Our study demonstrates that carers’ orientations and dispositions towards the public, social and private spheres and their ways of negotiating among them cannot be read off from formal welfare systems (Chamberlayne, 1993). Carers’ practices in everyday situations are to a large extent structurally determined, yet they are often considerably at odds with institutionalised policies. In this chapter we explore this paradox. We ask what energises creative responses in carers, what features of informal social structures which are contiguous with carers’ lives enable them to negotiate and access outside support, and what cultural dynamics leave them torn between home and non-home identities and resources, or even cause them to retreat into a strategy of isolation.

A key concern is to distinguish the ingredients of social infrastructures which propel carers into greater outer-connectedness and prevent them from becoming enclosed in a narrow world of domesticity. We are also interested in the extent to which these ingredients are in fact the focus of social interventions in Germany and Britain, and whether they figure in contemporary debates concerning social practice and the future of social policy. In our view, carers who negotiate wider connections and for whom caring becomes a process of personal and social development, model the ‘active welfare subject’ which social policy purports to be in search of. It would be all too easy to attribute the outward propulsion of some carers to their individual personalities and so blame others who remain more rooted in the home. Our purpose, however, is to focus on and distinguish key elements of the structural dynamics which give rise to proactive and outwardly oriented strategies in caring, and to discuss what kinds of social policy interventions might support such social engagement. In doing so we are aided by the comparative method, which brings these structural features into view.

In order to intervene at the level of the informal sphere, social policy needs a language and understanding of socio-cultural processes. One of the sources of our own rather tentative terminology is Riley's (1988) notion of the social, which she defines as a fluid sphere of communal interaction and public health reform adjacent to the home, which has often provided avenues to wider public involvement, but which political science has continually fenced off as not ‘political’.