Logistics of care: Trust-reform and self-managing teams in municipal home care services
Peer reviewed, Journal article
Published version
Date
2023Metadata
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- NOVA andre dokumenter [109]
- SAM - Institutt for sosialfag [518]
Abstract
The central idea in trust-reform is to improve service delivery by granting professional
autonomy and acknowledging the experiential knowledge of professionals. In this article,
we study trust-reform bottom-up from the perspective of frontline care workers. Our aim
is to discuss the challenges for care work and care workers who have been organised in
self-managing teams, paying particular attention to the organising of the daily work in
the teams. This study draws on data from four months of fieldwork in Norwegian
municipal home care services for older people. The article sheds light on some
problematic aspects in trust-reform regarding the relationship between frontline
workers’ autonomy and responsibility on the one hand and the lack of authority and
managerial support on the other hand. The study demonstrates that trust-reforms
within public service delivery can be experienced as delegation of logistical tasks and
enhanced responsibility instead of delegation of the authority that is necessary for
professional care work to be performed. As such, trust-reforms risk obstructing rather
than advancing their declared intentions of strengthening professional agency in care
work, and rather than distributing management tasks, trust-reforms need to strengthen
the management function in order to succeed.