The State and Caring is a collection of essays especially prepared by an international team of writers on issues concerned with the part played by the state in the process of caring in modern societies. The writers focus on five societies - Britain, Japan, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. But they deliberately address aspects of the state and caring in these particular societies so as to develop arguments and arrive at conclusions of relevance to modern societies in general.

The writers come from different scholarly disciplines and accordingly employ a range of perspectives on the state and caring. Nonetheless, all the writers adopt approaches to their topics which lie firmly within the 'critical school' of social thought and comment. The writers scrutinise sceptically the outcomes, interests and motives associated with state care, favouring the view that the state not only inadequately but also detrimentally affects people's welfare. An overall message of the book is that we can understand and improve the state's involvement in care only by recognising how this involvement ties in with a further social process - that of social control. At the same time, the book carries the optimistic message that precisely because state care also entails the everyday experience of state control, the state's involvement in caring becomes a crucial source of progressive social change in modern societies.