Abstract
Despite dramatic expansions in the Chinese nursing home sector in meeting the increasing care needs of a rapidly aging population, direct care work in China remains largely devalued and socially unrecognized. Consequently, scant attention has been given to the caregiving experiences of direct care workers (DCWs) in Chinese nursing homes. In particular, given the relational nature of care work, there is little knowledge as to how Chinese DCWs manage emotions and inner feelings through their emotional labor. This article examines the emotional labor of Chinese DCWs through ethnographic data collected with 20 DCWs in one nursing home located in an urban setting in central China. Data were analyzed using conventional content analysis and constant comparison. Participants’ accounts of sustaining a caring self, preserving professional identity, and hoping for reciprocity revealed implicit meanings about the often-conflicting nature of emotional labor and the nonreciprocal elements of care work under constrained working conditions. Importantly, the moral-cultural notion of bao (报 norm of reciprocity) was found to be central among DCWs in navigating strained resources and suggested their agency in meaning-construction. However, their constructed moral buffers may be insufficient if emotional labor continues to be made invisible by care organizations.
Highlights
Nursing homes in China during this period primarily served as social welfare/social relief institutions
Three overarching and interlocking themes were identified: sustaining a caring self, preserving professional identity, and hoping for reciprocity. These themes suggest the implicit meaning and often-conflicting nature of nursing home care work and are described in detail below with narratives from representative direct care workers (DCWs) summarized in each theme
This article delves into the manifestation of emotional labor among Chinese DCWs, a group of service workers whose labor is devalued and stigmatized, and an underexplored topic in China’s aging studies
Summary
From the 1950s to the 1990s, the Chinese government provided little formal longterm care opportunities for its population outside those welfare recipients who comprised the “Three-No Elders”; i.e. older adults with no children, no income, and1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology (2022) 37:1–22 no relatives (Feng et al, 2020). LTC provisions in China are largely characterized by informal family care mechanisms, supplemented by home- and community-based care, institutional care, and private sources (Gu & Vlosky, 2008) Under the former socialist system there was restricted demand for social welfare services, and older people were expected to seek support primarily from their family and their work units (Wong & Leung, 2012), i.e. employment organizations, which provided ‘cradle to grave’ welfare benefits primarily in the socialist era. As China experienced market-oriented transformations in the 1980s and the ensuing socialization of social welfare, LTC was gradually decentralized and diversified to include non-state operators During this transitional period, nursing homes were no longer dominated by government ownership and started to admit self-funded older adults other than welfare recipients (Feng et al, 2020). Rapid urbanization, increased labor mobility, the one-child policy, and limited capacities of state and local communities have all inflated the demand for formal elder care since the 2000s as families became smaller and dispersed (Wong & Tang, 2006; Feng et al, 2020)
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