Unmasking the enterprising nurse : migrant care workers and the discursive mobilisation of productive professionals

Public care work organisations in Northern Europe often seek to increase their economic efficiency in ways that care workers criticise for reducing both their professional autonomy and the quality of care. Recently, the ideal of ‘enterprising nursing’ has emerged as a political belief according to which economic efficiency, care workers' autonomy and the quality of care can be improved in tandem by cultivating care workers' agential abilities. This article examines the reception of this belief among migrant care workers in Finland. Drawing on research interviews, the analysis demonstrates how migrant care workers may have difficulties in aligning themselves with the enterprising ideals but also in protesting them. Ethnicity, and the status of a migrant, can offer resources for both constructing enterprising subjectivities and reframing care workers' agency, and their organisational environment, in more critical terms.Peer reviewe

The problematic recruitment of migrant labor : A relational perspective on the agency of care work managers

Care organizations in northern Europe recruit increasing numbers of migrant workers, but mostly to low-end jobs and especially to old-age care. According to sociological research, employers and managers play a significant but under-examined role in such recruitment. This article examines the roles played by two care work managers who both have responsibilities in recruitment in a public nursing home in Finland. The article examines the managers’ work through the lens of their occupational agency. Drawing on Emirbayer’s distinction between substantialist and relational sociology, the article adopts a relational perspective on the managers’ agency. Opposite to substantialist studies that operate with analytically pre-given entities (such as agents and structures), the article portrays the managers’ agency as open to relationally changing interpretations. The analysis demonstrates how the managers’ agency in and around recruitment depends on how the recipients of care, migrant workers and their broader political environment are constructed and interpreted. These relationally changing interpretations, the article argues, can serve many functions, including care work managers’ impression management in different situations and, ultimately, the recruitment of migrant workers to (precarious) old-age care.Peer reviewe

Pragmatic inattention and win-win narratives : How Finnish eldercare managers make sense of foreign-born care workers’ structural disadvantage?

The chapter examines the ways in which eldercare managers (e.g. head nurses, home care supervisors, ward managers) in Finland can justify the increasing recruitment of foreign-born workers to lower-level eldercare jobs that are decreasingly attractive to Finnish-born workers. The question we ask is, how can eldercare managers discursively cope with the potential criticism according to which the prevailing recruitment and employment tendencies exploit actors in structurally disadvantaged labor market positions? Our analysis demonstrates how eldercare managers can maintain affectively appealing impressions of their own actions by constructing foreign-born workers as subjects who are inherently interested in eldercare work, and less interested in wages and working conditions. When eldercare managers’ self-presentations depend on these win-win narratives, foreign-born workers’ abilities to mobilize counter-narratives at their workplace are highly limited.The chapter examines the ways in which eldercare managers (e.g. head nurses, home care supervisors and ward managers) in Finland can justify the increasing recruitment of foreign-born workers to lower-level eldercare jobs that are decreasingly attractive to Finnish-born workers. The question asked is: How can eldercare managers discursively cope with the potential criticism according to which the prevailing recruitment and employment tendencies exploit actors in structurally disadvantaged labor market positions? Our analysis demonstrates how eldercare managers can maintain affectively appealing impressions of their own actions by constructing foreign-born workers as subjects who are inherently interested in eldercare work and less interested in wages and working conditions. When eldercare managers’ self-presentations depend on these win-win narratives, foreign-born workers’ abilities to mobilize counter-narratives at their workplace are highly limited.Peer reviewe

Elämää sinnittelevässä pikkukaupungissa

Kirja-arvostelu. Arvosteltu teos:Elämää sinnittelevässä pikkukaupungissa / Vilma Hänninen, Antti Kouvo & Pekka Kuusela (toim.). – Tampere : Tampere University Press, 2020. 319 s. ISBN 9789523590243.Non peer reviewe

The trouble with vulnerability. Narrating ageing during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this paper, we have used the exceptional circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic as a window for investigating the ambivalent, stereotypical and often-incongruent portrayals of exceptional vulnerability and resilient self-management that define the self-constructions available for older adults. From the onset of the pandemic, older adults were publicly and homogenously presented as a biomedically vulnerable population, and the implementation of restrictive measures also raised concerns over their psychosocial vulnerability and well-being. Meanwhile, the key political responses to the pandemic in most affluent countries aligned with the dominant paradigms of successful and active ageing that build on the ideal of resilient and responsible ageing subjects. Within this context, in our paper we have examined how older individuals negotiated such conflicting characterisations in relation to their self-understandings. In empirical terms, we drew on data comprising written narratives collected in Finland during the initial stage of the pandemic. We demonstrate how the stereotypical and ageist connotations associated with older adults' psychosocial vulnerability may have paradoxically offered some older adults novel building blocks for positive self-constructions as individuals who are not exceptionally vulnerable, despite ageist assumptions of homogeneity. However, our analysis also shows that such building blocks are not equally distributed. Our conclusions highlight the lack of legitimate ways for people to admit to vulnerabilities and voice their needs without the fear of being categorised under ageist, othering and stigmatised identities.Peer reviewe

Vanhuus, kieli ja vuorovaikutus (kirjaesittely)

Arvioitu teos: Vanhuus, kieli ja vuorovaikutus: Hippi, Kaarina, Mäntynen, Anne, Lindholm, Camilla. Vanhuus ja kielenkäyttö. Helsinki, Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 2020.Non peer reviewe

Terveyden ammattilaiset : professiososiologisia näkökulmia

Peer reviewe