Work Identity and Contradictory Experiences of Welfare Workers in a Life-history Perspective

»Arbeitsidentität und widersprüchliche Erfahrungen in der Lebensgeschichte
von Sozialarbeiter/innen und Krankenschwestern«. Transformation
of the welfare sectors challenge professional identities of care and welfare
workers in Scandinavia. At the same time welfare and care workers take
part in these changes and are changed in the psycho-social setting of the
workplace. This article presents research about care work in Denmark with a
focus on subjective processing of work identity, applying a psycho-societal
theoretical and methodical approach. A life historical and experiential understanding
of Alfred Lorenzer's cultural theory is applied to understand societal
transformations, here in the work place and of professionals in relation to their
present scene of work and in relation to their life history. Two concepts are applied,
interaction form and scenic understanding, because of their potentials
for analyzing workers' experience. The analysis is based on a combined ethnographic
and life historical investigation in nursing and involves a young nurse
in scenes of the hospital, where gendered life history is re-enacted and present
in a gendered work life with fragile possibilities of identification. Social dynamics
interact with subjective dynamics in ways that illuminate not only habitual
and creative orientations and practices of professionals in care, but also the
contradictory transformations of the work, e.g. marketization and democratization
in the work place.