Unpaid Work in Nursing Homes: Flexible Boundaries

Unpaid Work in Nursing Homes: Flexible Boundaries (Bristol University Press, 2023) reports on the work done by family members, volunteers and residents in long-term care or nursing homes. Guided by feminist theory, the book contains ten chapters, each written by different team members using data from a team project that conducted mixed-methods research in Canada, Sweden and Norway. The authors find that, in recent years, the line between paid and unpaid care in nursing homes has grown more and more blurred. The nature of the unpaid care work performed reflects value decisions and also the structures and polices that shape funding levels, ownership, staffing and the division of labour in care homes.

The book has ten chapters:

• 1 Introduction: framing and comparing unpaid care work (pp. 1-17)Pat Armstrong and Marta Szebehely
• 2 Accessing nursing home care: family members’ unpaid care work in Ontario and Sweden (pp. 18-32) Petra Ulmanen, Ruth Lowndes and Jacqueline Choiniere
• 3 Body-work-that-isn’t: supporting nursing home residents’ autonomy in self-care and sexual expression (pp. 33-47)Susan Braedley
• 4 “They make the difference between survival and living”: social activities and social relations in long-term residential care (pp. 48-60)James Struthers and Gudmund Ågotnes
• 5 Residents who care: rethinking complex care and disability relations in Ontario nursing homes (pp. 61-72)Janna Klostermann
• 6 Family workers: the work and working conditions of families in nursing homes (pp. 73-85)Christine Streeter
• 7 Staff perspectives on families’ unpaid work in care homes (pp. 86-99)Ruth Lowndes, Marta Szebehely, Gudmund Ågotnes and Oddrunn Sortland
• 8 Contextual conditions and social mechanisms in rural communities and care homes (pp. 100-112) Oddrunn Sortland, Petra Ulmanen and James Struthers
• 9 Bringing the outside in and the inside out: the role of institutional boundaries in nursing homes (pp. 113-126)Frode F. Jacobsen and Gudmund Ågotnes
• 10 Conclusion: a labour of love is still labour (pp. 127-130) Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong and Marta Szebehely

Pat Armstrong is on the advisory board for the Care Economies in Context research project.