Toward a New Typology of Professional and Voluntary Care

This article proposes a new typology between professional and voluntary care, thus seeking to understand why attempts to establish clear boundaries between them often end in ambiguity and frustration. We argue that because both forms of care represent their own unique and paradoxical ways of combining formal and relational care principles, any attempt to fix the boundaries between them and create the sense of a predictable world usually proves challenging. As such, we show that the two different care practices, in fact, have severe difficulties drawing their boundaries on their own terms. Finally, we consider how these insights might enhance efforts to manage collaborations between professional and voluntary care delivery.