Research project (Un)equal working conditions? The everyday life and organizations of home care units and residential
An important finding in the thesis “The meaning of gender and skin color in the everyday life of nursing homes under different organizational conditions (Storm 2018), was that it was a tension between the residents’ right to self-determination and influence over their care, and the staff’s right to an anti-discriminatory working life.
This topic is addressed here, when I intend to investigate how ethnicity is discussed and given importance in an elder care sector in transition. With elder services (home care and residential care facilities) in focus, we see two general trends. One is an increasing proportion of foreign-born care workers, and from previous research, we know that non-white care workers can face racist comments and be rejected by clients. The second trend is that elder services are characterized by new market-like influences stressing individualized care and competition. This implies a shift in power where the clients (and their families) become consumers in a care market where care providers compete for potential customers. Issues related to the importance of ethnicity and language barriers under these new organizational conditions are increasingly important but an area with significant knowledge gaps.
This project will investigate the impact of ethnicity/skin color and racism in home- and residential care service's everyday life under different organizational conditions by interviewing 25-30 Sweden-born and foreign-born care workers and around 40 managers in home care- and residential care facilities for older people. The study will be conducted in public and private elder care providers located in municipalities with different extent of customer choice, as such differences may have importance to the extent to which demands for a particular category of care worker are met, not to risk that the clients choose another provider. The interviews will focus on experiences of the importance of ethnicity in different care interactions, the impact on the work-team, and conditions needed to lead multi-ethnic work- teams.
Project description
This topic is addressed here, when I intend to investigate how ethnicity is discussed and given importance in an elder care sector in transition. With elder services (home care and residential care facilities) in focus, we see two general trends. One is an increasing proportion of foreign-born care workers, and from previous research, we know that non-white care workers can face racist comments and be rejected by clients. The second trend is that elder services are characterized by new market-like influences stressing individualized care and competition. This implies a shift in power where the clients (and their families) become consumers in a care market where care providers compete for potential customers. Issues related to the importance of ethnicity and language barriers under these new organizational conditions are increasingly important but an area with significant knowledge gaps.
This project will investigate the impact of ethnicity/skin color and racism in home- and residential care service's everyday life under different organizational conditions by interviewing 25-30 Sweden-born and foreign-born care workers and around 40managers. The study will be conducted in public and private elder care providers located in municipalities with different extent of customer choice, as such differences may have importance to the extent to which demands for a particular category of care worker are met, not to risk that the clients choose another provider. The interviews will focus on experiences of the importance of ethnicity in different care interactions, the impact on the work-team, and conditions needed to lead multi-ethnic work- teams
Project members
Project managers
Palle Storm
Senior lecturer
