin use and recovery. Conceptual resources developed within the sociology of sleep are deployed to facilitate the analysis of interview data generated as part of a qualitative investigation into the everyday lives of recovering heroin users living in England. Twenty one men and 19 women were interviewed with 37 of the 40 being interviewed twice, giving a corpus of 77 interviews. Without exception all the participants in the research experienced extensive sleeping problems that were not only exacerbated by the pharmacological effects of heroin, but were made worse by the way of life that accompanied their using. Irregular and anarchic sleeping practices mirrored the study participants’ disrupted and difficult lives. Attempts to establish sleep routines, and normative sleeping patterns, constitutes an important marker of recovery, but after years, and for some decades, of chaotic, intermittent and irregular sleeping, cultivating sleep presents a series of difficult challenges. Their embodied biographies of heroin use constrain the promotion of sleep, and attempts to develop rituals and routines to restore sleeping patterns are confounded by the involuntary aspects of sleep and their recalcitrant bodies. These findings are significant because not only is the quality of sleep critical to health outcomes but it also forms an important but hitherto relatively overlooked aspect of recovery from heroin use. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]