Boundaries of Professionalization at Work: An Ethnography-inspired Study of Care Workers’ Dilemmas at the Margin
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Within the last decade, rehabilitation has been promoted as a new professionalization opportunity\nwithin home care policy and practice in both Denmark and across Europe. Rehabilitation is said to\nreconfigure home care work in ways that result in improved working conditions, better quality of\nservices, and cost savings. Rehabilitation is, however, only the most recent example of an ongoing\nrange of new reforms and demands that have focused on professionalizing home care workers and their\nareas of work by imposing new professional structures, qualifications or status on the workers. And,\nyet, despite these ongoing processes of professionalization, home care workers, and care workers as\nsuch, continue to be socially, technically and economically marginalized at work.\nThis paradox has increasingly encouraged in particular feminist-inspired academics (e.g., Sullivan,\n2007; Cheney and Ashcraft, 2007) to question whether we have sufficiently understood the\ncomplexities and particularities of how professionalization processes are constituted and function at\nwork. Their studies indicate that both definitions of “professionals” and the more material modes of\norganizing and doing “professional” work in the west tend to privilege some workers (i.e., white,\nwhite-collar, heterosexual males) and marginalize others, especially female workers who perform\n“dirty”, private household services for the aging or disabled, such as home care workers. Following\nthese studies I take a critical stance against the so-called professionalization opportunities that are\noffered to home care workers with the introduction of rehabilitation in home care organizations. I ask\nwhat happens to the home care workers’ area of work and their risk of being socially, economically and\ntechnically marginalized, when they are confronted with the new opportunities to professionalize in\nrehabilitative home care organizations.
Source: Econstor (Econstor)
Author: Maya Christiane Flensborg Jensen
Language: English
Subfield: Industrial relations
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2801386380