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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.

Drawing on the literature as well as themes emerging from interview data collected as part of a multi-year, three-province (Alberta, Nova Scotia and British Columbia), qualitative study (eighty-three semi-structured interviews) of the restructured social services sector in Canada, this article explores discernible types of caring work delineating seven kinds, only one of which is paid. The social service workers' description of their changing worlds show not only extremely heavy workloads but also that their paid, volunteer, community, and union activist work involve many of the same skills, tasks and mind sets, thus blurring the lines between professional and non-professional identities as well as the lines between work and leisure. Moreover, this work was highly gendered and significantly racialized. ; En se basant sur la littérature ainsi que sur les termes qui émergent des données recueillies d'entrevues, en tant qu'une partie d'une étude qualitative étalée sur plusieurs années, trois provinces ( l'Alberta, la Nouvelle- Écosse, et la Colombie-britannique), quatre-vingt-trois entrevues semi- structurées du secteur des services sociaux restructurés au Canada, cet article explore les différents types perceptibles, de travail de soins qui délignent sept types, dont seulement un d'entre eux est rémunéré. La description de leur monde en changement que décrivent les travailleuses en services sociaux, démontre non seulement leur charge de travail extrêmement lourde mais aussi que leur travail rémunéré, bénévole, communautaire, et leur travail d'activisme syndical, demande le même genre de façon de penser, ce qui brouille les lignes entre l'identité professionnelle et non professionnelle, ainsi que les lignes entre le travail et les loisirs. De plus ce travail a été hautement divisé entre les sexes et les races.

This article presents a critique of various aspects of feminist practice that were not helpful in the context of the author's work in an underfunded inner-city public hospital in an impoverished, culturally diverse community. It also analyzes those aspects that were helpful and illuminated some of the ways in which race, class, and gender are played out in everyday life.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. How to do more with less? This is, essentially, austerity's onerous question. Its default answer, in turn, has been to defer, download and outsource the burden of being overtasked and cash strapped.

In order to compete in increasingly tight quasi-markets generated by government cutbacks and contracting-out, management in nonprofit agencies have argued that wages and benefits must be reduced or jobs and services will be cut. These arguments have motivated some of the female-majority workers to join and/or organize unions and undertake strike action. Focusing on two case studies exploring restructuring in the highly gendered nonprofit social services in two liberal welfare states (Scotland and Canada), this article explores shifts in industrial relations at the agency level, as well as workforce resistance and union activism. Through the analysis of gendered unpaid work and gendered forms of social and union solidarity, this article extends feminist political economy and mobilization theory. It also suggests convergences at several layers of practice and policy, including private and nonprofit industrial relations cultures, managerialism and the underfunding of contracted-out government services.

Drawing on comparative data from Canada and Scotland, this article explores reasons why violence is tolerated in non-profit care settings. This article provides insights into how the predominantly female (paid) workers' orientations to work, the desire to care and the intrinsic rewards from working in a non-profit context interact with the organization of work and managerially constructed workplace norms and cultures to offset the tensions in an environment characterized by scarce resources and poor working conditions. This article also outlines how the same environment of scarce resources causes strains in management's efforts to establish these cultures. Working with highly excluded service users, workers find themselves working at the edge of their endurance, beginning to participate in various forms of resistance, suggesting that even among the most highly committed, 'white knuckle care' may be unsustainable.