The place embeddedness of social care: Restructuring work and welfare in Mackenzie, BC

Abstract

The concept of social care is valuable in examining how responsibilities for social support are distributed amongst private, public and voluntary interests. We argue that social care is embedded in place, by which we mean the social relations that determine who provides what are closely connected with the physically bounded settings of meaning and interaction in which these activities and relations occur. To illustrate the usefulness of these conceptions, we present a case study of the restructuring of work and welfare arrangements in Mackenzie, British Columbia, a remote and resource-dependent community in the province's northern interior.