Abstract
This article addresses the relationship between profession, organisation and spatial (geographical) setting, more specifically the relationship between welfare sector professionals’ conditions for work amidst governance change. In previous research, the conditions for welfare sector professionals’ work have largely been studied without taking the employing organisations or the local and regional situation into consideration. In this article, the authors question and seek to counteract this de-contextualised approach. They do so by showing that the circumstances of the specific workplace context are essential in understanding welfare sector professionals’ working conditions, especially so in current governance contexts characterised to varying degrees by marketisation, via processes and structures which facilitate choice, competition, privatisation and devolution. This line of argument is illustrated in relation to how upper secondary teachers in Sweden experience their conditions for work and employment in eight schools across three different ‘market types’. The authors contend that whilst different conditions in different workplaces can to some extent always be expected, current governance agendas in the welfare sector seem to exacerbate these differences. The article’s theoretical contribution, therefore, is in the privileging of local contextual dynamics. The authors suggest a stronger emphasis on spatially-informed frames of reference in future studies of conditions for welfare sector professionals.
Highlights
The article’s theoretical contribution, is in the privileging of local contextual dynamics
We propose that geographical factors affect the employees too, the teachers; a proposition supported by international research which suggests, for one thing, that teachers themselves can be subject to the pressures of choice-based systems, drawn to and from particular geographical areas by the attractiveness and range of schooling options available (Doherty et al, 2013)
In our own previous research in this context, we found that how teachers describe their conditions for work clearly links back to local and regional circumstances; a differentiation in working conditions was identified (Parding et al, 2017)
Summary
The article’s theoretical contribution, is in the privileging of local contextual dynamics. ‘Welfare professions, encompassing public sector occupational groups such as doctors, nurses, teachers and social workers, constitute one of the backbones in the development of the Nordic welfare states’, Kamp (2016: 1) asserts This importance makes the circumstances surrounding the work and employment conditions of such professions highly relevant both in their own right, and in terms of their importance for society as a whole – in the Nordic states, and elsewhere. Our novel contribution is to address this recommendation by empirically illustrating welfare sector professionals’ working conditions taking specific workplace, local and regional aspects into consideration, conditions which, we argue, are becoming increasingly heterogeneous This investigation of local conditions is important today given that the education sector as a place for education and schooling, and as a place for work and employment, has been and is changing, and is characterised by privatisation and marketisation through choice and competition, involving devolutionary initiatives. Welfare sector professionals can be said to be situated in a kind of ‘institutional crowdedness’ (Blomgren and Waks, 2015), reflected in a range of governance reforms
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