Doing gendered and (dis)embodied work. Care work in the context of medico-managerial welfare state

Abstract

Whether and how technology-driven managerial reforms affect the field of human service work is a timely question for social sciences. In an increasingly technology-assisted working-life, material conditions such as one’s age and gender may be losing their significance as signifiers of professional identity. Welfare service work is traditionally understood as feminine work that comprises of embodied, situational and social practices of care work. Over the past few decades, public management reforms have called for reassessment of welfare service workers’ occupational skills through practices of medico-managerial service management and occupational accountability. As a result, workers technical competence and occupational accountability in technology-assisted service delivery are increasingly valued over their skills in embodied care and emotion work that have traditionally been viewed as a feminine domain of care work. This article is based on an interview study (n = 23) that assesses female workers’ conceptualization of care work and ‘doing gender’ in the context of Finnish public service sector. The results suggest that gendered cultural expectations continue to invite female workers to ‘do gender’ through embodied and emotional practice of care work. Moreover, the results show that female workers are critical toward the valuations of workers technical and disembodied skills. From the point of view of front-line workers, there is a risk in medico-managerial management of implementing a narrow account of care work as disembodied and technical, which further hampers the recognition of embodied occupational skills and knowledge that remain a domain of feminine work and are integral part of generating trust in worker-service user relation.