The dialectics of health and social care: toward a conceptual framework

The difficulty in conceptualizing health and social care resides in its complex and dialectical character: its constitutive social relations are not reducible to a single logic or type of actor; it is both a descriptive and a normative idea, a tool of classification and evaluation, a means of analysis and a weapon of critique. It is both theoretical and practical, a scientific construct and an ethical stance, rooted both in academic disciplines and the manifold practices of health and social care. This article draws out the radical core of the concept of care as a dialogical form of labor that transcends mere instrumental or strategic action; it then explores the contradictions of this praxis in the context of the social division of care in late capitalism.