The construction and crisis of professional care from the perspective of elderly care workers

Abstract

The focus of the study lies at the current and domestic social policy relevancies aiming to answer the question of how and in what form the symptoms of the care crisis appear in the field of elderly care which is one of the most important but underestimated areas of professional care. Furthermore, concentrating on what additional burdens both paid and unpaid reproductive labour put on the mostly female employees. The qualitative study that took place in the summer of 2020 primarily focused on exploring the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, assuming that the pre-existing organizational crisis has been made even more visible and exacerbated by the measures to curb the pandemic. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with the key stakeholders of care management in a mid-sized town located in the Southern Great Plain: with heads of institutions and primarily with middle managers in a coordinating role. In the second the phase of study, focus group interviews were conducted with non-executive caregivers. The purpose of analysing these interviews is to explore the personal perceptions of the care crisis in addition to constructing the concept of caregiving through a normative lens of the values and political philosophical presuppositions of care ethics.