Abstract for the biannual conference of the Nordic Sociological
Association, “Dissolution of Society?”18-20 th of august
Turku, Finland
Workshop: Occupations and professions
Betina Dybbroe
Associate Professor
Department of Educational Studies
Roskilde University, Denmark
A Crisis of Learning and Welfare in Care
The recruitment crisis in nursing and health- and social care for the sick, disabled and elderly in Denmark, is the current setting for the actuality of this article and at the same time a political headline that is sought reflected theoretically and empirically, in order to come up with new understandings and more profound implications to this problem.
The recruitment crisis is statistically presented ( as alarming with the coming of 2005-2006), and politically and labour-market wise defined through a short presentation of current discourses on recruitment crisis, and to a brief extent deconstructed through results from quantitative as well as qualitative research on job-satisfaction and devotion to and identification with work, which still is very high . And supplemented by results from analyses of educational choice pointing to health and social work still being an obvious educational and labour- market choice.
The focus of the article is however to explore the problem from primarily the subjective side. It is the main argument that the recruitment crisis is both the result of and at the same time enhances the elimination of learning possibilities in the health sector, and this is enfolded into dismantling of the welfare state. The discussion takes place through the application of four dimensions: educational learning, which is becoming increasingly impeded through the confinement of education into paradoxes in the health sector producing double bind situations of learners, Workplace learning in the frame of self-management, that is threatening for workers subjectivity and therefore enhancing a “non-learning” process, rationality of welfare , which has been the societal and professional framing for care work and the recognition of citizens and care-workers as partners in this, which is being dismantled and at institutional and organisational level individualising choice and quality of the care worker, gender and biography as the gender hierarchical lowering of status of work conflicts with gendered life expectations and experiences of young nurses and health and social workers.
These dimensions are illuminated through three short cases of young nurses´and their experiences of learning in education and work and their position in health and care work in relation to job identification, expectations and strategies. Seen from these cases the relation between a welfare rationality, learning possibilities in education and work, and gendered expectations and experiences of personal development and growth seem of utter importance for developing caring professionals that will go on learning in order to reproduce an create the welfare state provision in health- care in the future.