Doing gendered and (dis)embodied work. Care work in the context of medico-managerial welfare state

Abstract

Whether and how technology-driven managerial reforms affect the field of human service work is a timely question for social sciences. In an increasingly technology-assisted working-life, material conditions such as one’s age and gender may be losing their significance as signifiers of professional identity. Welfare service work is traditionally understood as feminine work that comprises of embodied, situational and social practices of care work. Over the past few decades, public management reforms have called for reassessment of welfare service workers’ occupational skills through practices of medico-managerial service management and occupational accountability. As a result, workers technical competence and occupational accountability in technology-assisted service delivery are increasingly valued over their skills in embodied care and emotion work that have traditionally been viewed as a feminine domain of care work. This article is based on an interview study (n = 23) that assesses female workers’ conceptualization of care work and ‘doing gender’ in the context of Finnish public service sector. The results suggest that gendered cultural expectations continue to invite female workers to ‘do gender’ through embodied and emotional practice of care work. Moreover, the results show that female workers are critical toward the valuations of workers technical and disembodied skills. From the point of view of front-line workers, there is a risk in medico-managerial management of implementing a narrow account of care work as disembodied and technical, which further hampers the recognition of embodied occupational skills and knowledge that remain a domain of feminine work and are integral part of generating trust in worker-service user relation.

Keywords:

• gender studies
• social care
• social administration
• information technology

Notes

1. The on-going service reforms are on the one hand consequent to the severe recession in the early 1990s that has led to welfare state reconstruction according to the principles of New Public Management (Julkunen 2006). On the other, they result from a longer trend of reforming to transforming welfare states (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011).

2. I follow Laiho and Ruoholinna’s (2012) definition of professional identities in welfare service work that comprises the person’s self-conception as a professional agent based on his or her life history, how they see themselves, what they want to become, what they relate to and identify with, what they value and what their professional commitments are, including the values and ethics of the work. The venue of constructing professional identities is the socio-cultural context of the workplace.