Can You Care For A Profit? A Micro-Ethnographic Exploration of the Lived Realities of Formal Care Workers for Older People

As a subject, care for older people is a topical and controversial issue that features regularly on both media and political agendas. This paper is a response to the recent interest into the apparent ‘crisis’ in care in the United Kingdom, from the perspectives of those currently working within the care industry. This is a topic that needs an urgent and increased level of academic attention, because the average age of society is increasing as life expectancy is rising due to medical and social developments. This paper explores the consequences of the increasing privatization of care work as the state downplays its involvement in health and social care services. It is based on five months of participant and non-participant observations, and developed using the data derived from eighteen in-depth interviews with the staff of three different care homes situated in the East and North East of England.

This paper concludes that unless the tensions discussed within the paper are resolved, the future of care work faces an uncertain future. In today’s aging society, urgent scholarly attention should be directed to the notions of gender, trust, emotional labour, body labour and authenticity of the inter-personal relationships within care settings and how they are affected by the increasing privatization of care, in which care is commonly thought of as a business. Furthermore, the perspective of care workers is rarely addressed within academic literature, and in order to ensure a sustained high quality of care, this viewpoint also needs to be considered. I wish to address these issues in this paper.