Authors:Vyda Mamley Hervie Pages: 95 - 127 Abstract: In high-income countries, population ageing has a significant impact on the labour force and care demands. As a result, the tendency is to rely on migrant workers to meet workforce and care demands. Drawing on insights from Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this study focused on unskilled migrant healthcare assistants in Norway’s long-term care. The objectives were to explore factors influencing the decision of unskilled migrant healthcare assistants to work in elderly care, sources of knowledge about work in elderly care, and challenges encountered in elderly care work. The key research questions were as follows: a) What factors influence the decision of migrant healthcare assistants to work in elderly care' b) What are the sources of knowledge/information about work in elderly care for migrant healthcare assistants' c) What are some of the challenges of working in elderly care for migrant healthcare assistants' Qualitative research and purposive sampling were used to recruit 20 participants: 13 unskilled migrant healthcare assistants and seven managers of long-term care facilities in South-Eastern and Northern Norway. Data were collected using in-depth individual interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation, and thematically analysed. Findings indicated that factors influencing unskilled migrant healthcare assistants' decision to work in the elderly care sector included cultural norms and values of caring for older people, nonrecognition of overseas qualifications and economic considerations. State-organized language learning programmes, Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) offices, as well as migrant family and community networks, provided crucial information about work in elderly care. Challenges regarding lack of career progression, temporary working contracts, low status and poor wages emerged. In conclusion, meaningful employment outcome through better opportunities for career progression are essential for unskilled migrant healthcare assistants’ well-being and care for older people. It would be useful for long-term care policymakers and stakeholders to address the challenges faced by its aged care workforce. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.31265/jcsw.v18i2.690 Issue No:Vol. 18, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Zubia Willmann-Robleda, Memory Jayne Tembo-Pankuku Pages: 128 - 153 Abstract: The last decades have seen a shift towards activation policies in welfare states, such as the introduction programme for refugees in Norway, a qualification programme that seeks to prepare refugees for the labour market. In the last decade, the programme has placed further focus on refugees’ duties rather than their rights, as it had previously done. This article examines the strategies that work counsellors in the introduction programme use to ‘activate’ and assist newly arrived refugees as they prepare to enter the Norwegian labour market. We focus on how work counsellors guide and motivate refugees in this process. We draw on 10 semi-structured interviews with work counsellors in various municipalities in southwestern Norway. We suggest that the activating strategies used by the work counsellors may be seen as a form of aspirations management to get the refugees to shift their aspirations toward those the work counsellors see as more achievable within a shorter period, to get them more quickly into the labour market. We suggest that unchecked power dynamics, together with increasing time-pressure on work counsellors, may be at play leading them to exert too much influence, and leading to user involvement practice not being properly implemented. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.31265/jcsw.v18i2.570 Issue No:Vol. 18, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Maria Norstedt, Per Germundsson Pages: 154 - 179 Abstract: In many countries, self-employment has become a common strategy for achieving inclusion in the labour market. Studies show that the occurrence of self-employment depends not only on individual motives, but also on existing policies and support. In Sweden, labour market measures to include people with disabilities are primarily organized to achieve inclusion through traditional forms of employment, though one tool offered by the Swedish Public Employment Service is Support to Start a Business. One part of this support is exclusive to people with disabilities. Although the Swedish Public Employment Service is responsible for this specific support, they collaborate with both external state-funded and non-profit actors who assess applicants’ business ideas. Drawing on the methodological approach of institutional ethnography, this article explores how the in-house frontline workers and external actors describe their professional roles, how they make decisions and what the chain of action looks like at multiple sites. Nine representatives from the various organizations that people can meet with when trying to start and run their own business have taken part in semi-structured interviews. The analysis identifies different institutional practices that overlap when people with disabilities apply for support to start their own business: one focusing on the efficient allocation of resources, and the other on the individual’s social and financial welfare by protecting the individuals these organizations meet with from risks connected to economy and health. These two practices reflect a long-standing conflict between control and support in objectives within both labour market policy and social work. This support of self-employment for people with disabilities is organized by actors who traditionally have not been studied in research on social work. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.31265/jcsw.v18i2.658 Issue No:Vol. 18, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Jovia Salifu Pages: 180 - 206 Abstract: Despite being the subject of numerous research, professional identity in social work remains an important yet contentious concept. The aim of this article is to contribute to the literature on professional identity in social work by reflecting on the mutual development of the personal and professional identities of social workers in Ghana. Interviews were conducted among 20 social workers in two regions of Ghana, the northern and central regions. The evidence shows that the identity of social workers is shaped by two major factors – the statutory legal regime in which they operate, and the professional principles they apply in their work. Understood within the frame of social identity theory, the narratives of the social workers indicate how identifying with the professional group bestows distinctiveness and a change in personal identity. This change is reflected in their attitudes and value judgements of previously taken-for-granted socio-cultural practices. But while they firmly identify with the state and the professional principles, the social workers actively attempt to build local authenticity into their professional practices. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.31265/jcsw.v18i2.675 Issue No:Vol. 18, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Lennart Nygren, Alastair Christie, Carolina Muñoz Guzmán, Rasa Naujaniené Pages: 207 - 235 Abstract: This article compares social work in countries representing four different welfare regimes: Chile, the Republic of Ireland (refer to elsewhere as ‘Ireland’), Lithuania and Sweden. The aim is to examine how social workers in different contexts refer to families’ complex needs, how contextual factors influence social workers’ positions and actions, and how they make sense of their work. Social workers in 15 focus groups, 4 per country except for Chile with 3, were interviewed about their conceptions of ‘family’, ‘families with complex needs’, and reasoning about interventions in relation to a fictitious complex case vignette. The understanding of complex needs appears relatively individualized in Chile and Lithuania, while contextual factors were more pronounced in the Irish and Swedish material. Chile, exemplifying a familialized family policy regime, reflects a poverty-compensatory social worker role that also supports familial reproduction; Ireland, a partly de-familialized regime, reflects a supportive and risk-reactive role; Lithuania, a re-familialized regime reflects a patriarchal risk-reducing role and Sweden, a de-familialized policy regime, reflects a rights-oriented and technocratic role. Welfare regimes shape different social work practice contexts. However, to some extent, social workers around the world share a common work ethos in how they, for the best interest of the people they work with, deal with the cross-pressure from social problems and political-ideological priorities. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.31265/jcsw.v18i2.547 Issue No:Vol. 18, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Siv Oltedal, Lennart Nygren Pages: 236 - 248 Abstract: The aim of this article is to reflect on the strengths and challenges in qualitative comparative research on personal social services. The specific methodological approach that these reflections emerge from is the application of case vignettes in focus group interviews with social workers, working in different welfare regimes. We describe the process of vignette construction and implementation in focus group interviews, and relate this to findings in a large international project with researchers and data from Chile, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Ireland and the UK. Findings reveal that some globally spread professional norms prevail when they are applied locally, while others are more formed through welfare systems with strong contextual norms and legal and socio-economic barriers. Furthermore, the project showed that to use case vignettes and focus groups, in order to compare ‘social work’ in its totality between countries, is really difficult. It appears more fruitful to use such research methods to compare subsectors and sub-disciplines instead of social work as a whole. The strength of the data retrieved from the study is that it makes it possible to separate information on actual practice from information on principles and system norms, thus providing in-practice and on-practice reflections. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.31265/jcsw.v18i2.548 Issue No:Vol. 18, No. 2 (2023)
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