This dissertation is about how knowledge is constructed in interactions and what knowledge entails in practical social work. It is about how a collective can provide a foundation for the construction and development of knowledge through the interactions contextualized in this study on Swedish elder care, organized by the municipality. This study follows a research tradition that recognizes knowledge as socially constructed, and focuses on the practice of knowledge within an organizational context of care. This is an ethnographic study. The empirical material consists primarily of field notes from participant observations at two elder care units in a midsized city in Sweden. Moreover, the collected materials include national and municipal policy documents, local policy documents and guidelines, and notes from observations in staff meetings and interviews with care workers and managers. This thesis uses Institutional Ethnography as a departure point for analyzing the contextual factors for workers in elder care, mainly women, and the situational factors for acquiring knowledge. The overall aim of this dissertation was to explore knowledge in elder care practice by analyzing the construction and application of knowledge for and by staff in elder care. This sheds light to the Mystery of Knowledge in Elder Care Practice: Locally Enabled and Disabled. In order to pursue this aim, two questions were addressed in the study: 1. How and what kind of knowledge is expressed and made visible in daily elder care practice? 2. How is knowledge shared interactively in the context of elder care? The findings shed light to the situation for care workers in elder care and the conditions for using and gaining knowledge. This situation is problematic as the local conditions both enables and disables knowledge use and sharing of knowledge. Contributing challenging factors are lack of recognition and equal valuing of various forms of knowledge; the organizational cultures and a limiting reflective work to the individual. The main findings in this thesis are presented in three areas: - a way of understanding tacit knowledge, which refers to knowledge gained by care workers through working in elder care; - the connection between an organizational culture and the knowledge shared within the organizational culture; - reflective practice in elder care work and the imbalance between individual and collective reflectivity. These findings have implications for specific knowledge in social work practice and the need for education linked to this knowledge. Formal knowledge alone is insufficient for effective elder care practice; however, informal knowledge is also insufficient alone. Both are needed, and they should be linked to create synergy between the two types of knowledge.

The aim of this study is to explore the cross-border migration of Zimbabwean women who undertake various types of care work within the domestic sector in South Africa. The study seeks to understand the female labour migration within the context of global care work. It utilises the global care chain concept, which describes the employment of women and men to provide care in wealthy countries while leaving a care gap in their own families. The specific objectives of the study were as follows: 1. To examine the reasons for care workers’ migration to South Africa. 2. To investigate their work experiences in relation to duties, contractual agreements, hours worked, benefits including leave entitlements, employer-employee relations, and overall working conditions. 3. To examine the perceived macro and meso benefits and costs of the cross-border migration for care workers and the extent to which these impacts affect familial relations in Zimbabwe. 4. To explore the coping mechanisms and strategies employed by migrant care workers in navigating the challenges encountered in the course of their duties. 5. To examine women’s interpretations of their work experiences in relation to their position in society (or their position as migrant care workers in society). This study drew on two theoretical concepts: social reproduction from a feminist perspective, and transnationalism. Social reproduction places an emphasis on care and describes the activities of maintaining life daily and nurturing future generations. Transnationalism involves migrants maintaining relations in both their home country and the receiving country. Data was collected through a qualitative research design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants from four domestic worker recruitment agencies and 26 domestic and care workers in two cities, Johannesburg and Pretoria. Both cities are located in Gauteng, one of the nine provinces in South Africa and the country’s economic hub. The cities were chosen based on statistics showing that migrant inflows from outside South Africa were highest in Gauteng. The leading findings were that Zimbabwean migrant care workers in South Africa faced exploitative working conditions as the majority of them were undocumented or irregular. They faced challenges in obtaining valid work visas due to the stringent immigration policies in South Africa. It emerged that without legal documentation, migrant care workers could not seek employment through formal channels such as recruitment agencies. They used informal channels such as social networks and the ‘market’. The study highlighted that these informal channels were risky and did not offer protection and safety to either the care workers or the employing families. Further, it emerged that migrant care workers were vulnerable to exploitation through poor working conditions that violated labour laws. The findings highlighted that the benefit of migration for care workers was the opportunity to find employment, which enabled them to become economically active as income earners and financial providers. Through the income they earned, migrant women were able to send remittances in the form of money, groceries, and clothing to their families in Zimbabwe, reflecting transnational care practices. The study revealed that the migration of women was associated with social costs such as the emotional strain resulting from the separation of family members and the extraction of care resources by removing carers from the family. In light of the transfer of care resources through their migration, migrant women had to make care arrangements to fill the gap. They found suitable caregivers in their extended families. They made use of the information and communication technologies of smart phones to maintain ties with their families. The overall contribution of the study is that it gathered evidence to show that migrant care workers within the Global South are more vulnerable to exploitation largely due to unregulated migration processes when compared to South-North global care chains. This evidence supports the argument that employment conditions, migration laws and policies, as well as national labour standards can intersect to shape the status and experiences of migrant domestic workers. Based on the findings of the study, the following recommendations for policy, practice and future research were made: Recommendations for policy: • Introduction of less stringent and affordable visa options for care workers. • Strengthening of bi-lateral or multi-lateral agreements within Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries to allow both the sending and destination countries to establish safeguards to protect the employer and employees. • Redefinition of domestic and care duties and responsibilities. This entails a distinct classification of roles and responsibilities for workers in this sector in policies and laws to ensure that employees are remunerated accordingly. • Training of care workers to enhance their skills as well for the protection and security of care recipients and employers in general. Recommendations for practice: • There is need to ensure that migrant domestic workers enjoy same labour rights as other workers. Recommendations for future research: • Further study could explore the perceptions of employers to understand their motivations and the domestic employment relationship. • Research that focuses on the experiences of domestic workers from other countries in the SADC region. • Comparative study of migrant domestic workers and their local counterparts would be useful to understand whether the challenges they face are specific to the sector or are associated with their migrant status. / Thesis (DPhil (Sociology))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / UP Postgraduate Doctoral Research Bursary / Sociology / DPhil (Sociology) / Unrestricted

This thesis investigates the ways in which women’s international migration from Armenia to Turkey is governed by the production and re-production of appropriate feminities and masculinities by macro-level state policies, legal texts and by everyday cultural discourses. Through an analysis of policy documents, legal texts and data collected through interviews with policy makers both in Armenia and Turkey, this thesis shows that gendered norms and rituals are implicated in how states regulate, intervene or simply ignore who are allowed or denied entry. Border regulations are affected and in return discipline the ideas and norms revolving around how the deserving feminine subjects of society should act and think.This thesis demonstrates that in focusing on a South-South migration from the perspective of gender challenges the dominant analysis of International Relations (IR) on migration, which has framed international migration mostly as a question of international security. In contrast, this thesis brings the rich political histories, social contexts and economic concerns – framed by gender, class and racial hierarchies – to bear on the flows of migrant women from Armenia to Turkey. This framework developed here has two important implications for how migration is studied in IR: one, it paints a much more complex picture of state-migrant interactions that goes beyond simplistic security/exclusion claims; and secondly, it allows for a multi-faceted conception of women’s agency. This thesis argues that migrant women develop several methods of managing their identities in order receive acceptance and legitimacy in the context of the gendered regulation of migration by Armenia and Turkey. They actively participate sometimes to challenge their characterization as “illegals”, as immoral mothers and women, and as useless workers. Their relationships with their families, employers, police officers and compatriots are carefully described and analyzed. The findings suggest that migrant women’s experiences are multifaceted and cannot be subsumed under a category of “irregular” migrant. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research explores the themes of participation and professionalization as they intersect with power in domestic violence advocacy by using a case study from one region in Kentucky. Throughout this dissertation, I investigate the ways political and economic pressures influence local domestic violence advocates and the ways these macro-level pressures influence 1) an advocate's level of participation in the organization and 2) a transition in social service provision to a professional model of advocacy. The research illustrates that the nature of domestic violence service provision is changing in the United States as a result of the increasingly privatized nature of social service provision and subsequent shifts in domestic violence advocacy participation practices and professionalization trends.Specifically, I explore the relationships between power and levels of participation in domestic violence advocacy by examining the relationship between power, the expectation for increased professionalization within social service agencies, and the local level negotiations of these expectations. Furthermore, I provide an ethnographic description of the daily activities of a domestic violence organization to illustrate why, how, and what aspects of the program are transformed in a new model of professionalized social service provision. Additionally, this research includes the voices of oral history participants in the domestic violence social movement in Kentucky. As services in Kentucky undergo a transformation aimed at further professionalizing domestic violence advocacy, the historic local knowledge of domestic violence advocacy and activism is useful for clarifying the foundations of contemporary advocacy service provision and activism by providing a longitudinal perspective.The changing field of domestic violence advocacy is marked by the move towards unequal power relationships between the advocates and the women, the lack of victims' and advocates' participation in the creation and implementation of programming and services, and the professionalization of domestic violence organizations and workers. This local case study contextualizes the trends that are currently acting upon social service organizations in general, thereby illustrating thecomplexity of human service provision by examining the multiple messages that domestic violence advocates, and thus human service care workers in general, negotiate.

The purpose of this essay is to explore a common situation of special education in Taiwan. Paraprofessionals, mostly consist of women, are asked to afford most care works for disabled children under the institution of special education. As men join as paraprofessionals to take care responsibilities, duties may be distributed by gender categorization. Moreover, care routines for children in the practice of daily life are divided into educational and caring matters which also much influence the partnerships between teachers and paraprofessionals. Based on the Institutional Ethnography, that emphasize through problematic daily experiences of those actors, to find how the institution to govern their relationships in the hidden domination, author has adopted in-depth interview of sixteen paraprofessionals and five teachers, moreover, engaged in participant observations to analyze where the caring practice reoccur and how much the influence of power of the institution to represent the relationships differentiated between these actors according to their gender and professional degree in the classroom. This study reveals, first, that women are shaped to be perfect care workers for disabled bodies, they also satisfy with mothering imagination through daily practice. Second, a few men join to be care workers only for a short period. To maintain traditional masculinity, caring experiences of men in the classroom are presented within stereotypical practice associated with gender stereotypes. At the same time, gender division of work can well keep men from the accusation of sex violation. Third, professionalism is the important factor influencing the interactions and negotiations between those actors who engaged in the special education institution. Furthermore, care works in this regard are distinguished into a dichotomy of body/ mind care responsibilities, and it may reshape the hierarchy inside the women.

The present study analyses the welfare state as employer by studying eldercare workers’ experiences of their work in Sweden and Denmark.  The Nordic welfare states are often described as potentially women-friendly due to the availability of publicly provided services that enable women to combine paid work and caring responsibilities.  Whereas this might be empowering for a large group of women, paid care workers are often neglected in the discussion. The theoretical point of departure is Nancy Fraser’s dualistic model of gender justice, which encompasses redistribution (of material resources) and recognition (in the form of social status). By utilising survey-data (NORDCARE) on Swedish (n=532) and Danish (n=732) eldercare workers, the study shows that care recipients have larger needs and working conditions are more arduous in Sweden. However, in both countries workers report deficiencies with regard to insufficient resources, such as lack of staff, limited opportunities for development and training, and lack of necessary equipment for lifting service users, of support from managers and of reasonable time for the tasks to be performed. The pressure at work makes the care workers feel inadequate in relation to quality of care they are able to offer. The differences in job strain between the countries turn out to be of little importance when the care workers’ experiences of bodily and mental fatigue are compared. The bodies of the care workers are their main working tool and thus the bearer of the working conditions. More than 60 per cent of the respondents state that they often are physically tired after the day's work, and two-fifths of the respondents have seriously considered leaving their job during the past year. In both countries, the experience of physical and mental fatigue and the number of sick days over the past year are important factors behind thoughts about quitting the job. Using a dualistic model of gender justice, where redistribution and recognition are theorised as overlapping analytical dimensions, the results are interpreted as continuous organisational shortcomings which make the care workers’ everyday work invisible, and in the long run imply a risk for their health.

abstract: This qualitative study examines how fathers, who stay home with their children and identify as the main care-giver within their family, construct their role as the primary caregiver. I analyze the narratives of stay-at-home fathers focusing on the thematic areas of isolation, resistance and the division of household labor. Unlike previous research, I examine the ways in which fathers construct their position as a stay-at-home father separate from the traditional stay-at-home mother role. Consequently, I focus on the constructions of masculinities by stay-at-home fathers that allows for the construction of the stay-at-home role to be uniquely tied to fatherhood rather than motherhood. In this research, I explore three questions: 1) how do stay-at-home fathers construct their masculinity, specifically in relation to their social roles as fathers, partners, peers, etc.? 2) Is the negotiation of household labor, including care work and household tasks, in these families a reflection of shifting gender roles in the home where the primary caregiver is the father? 3) In what ways does social location and intersecting identities influence the ways in which fathers construct this stay-at-home identity? My research emphasizes how these fathers understand their role as a stay-at-home father while challenging some traditionally dominant expectations of fatherhood. Specifically, I use themes of isolation, resistance, and the division of household labor in order to understand the multiple ways fathers experience their roles as stay-at-home parents. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Gender Studies 2016

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organi zations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front-line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Aus tria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gender ing of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work pat terns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activa tion paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect-neutral male bureaucratic work.

Thesis advisor: Erika L. Sabbath / The care industry is encountering a critical demand for care workers in the formal and informal sectors. As a result, the healthcare industry is strained from the increasing shortage of workers and capacity in facilities. Moreover, there is a desire among the aged to age in place, thus, care provided in the home and community is also on the rise. The requisite for care workers in the U.S. suggests that this population is vulnerable to job and personal demands in the workplace that are associated with negative health outcomes such as poor sleep and burnout. The purpose of this three-paper dissertation is to evaluate the moderating effects of job and personal resources on the health and well-being of nurses and patient care associates (PCAs) in the formal sector and Filipina care workers in the informal sector. The first two papers used the Boston Hospital Health Workers Study, a longitudinal study that was established in 2006 to examine the working organization and condition, behaviors, and health outcomes among healthcare workers from two large hospitals in the same health system in Boston. The first paper (N=845) used a mixed methods approach and used logistic regression analysis to examine the association of discrimination and short sleep and interaction terms to assess the buffering effect of people-oriented culture between discrimination and short sleep. The qualitative section used a combination of grounded theory and thematic analysis of interviews of unit nurse directors (N=16) to gain an in-depth understanding of how discrimination transpires in the workplace and the resources available to address discrimination and poor sleep among care workers. The second paper (N=874) evaluated the association of job and personal demands and burnout using logistic regression. Interaction terms were implemented to assess the buffering effect of workplace flexibility between job and personal demands and burnout. The third paper used semi-structured interviews of Filipina care workers in New England (N=14). A combination of grounded theory and thematic analysis were used to analyze the qualitative data. In Paper 1, findings showed that people-oriented culture did not buffer the relationship of discrimination and short sleep. However, people-oriented culture slightly attenuated the association of discrimination and odds of short sleep. Qualitative findings illuminated that discrimination transpired among co-workers in relation to their job titles and while numerous job resources are available, these resources do not necessarily address discrimination and promotion of inclusivity. In the second paper, workplace flexibility moderated the relationship between married healthcare workers without children and odds of burnout. Moreover, there are significant associations between active (high demand, high control) and high strained (high demand, low control) workers with perceived low workplace flexibility and odds of burnout. In the third paper, qualitative findings highlighted that Filipina care workers are tasked with multiple job responsibilities that are associated with abuse and injuries and personal demands of providing financial care to their family and saving face from divulging difficult experiences. While job resources like job contracts are helpful in lowering the likelihood of abuse, lack of government oversight facilitated violence in the workplace. Filipina care workers found support through community organizations and advocating for themselves and other fellow care workers. Findings from this study suggest that organizational policies and practices play a role in attenuating poor health outcomes among care workers but not all experience these policies and practices equally. Barriers such as not acknowledging discrimination directly and providing specific resources to discrimination, differing control in the workplace because of job title and racial and gender identities, and reporting abuse and violence in the workplace outweighing the cost of the demand to provide the needs for family members prevent care workers from being able to fully benefit from these policies and practices. Nevertheless, while structural changes take time, unit managers in formal settings and employers in informal settings can address these inequities in their specific settings to improve the health and well-being of care workers. This dissertation will assist the field of social work to advocate for federal, state-level, local, and organizational policies to be implemented in the workplace that will adjust to the needs of healthcare and domestic workers. Furthermore, the study can also inform future interventions to integrate effective organizational policies that reduce poor sleep quality and burnout among care workers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

This dissertation explores the transnational care perspectives and practices of black immigrants working on the frontlines of eldercare in Greater Boston. Responding to the critical shortage of caregivers for the burgeoning aging population, first-generation immigrants from African and Caribbean countries find work in this field, performing physically and emotionally grueling work as Home Health Aides and Certified Nursing Assistants for low pay and few benefits. At the same time that these caregivers provide the most intimate care for older Americans and adults with disabilities, they often take on caring responsibilities for their aging relatives abroad. Evidence from fifty in-depth interviews with African and Caribbean caregivers reveals that these immigrants are changing the climate of eldercare in the U.S. as well as in their countries of origin by providing eldercare-specific economic and social remittances to their families abroad and fictive kinship through creative emotion work for their clients in the United States. These practices are informed by their transnational social location and work experiences which expose these caregivers to different state systems and care cultures. A dual evaluation of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of national eldercare systems produces for them a general definition of compassionate eldercare as the delivery of life saving medical care and skillful emotion work that ensure elders feel dignity in body and mind. Along with perceived cultural differences, these caregivers identify income inequality and weak welfare regimes as producing atmospheres of resource deficit and emotional deficit in the countries of origin and country of settlement, respectively. These perceptions provoke these caregivers to attend to the observed deficit and provide well-balanced compassionate care for their dependents, whether family member or client. These immigrant caregivers derive a sense of agency and pride from "filling the voids" in care for their clients and family members, arming them with a positive transnational caring identity strategy that helps guard against racism and marginalization they often experience on the job. Taken together, these findings reveal new ways of thinking about eldercare best practices and illustrate how actors at the micro level can inform institutional change at the global level.