During the era of neoliberalism, the nonprofit services sector has simultaneously been a site of (a) promarket restructuring and collective and individual resistance and (b) alternative forms of service delivery. Drawing on data collected as part of an ethnographic study in the Canadian nonprofit social services sector, this article explores the impacts of some of restructuring on professional, quasi-professional, and managerial employees in eight unionized, nonprofit social services. The data show that the adoption of social unionism has permitted some nonprofit social service workers to initiate new processes through which to have a voice in far-reaching social issues, sometimes in coalition with management and/or clients. The findings of this study point to the irrepressibility of the participatory spirit and its capacity to seek new forms and practices despite the stretched and restructured conditions of today’s nonprofit social services sector.
New Public Management (NPM) has been adopted in a number of Canadian provinces. NPM is not merely a set of neutral and technical public management strategies, rather it is part of the creation of a minimalist, residual welfare state criss-crossed by pro-market, non-market practices. Drawing on themes emerging from original data gathered as part of a study of social service restructuring, this article elaborates some of the pro-market, non-market processes that dominate state-run and non-profit sections of the Canadian social services sector. Special attention is paid to two processes that have had unexpected but major impacts on the deskilling, disciplining and narrowing of social services work, namely the mandatory licensure and specialization of some workers.
Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender-neutral violence; gender-specific violence and the juggling of home and work responsibilities. Collective assumptions and expectations about how men and women should perform care work result in men's partial insulation from the more intense forms of exploitation, stress and violence. This article looks at health risks, not merely as compensable occupational health concerns, but as avoidable products of forms of work organization that draw on notions of the endlessly stretchable capacity of women to provide care work in any context, including a context of violence. Indeed, the logic of women's elastic caring appear crucial to the survival of some agencies and the gender order in these workplaces.he literature on occupational health is focused, rather myopically, on hazards common to the work sites in which men are employed. This restricts the field of inquiry, excluding many hazards encountered in 'women's' work sites (Feldberg et al .
Using data collected as part of a larger, four country, international comparative study, the challenges and strengths of rapid ethnography (RE) are explored. To deepen and enhance the study, in each case study (nine completed to date) an insider is paired with an outsider researcher in order to draw on a comparative perspective from the researcher team involved in each individual case study, as well as across the four countries and nine studies. The article concludes that because of its strengths and rapid turnaround, RE provides a way for international comparative studies to continue despite sharp decreases in research funding and, in our case, produced important insights for those seeking to understand and derail the seemingly unstoppable impacts of neoliberalism and managerialism in social service delivery.
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