Care and resistance to neoliberal reform in social housing

Neoliberal ideologies and associated market imperatives are widely identified as the predominant sets of ethics transforming social housing in western liberal welfare states. This paper advances a politics of care in social housing, identifying relational caring as an alternative political ethic operating in this space resisting and reworking governing logics. Bringing governmentality informed conceptualizations of resistance together with feminist care ethics the paper makes two key interventions. First, it expands existing knowledge of how housing managers resist power structures within organizations to show that care also sustains resistance to sectoral transformation. Second, it examines how housing managers vest care in market practices. Asking how “caring qualities” may be extracted from market relations, the paper argues that market-driven transformation can, in some circumstances, bolster caring capacity. These ideas are advanced through analysis of staff practices in not-for-profit housing providers in Sydney, Australia.