This book has painted an ambivalent picture of residential child care. On the one hand it is hard to argue with Cameron's portrayal of the sector as one ‘emptied of its potential, a dried up expression for how to manage an underclass of disadvantage’ (2003, p 93). Evoking this image is not to say that residential child care is universally bad. There are many pockets of good practice and even in the worst situations there are individual carers who strive on a day-to-day basis to do their best by those they work with. The problem lies less with the individuals who work in residential child care than with the wider context in which they are expected to do their jobs. As Heron and Chakrabarti note, the ‘good practice that does exist does so against a backdrop of organisational and professional failure’ (2002, p 356). The corporate parents of children in state care might benefit from parenting classes.

While it is hard to ignore the current state of the sector, I hope that a positive spirit threads through the book; residential child care can be a conducive environment for children to grow up in. For this to happen, however, requires a fundamental rethink of the discourses that currently shape policy and practice. If residential care is to become a positive option in the lives of children it requires that new ways of thinking are brought to bear, based around the concept of care itself. Care is essentially a relational and moral endeavour rather than the technical/rational one it has become. Before moving on to discuss care in some more detail I will address why current attempts to manage and ostensibly improve residential child care through increasing bureaucracy and regulation are conceptually flawed. Care is emptied of its potential by the bureaucracy of solid modernity and by the neoliberal precepts of liquid modernity.

The problem with bureaucracy

Bauman (1989) offers some telling insights into the functioning and effects of bureaucracy. He likens the modern period's obsession with rationality and order to gardening. At its extreme he associates the gardening mentality, reified in the assumptions and practices of bureaucracy, as being implicated in the Holocaust.