‘You’re only a care worker’. Exploring the status of adult social care work through the intersection of HRM innovation and job quality

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection between job quality and innovation by exploring policy-led innovation aimed at delivering high-quality adult social care jobs that attract and retain much-needed skilled workers. Through qualitative enquiry, we examine workforce policy’s emphasis on training, development and career progression, key elements of job quality, to create higher-skilled, higher-status roles. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with care providers and care workers in Wales (UK), we question the likely success of policy-led innovation given first its ineffective delivery and second its failure to address broader aspects of job quality. Policy thus fails both to institutionalise skilled roles in care work and to raise the status of the care worker occupation. We contribute to emerging HRM and interdisciplinary theory and policy debates about the complex nature of innovation activities and their outcomes for job quality in care work within a sector typified by low-quality jobs. We illustrate the different ways in which job quality and innovation interact and how both can be constrained by one another as a function of environmental antecedents.

Keywords:

• job quality
• innovation
• new work roles
• status

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the participants who took part in this study. We also thank the editor and the reviewers for their helpful and supportive feedback during the revision process

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Due to contracting arrangements with the funder the full supporting dataset is not available.

Notes

1 Project funder not named for reasons of anonymity.

Additional information

Funding

The data gathered is from a funded project. The funder is not named for reasons of anonymity.