Donna Baines
Biographic Data
| ID | 4192953 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Donna Baines |
| GIVEN NAMES | Donna |
| FAMILY NAME | Baines |
| SIGNATURE | BAINES D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3569-0083 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 412 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Emancipatory decoloniality as leadership in social service organizations: Insights from indigenous and anti-oppressive yarnings
Around the globe, there is a growing demand for leadership in resolving longstanding social injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples. As part of a larger, international study, this article draws on early findings from yarnings/qualitative interviews to contribute to theorizing Indigenous leadership in social service organizations. Within our research design, the team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers consciously centre Indigenous w…
We are limited by the structures we work in: Neoliberalism, Feminist Political Economy, and the Social Justice Dilemma in Social Work
The How of Doing Decoloniality in Social Work: Indigenous and Antioppressive Yarning
But where's the body? Bodies, time, money, and the political economy of post-pandemic field research
Since the pandemic, field work has been transformed by shifts in the political economy affecting the material conditions underpinning research. In this research note, a research team considers their challenges and learning in completing field studies conducted in 2022, including intensified strains on time, money, researchers' bodies, and risks associated with illness and infection spread. We argue that a neoliberal 'research super-hero' norm ope…
Rankings, Ruling and Reproducing Inequities: Critiquing the Knowledge Production of Social Work’s “Top 100 Scholars”
Decent care work: Politics, policy, and resistance” an introduction to the theme
The Shifting Labour Process in Professional Care: Recreating Dominance and the Managerialised Mental Health Social Worker
Though the rationalisation of health care has been well documented, less is known about its impacts on mental health social workers. Drawing on qualitative data collected from 120 interviews and the qualitative comments on a Canadian four-province survey, the article explores the shifting labour process through profession-linked and organisational care strategies. The article argues that power is shifted from mental health social workers to manag…
Decolonizing decolonization projects: Neoliberalism, Indigenous services, and Indigenous strategic change in Taiwan and Canada
Low-barrier harm reduction and housing for older people in Vancouver’s opiate crisis: Meeting People Where They Are
Drawing on recent case-study data, this article explores innovative practices around harm reduction and housing for older people who use drugs. Although right-wing groups call for further criminalisation of drug use, in light of extraordinarily high levels of deaths from opioid overdose in Vancouver, Canada, the provincial government has quietly permitted the development of safe supply, the testing of illegal drugs to avoid poisonings and the pro…
Interwoven, cross-sector, situational and enduring solidarities: Crisis, resistance and de-privatisation in care work
During and prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a predominantly female, significantly racialised, activist health and social care union in British Columbia, Canada, built and won decisive resistance/solidarity strategies not only for union members, but also for non-union and previously unionised workers, residents/patients, and the larger careseeking public. The formal and informal strategies were broad, inclusive, values-driven actions that raised wa…
Strengthening critical allyship in social work education: Opportunities in the context of #BlackLivesMatter and Covid-19
COVID-19 has shifted social work education and widened the gaps in services for historically marginalised communities, including people of diverse cultural, sexual and gender identities and social classes. Existing inequities based on cultural differences have been magnified, perhaps most recently evident in George Floyd's slaying and the subsequent #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations across the globe. Learning to be an ally for diverse communities …
Soft Cops or Social Justice Activists: Social Work’s Relationship to the state in the context of BLM and Neoliberalism
In the current dual context of Black Lives Matter/defund the police and calls for accountability to those whom social work has harmed as part of the state machinery, this article returns to the debate on state theory. The article explores three state-linked forms of care, coercion and control: stealth coercion/control (in aged-care); population-linked coercion/control, and police and carceral-linked coercion/control. The article analyses what is …
Relationship-Based Care Work, Austerity and Aged Care
Home care and aged care in English-speaking countries around the globe have enthusiastically taken up a model of work known as 'relationship-based care' (RBC). Part of the popularity of RBC is because it does not challenge austerity, underfunding, and extensive managerialism. Instead it works within and through them to foster caring connections between patients, staff, and families, and is able to do so because workers are willing to self-sacrifi…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 48, No. 3
The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the pace of the digital transition process in which we have been immersed.In a context of generalized lockdown, our organizations have been forced to go digital and many of the activities social workers perform must now be done remotely.As a result, e-social work, or digital social work, has gone from being an emerging specialization to a critical specialty across organizations and activities.In this article, we …
Working in the Context of Austerity: Challenges and Struggles
Nonprofit Care Work as Social Glue: Creating and Sustaining Social Reproduction in the Context of Austerity/Late Neoliberalism
This article will bring together the social glue concept of social reproduction and a feminist analysis of civil society to the study of nonprofit care work in order to cast analytic light on the dynamics of care work in the nonprofit sector and contribute to theorizing care work, to identify and theorize aspects of nonprofit care work which reproduce and sustain social glue, and to supplement theory on civil society. Drawing on qualitative inter…
Zero-sum social policy: Going gig and the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme
Australia’s newly introduced National Disability Insurance Scheme establishes a cash-for-care model that pits the human rights of people with disabilities against the employment rights of care workers, generating a zero-sum game that sees the emergence of gig labour markets, a downward spiral in wages and conditions, and concerns about quality of care. This article introduces the concept of pro-market/gig market to analyze this state-led initiati…
Borrowed Time and Solidarity: The Multi-Scalar Politics of Time and Gendered Care Work
Exploring long-term residential care (Ontario, Canada), we argue that within the context of late neoliberalism, care time is political, contested, and multi-scalar. Multi-scalar time captures the way that time commodifies, disciplines, and delimits workers’ experience of care, and fractures human relations and solidarities. Drawing on data from nonprofit nursing homes in Canada, the article explores how the larger policy context of care work shap…
Precarious care: International comparisons of nonprofit social service work
Off My Own Back: Precarity on the Frontlines of Care Work
Hailed by some as representing the 'most profound change in Australian disability history', care work in the disability sector under the new National Disability Insurance Scheme is described by one frontline worker as 'a massive swing towards a casual workforce and a massive cultural shock'. This firsthand account draws on 13 pages of unsolicited hand-written notes from a long-time, frontline care worker and his wife, as well as an in-depth inter…
Non‐job work/unpaid caring: Gendered industrial relations in long‐term care
This article explores the operation of gender and industrial relations in long‐term care work or nursing home work, ‘from within’ the experience of the predominantly female workforce in seven unionized facilities in Canada. Drawing on qualitative case study data in non‐profit facilities, the article argues that the main industrial relations challenges facing long‐term care workers are that their workplace priorities do not fit within existing, ge…
Filling the gaps: Unpaid (and precarious) work in the nonprofit social services
Unpaid work has long been used in nonprofit/voluntary social services to extend paid work. Drawing on three case studies of nonprofit social services in Canada, this article argues that due to austerity policies, the conditions for ‘pure’ gift relationships in unpaid social service work are increasingly rare. Instead, employers have found various ways to ‘fill the gaps’ in funding through the extraction of unpaid work in various forms. Precarious…
Coercive Care: Control and Coercion in the Restructured Care Workplace
This article re-analyses 105 interviews from four qualitative research studies of different kinds of care workers in Canada and Australia, in light of deepening workplace rationalisation and austerity. The sample included: two studies of voluntary sector social service and social workers—one study of nineteen and one of twenty social workers, twenty-two telenurses and forty-four nursing home care workers. Themes that emerged from the data include…
Moral projects and compromise resistance: Resisting uncaring in nonprofit care work
Arguing that intentional trade-offs between self-exploitation (unpaid work) and the care of others is a form of “compromise resistance,” this article extends Labour Process Theory in the area of resistance and dissent in care work. Drawing on data from studies of care work in the nonprofit care sector, this article explores whether workers’ dissent and resistance strategies promote the interests of workers or of management, or both, and whether t…
Understanding the negotiation of paid and unpaid care work in community services in cross-national perspective: The contribution of a rapid ethnographic approach
In the community services sector government policies and practices around the tendering and contracting out of services have a direct impact not only on the wages and conditions of care workers, but also on these workers' capacity to combine paid care work and unpaid care. The paper reflects on the qualitative methods employed in a large cross-national comparative study of community sector agencies, which contribute to a rich and gendered underst…
Caring for Nothing: Work Organization and Unwaged Labour in Social Services
Unwaged work is a widespread practice in the pro-market, non-market public and non-profit social services in Canada. Under performance-based models of public management new forms of work organization have standardized social services work and expanded the use of volunteers, including the volunteer labour of paid employees. Increasingly routinized work makes it easier for unwaged volunteers to assume work, and for managers to supervise it. New dev…
White knuckle care work: Violence, Gender and New Public Management in the Voluntary Sector
Drawing on comparative data from Canada and Scotland, this article explores reasons why violence is tolerated in non-profit care settings. This article provides insights into how the predominantly female (paid) workers' orientations to work, the desire to care and the intrinsic rewards from working in a non-profit context interact with the organization of work and managerially constructed workplace norms and cultures to offset the tensions in an …
Pro-Market, Non-Market: The Dual Nature of Organizational Change in Social Services Delivery
New Public Management (NPM) has been adopted in a number of Canadian provinces. NPM is not merely a set of neutral and technical public management strategies, rather it is part of the creation of a minimalist, residual welfare state criss-crossed by pro-market, non-market practices. Drawing on themes emerging from original data gathered as part of a study of social service restructuring, this article elaborates some of the pro-market, non-market …
Non‐job work/unpaid caring: Gendered industrial relations in long‐term care
This article explores the operation of gender and industrial relations in long‐term care work or nursing home work, ‘from within’ the experience of the predominantly female workforce in seven unionized facilities in Canada. Drawing on qualitative case study data in non‐profit facilities, the article argues that the main industrial relations challenges facing long‐term care workers are that their workplace priorities do not fit within existing, ge…
Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender, Juggling Responsibilities and Violence in Paid (and Unpaid) Care Work
Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender‐neutral violence; gender‐spe…
Relationship-Based Care Work, Austerity and Aged Care
Home care and aged care in English-speaking countries around the globe have enthusiastically taken up a model of work known as 'relationship-based care' (RBC). Part of the popularity of RBC is because it does not challenge austerity, underfunding, and extensive managerialism. Instead it works within and through them to foster caring connections between patients, staff, and families, and is able to do so because workers are willing to self-sacrifi…
Self-monitoring, self-blaming, self-sacrificing workers: Gendered managerialism in the non-profit sector
Migrant Workers as Non-Citizens: The Case against Citizenship as a Social Policy Concept
Facilitating the movement of individuals and communities from second-class citizenship to full, participatory citizenship has been a preferred social justice strategy for many on the Left. Indeed, within the Canadian social policy and community development literature, the debate over how to re-energize concepts such as citizenship has raged hotly since the mid-1980s. Citizenship is not, however, an unproblematic or wholly inclusive concept. Numer…
Moral projects and compromise resistance: Resisting uncaring in nonprofit care work
Arguing that intentional trade-offs between self-exploitation (unpaid work) and the care of others is a form of “compromise resistance,” this article extends Labour Process Theory in the area of resistance and dissent in care work. Drawing on data from studies of care work in the nonprofit care sector, this article explores whether workers’ dissent and resistance strategies promote the interests of workers or of management, or both, and whether t…
If I Had a Family, There Is No Way That I Could Afford to Work Here’: Juggling Paid and Unpaid Care Work in Social Services
Drawing on three case studies in each of Australia, New Zealand and Scotland, this article explores how care workers employed in the social services sector negotiate their unpaid care responsibilities in the context of lean work organization and low pay. For younger workers, the unrelenting demands of service provision and low pay made any long-term commitment to working in social services unrealistic, while many female workers experienced signif…
Off My Own Back: Precarity on the Frontlines of Care Work
Hailed by some as representing the 'most profound change in Australian disability history', care work in the disability sector under the new National Disability Insurance Scheme is described by one frontline worker as 'a massive swing towards a casual workforce and a massive cultural shock'. This firsthand account draws on 13 pages of unsolicited hand-written notes from a long-time, frontline care worker and his wife, as well as an in-depth inter…
Government Funding, Employment Conditions, and Work Organization in Non‐profit Community Services: A Comparative Study
The article provides a comparative exploration of New Public Management ( NPM ) funding models on the non‐profit sectors in the UK and Australia, and the implications for services, employment conditions, and worker commitment. A degree of convergence exists around the principles of NPM in the two case studies, creating employment regimes of low pay, casualization, and work intensification. Enhanced vulnerability to pay cuts in the UK , and insecu…
Forum: Quantitative Indicators “whose needs are being served?”quantitative metrics and the reshaping of social services
Filling the gaps: Unpaid (and precarious) work in the nonprofit social services
Unpaid work has long been used in nonprofit/voluntary social services to extend paid work. Drawing on three case studies of nonprofit social services in Canada, this article argues that due to austerity policies, the conditions for ‘pure’ gift relationships in unpaid social service work are increasingly rare. Instead, employers have found various ways to ‘fill the gaps’ in funding through the extraction of unpaid work in various forms. Precarious…
Race, Resistance, and Restructuring: Emerging Skills in the New Social Services
Since the introduction of the first neoliberal budgets in the mid-1980s, Canadian social service workers have had ample reason to resist changes in their work lives. Drawing on literature as well as on themes emerging from an intentionally diverse subset of data collected as part of a multiyear study, this article explores the resistance strategies of female, First Nations social workers and social workers of color in relation to changing work st…
Nonprofit Care Work as Social Glue: Creating and Sustaining Social Reproduction in the Context of Austerity/Late Neoliberalism
This article will bring together the social glue concept of social reproduction and a feminist analysis of civil society to the study of nonprofit care work in order to cast analytic light on the dynamics of care work in the nonprofit sector and contribute to theorizing care work, to identify and theorize aspects of nonprofit care work which reproduce and sustain social glue, and to supplement theory on civil society. Drawing on qualitative inter…
Lean social care and worker identity: The role of outcomes, supervision and mission
Since the 1980s, many social care jobs have shifted from the public to the nonprofit sector, accompanied by funding cuts, government contracts, managerialism and performance management. Qualitative data collected in Australia, New Zealand and Canada show that agency mission and immediate supervisors remain centrally important to workers’ identity and willingness to remain employed in social care. With the exception of one study site (where target…
It was just too hard to come back: Unintended policy impacts on work-family balance in the Australian and Canadian non-profit social services
Data from an international comparative study of changes in the Canadian and Australian non-profit social services sector (NPSS) suggest that conditions within specific sectors of the labour market, in this case the non-profit sector, and the distinctive contexts and ethos operating in these sectors influence the ways that women remain attached, reduce their hours or cut ties to the labour market in an effort to balance work-family dynamics. Drawi…
If We Don't Get Back to Where We Were Before: Working in the Restructured Non-Profit Social Services
Drawing on data collected as part of a larger study of the experience of restructuring in the nonprofit (voluntary) social services in Canada and Australia, this article explores the responses to four overlapping interview questions regarding what drew nonprofit social service workers to the sector, what were the positive and negative aspects of working in the sector, and, if given the power, what is the one thing they would change. Responses to …
Gender Mainstreaming in a Development Project: Intersectionality in a Post‐Colonial Un‐doing
This article explores some critical reflections engaged in as part of the earliest stages of applying for an international development project grant. Though most of the funding came from the North, which had the potential to reproduce typical North–South relations, both parties involved in the project agreed to predicate relationships on principles of equity in an attempt to decolonize relationships, or what could be seen as a sort of ‘un‐doing’ …
Borrowed Time and Solidarity: The Multi-Scalar Politics of Time and Gendered Care Work
Exploring long-term residential care (Ontario, Canada), we argue that within the context of late neoliberalism, care time is political, contested, and multi-scalar. Multi-scalar time captures the way that time commodifies, disciplines, and delimits workers’ experience of care, and fractures human relations and solidarities. Drawing on data from nonprofit nursing homes in Canada, the article explores how the larger policy context of care work shap…
Resisting Regulatory Rigidities: Lessons From Front-Line Care Work
In order to advance an argument addressing whether or not ethical and empowering care work is possible within the context of neoliberalism and managerialism, this article draws on international comparative, qualitative case-study data to ask whether processes and practices of radical care and emancipation already exist in nonprofit long-term care and social service work. If so, what do they look like, and what factors hinder or nurture social jus…
Soft Cops or Social Justice Activists: Social Work’s Relationship to the state in the context of BLM and Neoliberalism
In the current dual context of Black Lives Matter/defund the police and calls for accountability to those whom social work has harmed as part of the state machinery, this article returns to the debate on state theory. The article explores three state-linked forms of care, coercion and control: stealth coercion/control (in aged-care); population-linked coercion/control, and police and carceral-linked coercion/control. The article analyses what is …
Coercive Care: Control and Coercion in the Restructured Care Workplace
This article re-analyses 105 interviews from four qualitative research studies of different kinds of care workers in Canada and Australia, in light of deepening workplace rationalisation and austerity. The sample included: two studies of voluntary sector social service and social workers—one study of nineteen and one of twenty social workers, twenty-two telenurses and forty-four nursing home care workers. Themes that emerged from the data include…
Zero-sum social policy: Going gig and the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme
Australia’s newly introduced National Disability Insurance Scheme establishes a cash-for-care model that pits the human rights of people with disabilities against the employment rights of care workers, generating a zero-sum game that sees the emergence of gig labour markets, a downward spiral in wages and conditions, and concerns about quality of care. This article introduces the concept of pro-market/gig market to analyze this state-led initiati…
Feminist Social Work in the Inner City: The Challenges of Race, Class, and Gender
This article presents a critique of various aspects of feminist practice that were not helpful in the context of the author's work in an underfunded inner-city public hospital in an impoverished, culturally diverse community. It also analyzes those aspects that were helpful and illuminated some of the ways in which race, class, and gender are played out in everyday life
Obstacles to Equality: Issues for Purchaser and Provider
(1999). Obstacles to Equality: Issues for Purchaser and Provider. Ethnicity & Health: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 189-210
Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, by Nancy Fraser
(2000). Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, by Nancy Fraser. Feminist Economics: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 149-153
Everyday Practices of Race, Class and Gender: Struggles, Skills, and Radical Social Work
(2001). Everyday Practices of Race, Class and Gender. Journal of Progressive Human Services: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 5-27
Migrant Workers as Non-Citizens: The Case against Citizenship as a Social Policy Concept
Facilitating the movement of individuals and communities from second-class citizenship to full, participatory citizenship has been a preferred social justice strategy for many on the Left. Indeed, within the Canadian social policy and community development literature, the debate over how to re-energize concepts such as citizenship has raged hotly since the mid-1980s. Citizenship is not, however, an unproblematic or wholly inclusive concept. Numer…
Storylines in Racialized Times: Racism and Anti-Racism in Toronto's Social Services
Journal Article Storylines in Racialized Times: Racism and Anti‐Racism in Toronto's Social Services Get access Donna Baines Donna Baines Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 32, Issue 2, 1 March 2002, Pages 185–199, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/32.2.185 Published: 01 March 2002 Article history Accepted: 01 November 2000 Published: 01 March 2002
Pro-Market, Non-Market: The Dual Nature of Organizational Change in Social Services Delivery
New Public Management (NPM) has been adopted in a number of Canadian provinces. NPM is not merely a set of neutral and technical public management strategies, rather it is part of the creation of a minimalist, residual welfare state criss-crossed by pro-market, non-market practices. Drawing on themes emerging from original data gathered as part of a study of social service restructuring, this article elaborates some of the pro-market, non-market …
"Losing the "Eyes in the Back of Our Heads: Social Service Skills, Lean Caring, and Violence
Violence in the social services work place in general, and the developmental services in particular,h as increased in the last several years. Findingsf rom an ethnographic study suggests that new, lean forms of work organization remove opportunities to use or learn many of the tacit or practice skills workers previously used to keep themselves and their clients safer in the work place. This article describes many of these skills and the new manag…
Caring for Nothing: Work Organization and Unwaged Labour in Social Services
Unwaged work is a widespread practice in the pro-market, non-market public and non-profit social services in Canada. Under performance-based models of public management new forms of work organization have standardized social services work and expanded the use of volunteers, including the volunteer labour of paid employees. Increasingly routinized work makes it easier for unwaged volunteers to assume work, and for managers to supervise it. New dev…
Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender, Juggling Responsibilities and Violence in Paid (and Unpaid) Care Work
Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender‐neutral violence; gender‐spe…
Forum: Quantitative Indicators “whose needs are being served?”quantitative metrics and the reshaping of social services
Race, Resistance, and Restructuring: Emerging Skills in the New Social Services
Since the introduction of the first neoliberal budgets in the mid-1980s, Canadian social service workers have had ample reason to resist changes in their work lives. Drawing on literature as well as on themes emerging from an intentionally diverse subset of data collected as part of a multiyear study, this article explores the resistance strategies of female, First Nations social workers and social workers of color in relation to changing work st…
Gender Mainstreaming in a Development Project: Intersectionality in a Post‐Colonial Un‐doing
This article explores some critical reflections engaged in as part of the earliest stages of applying for an international development project grant. Though most of the funding came from the North, which had the potential to reproduce typical North–South relations, both parties involved in the project agreed to predicate relationships on principles of equity in an attempt to decolonize relationships, or what could be seen as a sort of ‘un‐doing’ …
In a Different Way: Social Unionism in the Nonprofit Social Services-An Australian/Canadian Comparison
Drawing on comparative, qualitative data, this article explores unionization in the Canadian and Australian nonprofit social services. The article shows that the growth of unionization in this sector in Canada had little to do with deliberate strategies for union renewal. Instead, union growth and activism rose organically from the values orientation of the predominantly female workforce and the curtailment of workplace opportunities for social j…
If We Don't Get Back to Where We Were Before: Working in the Restructured Non-Profit Social Services
Drawing on data collected as part of a larger study of the experience of restructuring in the nonprofit (voluntary) social services in Canada and Australia, this article explores the responses to four overlapping interview questions regarding what drew nonprofit social service workers to the sector, what were the positive and negative aspects of working in the sector, and, if given the power, what is the one thing they would change. Responses to …
White knuckle care work: Violence, Gender and New Public Management in the Voluntary Sector
Drawing on comparative data from Canada and Scotland, this article explores reasons why violence is tolerated in non-profit care settings. This article provides insights into how the predominantly female (paid) workers' orientations to work, the desire to care and the intrinsic rewards from working in a non-profit context interact with the organization of work and managerially constructed workplace norms and cultures to offset the tensions in an …
It was just too hard to come back: Unintended policy impacts on work-family balance in the Australian and Canadian non-profit social services
Data from an international comparative study of changes in the Canadian and Australian non-profit social services sector (NPSS) suggest that conditions within specific sectors of the labour market, in this case the non-profit sector, and the distinctive contexts and ethos operating in these sectors influence the ways that women remain attached, reduce their hours or cut ties to the labour market in an effort to balance work-family dynamics. Drawi…
Self-monitoring, self-blaming, self-sacrificing workers: Gendered managerialism in the non-profit sector
Lean social care and worker identity: The role of outcomes, supervision and mission
Since the 1980s, many social care jobs have shifted from the public to the nonprofit sector, accompanied by funding cuts, government contracts, managerialism and performance management. Qualitative data collected in Australia, New Zealand and Canada show that agency mission and immediate supervisors remain centrally important to workers’ identity and willingness to remain employed in social care. With the exception of one study site (where target…
Government Funding, Employment Conditions, and Work Organization in Non‐profit Community Services: A Comparative Study
The article provides a comparative exploration of New Public Management ( NPM ) funding models on the non‐profit sectors in the UK and Australia, and the implications for services, employment conditions, and worker commitment. A degree of convergence exists around the principles of NPM in the two case studies, creating employment regimes of low pay, casualization, and work intensification. Enhanced vulnerability to pay cuts in the UK , and insecu…
Understanding the negotiation of paid and unpaid care work in community services in cross-national perspective: The contribution of a rapid ethnographic approach
In the community services sector government policies and practices around the tendering and contracting out of services have a direct impact not only on the wages and conditions of care workers, but also on these workers' capacity to combine paid care work and unpaid care. The paper reflects on the qualitative methods employed in a large cross-national comparative study of community sector agencies, which contribute to a rich and gendered underst…
If I Had a Family, There Is No Way That I Could Afford to Work Here’: Juggling Paid and Unpaid Care Work in Social Services
Drawing on three case studies in each of Australia, New Zealand and Scotland, this article explores how care workers employed in the social services sector negotiate their unpaid care responsibilities in the context of lean work organization and low pay. For younger workers, the unrelenting demands of service provision and low pay made any long-term commitment to working in social services unrealistic, while many female workers experienced signif…
Resisting Regulatory Rigidities: Lessons From Front-Line Care Work
In order to advance an argument addressing whether or not ethical and empowering care work is possible within the context of neoliberalism and managerialism, this article draws on international comparative, qualitative case-study data to ask whether processes and practices of radical care and emancipation already exist in nonprofit long-term care and social service work. If so, what do they look like, and what factors hinder or nurture social jus…
Moral projects and compromise resistance: Resisting uncaring in nonprofit care work
Arguing that intentional trade-offs between self-exploitation (unpaid work) and the care of others is a form of “compromise resistance,” this article extends Labour Process Theory in the area of resistance and dissent in care work. Drawing on data from studies of care work in the nonprofit care sector, this article explores whether workers’ dissent and resistance strategies promote the interests of workers or of management, or both, and whether t…
Filling the gaps: Unpaid (and precarious) work in the nonprofit social services
Unpaid work has long been used in nonprofit/voluntary social services to extend paid work. Drawing on three case studies of nonprofit social services in Canada, this article argues that due to austerity policies, the conditions for ‘pure’ gift relationships in unpaid social service work are increasingly rare. Instead, employers have found various ways to ‘fill the gaps’ in funding through the extraction of unpaid work in various forms. Precarious…
Political science (41 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Law (30 works) · Public relations (24 works) · Law (23 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (18 works) · Work (physics (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Social Work (16 works)