Thematic Panels 2019

Thematic Panel 18 – Transforming care work: Impact on working conditions and job quality

Thematic Panel 18

Transforming care work: Impact on working conditions and job quality

Conveners and Discussants:

Ricardo Rodrigues, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, Austria and Marta Szebehely, Stockholm University, Sweden

Social services for children, disabled and older people are undergoing a series of sector-specific transformations. These transformations reflect changing priorities in long-term care, including greater reliance on the market, re-organization of work spurred by cost containment or introduction of new providers (for and non-profit) and changing training and qualification standards in response to changing needs. These sector specific transformations take place against a wider context of changes in employment and work across the developed world such as, increased de-regulation and growing relevance of new forms of employment (from posting of workers to precarious work), falling unionization rates, increased cross-border movement of workers, among others. The potential for these transformation to impact working conditions, or even fundamentally change the nature of care work, is thus substantial.
This thematic panel  welcomes papers that explore the relationship between any of the above-mentioned transformations or changing priorities in public care policies – the main theme of the conference – and the working conditions in care or/and the quality of jobs and care work. In particular, we welcome papers that have a comparative focus to care work across different sectors (care for children, disabled or older persons), different settings (home care versus institutional care, public versus private), between countries, as well as across different groups (exploring differences in gender, ethnicity, qualifications, etc.)

Thematic Panel 19 – Inequalities and care needs in old age

Thematic Panel 19

Inequalities and care needs in old age

Conveners and Discussants:

Lina Van Aerschot, Post doctoral researcher, and Teppo Kröger, Professor of Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Living independently and ageing in place are key objectives of care policies in most countries. Older people are expected to live at home with the help of their families and other informal carers and, in addition, use home care services that may either be publicly provided or privately purchased. However, people’s care needs vary as older people may have needs for personal care and assistance in household tasks as well as social needs. The level and severity of care needs vary significantly and therefore older people as well as their informal carers need to deal with very different situations when organizing care. Sometimes the needed care and support are not available.

Older people have very different and unequal resources both in terms of informal care, financial assets, and capabilities of acquiring services. Formal care services may not be universally available to all or they may not cover all kinds of care needs. As a result, not everybody receives adequate and sufficient help or services to meet their care needs. These unmet needs reflect inequalities in the coverage of care needs in old age.

Unmet care needs or difficulties in accessing the needed help may be related to not having next-in-kin who could provide informal care, not being aware of suitable services, not having anyone to help in acquiring information or contacting possible service providers, not being able to access services due to long distances, high prices or other obstacles. Furthermore, care needs may remain unmet when help and assistance is received but they are not extensive enough, the quality is inadequate or they are not provided at the right time. It has been shown that both socioeconomic background and health status are related to disadvantaged positions regarding care.

Even though a rather broad range of research on poverty and social inequality exists, much less research has been done on inequality concerning care in old age. On the other hand, there is already quite a lot of research on unmet health care needs and health inequalities but much less research on inequalities regarding social care.

Tackling social inequality is stated as one of the main priorities of welfare policies in many European countries and especially in the Nordic countries. However, social and economic inequality has increased significantly throughout the last two decades, and older people are facing this especially in terms of unequal access, availability and affordability of care. Equality is often put aside and economic interests are prioritized when care services, benefits or support for informal care are designed and organized. The institutional settings and priorities of care systems and care policies are very relevant to this panel as well as the practical level of care arrangements. How equal rights to care are enhanced – or are they? How do the policies and service arrangements promote equality? How has the marketization of care services and other changes in policy priorities affected inequality? What is the role of informal and unpaid care in decreasing or, on the contrary, creating or maintaining inequality?

This thematic panel calls for presentations dealing with inequalities in care for older people. We welcome especially papers that connect inequalities related to care with wider questions and priorities of social policy. The topics may be related to social inequalities among older people or between different age groups, unmet needs, vulnerable positions, inadequate care and different mechanisms that lead to a disadvantaged position in old age. Also papers with other kinds of approaches to inequality in old age are welcome.

Thematic Panel 20 – What ECEC services in the context of rising child poverty?

Thematic Panel 20

What ECEC services in the context of rising child poverty?

Conveners and Discussants:

Margarita Leòn, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain and Stefania Sabatinelli, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

ECEC services are considered pivotal in the Social Investment approach by virtue of their importance in terms of investment in children’s human capital as well as of their work-life balance function. For the same reasons, ECEC services have a great potential in terms of prevention or reduction of child poverty. The Great Global Recession has caused an increase in child poverty rates in most developed countries. At the same time, the austerity policies related to the recession have in many contexts caused a decrease or a stop in the increase in the public funds destined to childcare provision and/or support. In the different contexts these trends have brought about a halt in ECEC expansion, a rise in their costs for families, and/or a decrease in the number of enrolled children. A situation that favors the growth of Matthew’s effects, leaving out exactly those underprivileged children (and their families) that would benefit the most from attending them. This risks to reduce the potential of ECEC services in terms of equal opportunities and contrast to child poverty, and questions the basic assumptions of the Social Investment approach.

The panel welcomes paper proposals that tackle the relation between recession/austerity, ECEC development, access to services and child poverty in different contexts, also in comparative terms, using quantitative and/or qualitative analyses.

 

Thematic Panel 21 – Care in South America: Challenges and tensions in research and public policies

Thematic Panel 21

Care in South America: Challenges and tensions in research and public policies

Conveners:

Karina Batthyany and Natalia Genta, Sociology Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de la República, Uruguay

Discussants:

Javier Pineda, Ph.D. in Geography, from the University of Durham, England. Associate Professor at CIDER (Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies) Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Karina Batthyány, PhD in Sociology from the University of Versailles Saint Quentin in Yvelines France. Full Professor of Sociology Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Coordinator of Research Group “Sociology of Gender” in same institution

The purpose of this thematic panel is to present and discuss researches and reflections on care, focused on Latin American countries. Social and gender inequalities and residual policies, characterize the region and establish the conditions under which care researches and policies of care are developed.

The changes experienced in recent years in Latin American societies regarding women’s participation in the labor market, the aging process and family transformations, invite us to reflect on the social organization of care in changing contexts.

Abstracts are expected on the following topics:

1) The trajectory of the conceptualization of care in the region, emphasizing on the theoretical developments themselves (reflections from different perspectives of care, links between gender theory and care, considerations about different dimensions of care, etc)

2) Social organizations of care and new and old problems around how and who provides care (offer and demand of care, family arrangements and strategies, formal and informal mechanism to provide care, etc)

3) The methodological challenges faced by the region and the innovative experiences to overcome them (reflection on the quantitative and qualitative measurement of care, measurement of quality care in institutions, challenges in measuring the time to care provided to the elderly, and the qualitative aspects of care,  economic valuation of care, etc)

4) The analysis of care policies, the existing ones and the absence of them (Analysis of public policies related to families, social protection, care, life course, well-being from a gender perspective)

The proposals will be evaluated according to their academic quality, the innovation that represents in conceptual-methodological terms and the capacity they have to demonstrate the particular characteristics of the Latin American region at the same time to incorporate its heterogeneities.

Summaries and presentations are expected that clearly establish objectives, methodology, main results of research and reflections or conclusions.

Thematic Panel 22 – Changing priorities of disability policies and care/assistance for disabled people in different care regimes

Thematic Panel 22

Changing priorities of disability policies and care/assistance for disabled people in different care regimes

Conveners and Discussants:

Yueh-Ching Chou, Professor of Institute of Health and Welfare Policy, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan and Teppo Kröger, Professor of Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Many disabled activists and disability scholars have argued that disabled people prefer Independent Living, that is, being in control of their own support rather than ‘being cared for’. In addition to disability policies, disabled people cross different ages and life cycles may be included in childcare and eldercare policies (e.g. long-term care policy). Besides different ages and life cycle phases, types of impairments and needs are various among disabled people, which make the policies and services that are relevant to disabled people more complex than those of childcare and care for older people. In fact, the diversity of disabled people’s needs has been mostly forgotten in the development and priorities of care policies. In the past decades, Independent Living and deinstitutionalisation movements originated by disabled people have turned out to be main trend of care policies for disabled people; therefore personalisation has become a priority of social care policy in many developed countries. For example, ‘personal assistance’ (PA) as an alternative to home help has grown to become a part of the mainstream of ‘home and community-based’ support services in many European countries for disabled people with certain types of impairment (e.g. persons with mobility impairment). In contrast, in some Asian and European countries institutional care may still be the primary service for certain groups of disabled people, especially for people with learning difficulties. Alternatively, in some countries, migrant care workers have transformed into another source of human power of care work, prioritised explicitly or implicitly by policy-makers, hired by service provider agencies or paid by disabled people or their family as ‘personal assistants’. Changing priorities and forms of care work or personal assistance are various in different countries and different welfare systems and may cause different impacts on well-being of disabled people and formal and informal carers (e.g. local care workers, migrant care workers and family members, depending also on gender, class and ethnic group). From policy and equality perspectives, discussion on the implications of changing priorities in disability and social care policies to disabled people and all stakeholders is needed.

Call for contributions

This panel aims at contributing to these discussions from the perspectives of policy, equality, and critical disability studies addressing the changing priorities of care and support policies and the influences of such changes on disabled people and all the stakeholders in different countries around the world (e.g. family/friends, formal care workers, migrant care workers etc.). We invite papers focused on:

How are disability and social care policies and their prioritizations made and formulated in different care regimes and what are their impacts on the lives of disabled people and formal/informal carers? What are the main debates connected to changing priorities and policies and how are the partly contradictory perspectives of care and Independent Living embedded in them? What lessons can be learned from disability research to care research and vice versa?