Offentlig äldreomsorg som del i ett socialt medborgarskap

Drawing on T. H. Marshall, the notion of
social citizenship is applied in this article
to the development of public care for the
elderly in Sweden. Initially a historical
résumé clarifi es the change of elder care
in Sweden as a move from a residual arrangement
with its roots in the poor laws of
the nineteenth century to become, during
the 1960s and 1970s, an institutionalized
public s ervice c ommonly u sed by e lderly
citizens. It is shown, however, that during
the 1990s features from the old model were
recaptured through changes in the organization
and practices of care delivery. The
authors construct a model for making the
term citizenship operational by the use of
three dimensions regarding access, assessment
and legitimacy. Leaning on empirical
data (mostly interviews) from ongoing
research in eight Swedish municipalities, it
is shown that parallel to a formal strengthening
of rights in elder care, the status of
citizenship is weakened. This somewhat
paradoxical conclusion is built around
the necessity of distinguishing the formal
status of social rights from the qualitative
aspects of social citizenship.