The Ethnography of Caring Networks: Disentangling a Governance Order In-the-Making

This thesis shifts attention from networks as well-demarcated governance structures to seeing networks as dynamic and emerging social phenomena. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Dutch older person and hospital care, it explores how networking unfolds in everyday governance actions and interactions of affected actors, and with which consequences for their role and work. This thesis calls for a recalibration of network thinking, highlighting the multiple, ongoing, place-based, multi-layered, and multi-purpose nature of networking. Rather than romanticizing network governance, this thesis offers a critical-pragmatist perspective, inviting a ‘romantic-realist’ engagement with the lived messiness of networks as a governance order-in-the-making amidst healthcare reforms.