Description
Book SynopsisIn this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security.
Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics.
What comes through from Cranford''s analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she argues for an intimate community unionis
Trade Review
Cranford's in-depth, thought-provoking, and insightful work is an important read not only for scholars of care work and labor, but also for activists, social workers, and organizers outside of academia who are interested in building alliances of care.
* New Books Network *
Home Care Fault Lines provides an innovative and essential analysis of the politics of community-based personal and attendant care and demonstrates the power of sociological analysis to inform policy and promote social justice.
* American Journal of Sociology *
In Home Care Fault Lines, Cynthia Cranford has written an ambitious and pathbreaking book. More than ever before, we cannot ignore the glaring need to invest in the home care sector in a way that is responsive to the needs of both care workers and recipients of care. Luckily, just in time, Cranford's book has provided us with an insightful analysis of how to do just that.
* Contemporary Sociology *
We can expect Home Care Fault Lines to become a pivotal reference for international care scholarship.
* International Journal of Care and Caring *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Tenions between Flexibility and Security
1. Gender, Migration, and the Purist of Security
2. Disability and the Quest for Flexibility
3. Managing Flexibility without Security in Toronto's Direct Funding
4. Negotiating Flexibility with Security in Los Angeles's In-Home Supportive Services
5. Agency-Led Flexibility and Insecurity in Toronto's Home Care
6. Bargaining for Security with Flexibility in Toronto's Attendant Services
7. Toward Flexible Care and Secure Work in Intimate Labor
