Performative Compliance and the State–Corporate Structuring of Neglect in a Residential Care Home for Older People

Abstract

The abuse and neglect of older people in care homes is widespread across England, but current causative explanations are limited and frequently fail to highlight the economic and political factors underpinning poor care. Informed by social harm and state–corporate crime perspectives, this study uses ethnographic data gathered through a nine-month period of working in an older person’s residential care home to show how neglect is embedded in working routines. Three aspects of care are interrogated to reveal the embedded nature of harm in the home; all reveal the rift between official, regulatory rules and informal working practices shaped by material constraints of the labor process. This article explores the role of regulatory regimes in actively legitimizing sectors, such as the residential care industry, even in the face of routine violence, by bureaucratically ensuring the appearance of compliance with formal rules. While the harms of contemporary institutionalized care for older people have its roots in material conditions, performative compliance through regulation guarantees that these injurious outcomes are concealed. This article contends that malpractice (and harm) can be explained with reference to conjoint state–corporate relationships and practices.