Understanding the impact of eldercare on working women’s lives:a pilot study

1. Responsibility for elder care is now a major issue for families, especially women. It often has an adverse impact on their economic and social well-being. Combining employment with elder care presents particular challenges. 2. Our survey suggests that around half the University's staff have elder care responsibilities, and more expect to take on elder care in the future. 3. There is a considerable additional burden of work for elder carers, which can be very stressful: • these staff are very conscientious about maintaining high levels of performance at work • most of them undertake elder care after working hours and one day per weekend, on top of caring for their own household and children/grandchildren • elder care is more unpredictable than childcare, typically including more and longer crises • although external support services (e.g. from local authorities) may exist, staff are often unaware of these, and elders frequently refuse to accept them. 4. Elder care impacts negatively on women's career development, including by limiting their ability to study for qualifications, undertake research, or seek promotion. This is particularly stressful for women academics now required to do a doctorate, some of whom have had to suspend studies. 5. Flexibility in the workplace, and information about available support (both within the University and from external services) emerge as key issues in enabling women to manage these challenges. 6. The role of line managers in helping women achieve flexibility is crucial. Whilst some appear to be helpful regarding elder care issues, others are unaware or unsupportive. There is currently no specific attention to elder care issues in managers’ training or induction. 7. The University Counselling Service is viewed by line managers as an essential resource for staff involved in elder care, especially following bereavement. However, it is not completely confidential, as line managers' approval is needed for faculties/services to pay for the service. 8. Few staff involved in elder care are aware of University family-friendly policies that may apply to them. Some who had searched for these on the intranet had been unable to find relevant information. 9. HR staff are not aware of the extent of elder care as an issue for staff at the University, and it is not monitored. HR receive requests for dependents' leave for childcare but not for elder care

From Careers Adviser to Personal Adviser: Emotion, Ethics, Politics and Learning in a Disrupted Community of Practice

This paper discusses recent policy reforms in career guidance for young people in England. It offers a case study of disruption to an established community of practice; presents evidence of its emotional, ethical and political effects; considers the implications for workplace learning and reconsiders theoretical conceptualisations of ‘communities of practice’

Communities of practice: reinscribing global labour in workplace learning

The concept of ‘communities of practice’ is widely used in workplace learning research. Whilst critiques have expanded its use in ways that claim more socially just approaches to workplace learning, a more critical analysis for change is needed. This paper draws on a case study of career guidance professionals’ work with young people, radically disturbed by new welfare-to-work policies. Their emotional and ethical labour reveals powerful processes of alienation, but also of resistance. Without reinscribing such aspects of globalized labour and capitalist power relations in workplace learning, ‘communities of practice’ remains a concept with a gaping hole in the middle

School-to-work transition services: marginalising ‘disposable’ youth in a state of exception?

Disadvantaged young people often inhabit a dangerous space: excluded from education, training and employment markets; constructed as disposable; and cast out as ‘human waste’ (Bauman, 2004). There are many macro-level analyses of this catastrophic trend, but this paper provides insights into some of the everyday educational micro-practices which contribute to such marginalisation. It presents findings from a study of a national school-to-work transition service in England, in a context not only of neo-liberal policies but also of severe austerity measures. The data reveal processes of triage, surveillance and control – driven by governmental and institutional targets – which denied many young people access to the service, including some of the most vulnerable. Beneath a rhetoric of social inclusion, the service in fact acted as a conduit into a dangerous space of exclusion. Drawing on the work of Butler and of Agamben, the article argues innovatively that such practices may represent an encroaching state of exception, in which more or less subtle forms of governmentality are gradually being supplanted by the more overt exercise of sovereign power

Learning experiences of adults mentoring socially excluded young people: issues of power and gender

Adult educators have not as yet investigated the vast movement of adults who mentor socially excluded youth. But these mentors are adult learners too. Their experiences suggest that mentoring – in any context – may entail the ‘toxic’ learning of emotional labour. More attention should be paid to their training from a perspective of social justice