The policy and implementation of the housing role in community care—a constructionist theoretical perspective

This paper contends that academic analysts, working within the discipline of ‘housing studies’, have misrepresented the meaning and significance of the housing role in community care, and that this has resulted from their unwillingness to utilise an explicit multi‐disciplinary and theoretical approach to its study. The first half of this paper attempts to provide a new and alternative definition of housing's community care role by locating its analysis within a constructionist theoretical framework. Then, using the research findings of a study undertaken in Wales, the second part of the paper analyses the critical questions of ‘what did and did not happen and why during implementation?’, which a theory of policy and implementation must claim to be able to answer if it is to justify itself as an analytical framework. The paper relates particularly to community care for people with mental and physical disabilities, rather than older people.