This chapter presents a critical review of the care literature, and suggests overall that there is a need to embrace complexity in grappling with understandings of care. This chapter critiques the traditional polarisations upheld in the literature around care/abuse and carer/caree. I develop a case for care and abuse to be understood as potentially coexisting components of family interactions.

In the first section, the focus is on the language and labels of care relationships, questioning the way that the literature has traditionally polorised aspects of care – particularly around the positions of care/abuse and carer/caree. In doing so I indicate the difficulties in drawing on these terms in an uncritical fashion, and promote the need to work with the complexities of care situations to gain a further understanding of people’s relationships.

Constructions of care are then introduced by focusing on ideas around gender/culture and typologies. This leads in to a review of literature that examines how care and difficulties are constructed in policy and in academic publications. The review then focuses on several core themes, namely dependency, stress, difficulties, surveillance and identity. These all feature prominently in the care literature. These themes reappear in the latter half of the book, and create a structure for reporting on the discursive analysis of interview transcripts of carers/carees. By introducing the literature in this critical way, the reader is led into the social constructionist enterprise of the book. This begins to then illuminate the possibilities for analysing texts and indicate the live practice implications that become possible when adopting a discursive and social constructionist framework.

The research, policy, and other publications reviewed in this chapter cover a wide time frame. Some stem from years before the research presented in this book was undertaken, and have been continually influential. Other articles have been published during the fieldwork, analysis, and during this final writing phase. These have been incorporated into the shape, analysis and commentary of the book. Pieces of social policy and writing on care and abuse will continue to emerge, and space and time will not allow for all of these to be explored within this book. However, I hope that through the careful explication of social constructionist approaches (see Chapter Two), a platform for the critical analysis of such documents is offered to enable the reader to continue this enterprise elsewhere.