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An increase in life expectancy brings about an aging society, necessitating increasing demand for elderly care services. The purpose of this paper is to present an examination of: how an aging society affects the demand for elderly care services and the labor market for elderly care services; how the labor share and wage inequality between the final goods sector and elderly care sector are determined; and whether the subsidy for elderly care service increases demand for elderly care services or not.

This paper sets the dynamics general equilibrium model with two sectors model: one for final goods sector and the other for elderly care services. This paper derives how the labor supply for elderly care services is determined in the theoretical model. In addition to analytical research works, this paper examines how the subsidy for elderly care service affects the labor share allocated for elderly care sector and wage inequality between the final goods sector and the elderly care sector with the numerical examples.

Related reports of the literature describe that an aging society raises the share of labor dedicated to elderly care services. However, considering a closed economy in which saving affects the capital stock, an aging society does not always raise the share of labor used for elderly care services because the wage rate of the final goods sector increases with an aging society. This effect prevents the increase of the labor supplied to elderly care services. On the other hand, the subsidy for the elderly care service raises the labor share of elderly care sector.

The related literatures derive that an aging society raises the labor share allocated for elderly care sector. However, the paper shows that the subsidy for elderly care plays an important role in the increase in the labor share of elderly care sector.

This paper examines how the aging society affects the labor share of elderly care sector, wage inequality between final goods sector and elderly care sector and others with numerical examples. Thanks to the numerical examples, this paper derives the quantitative result and shows how the subsidy for elderly care service should be provided.

The author thinks that this paper has rich implications and originality. There exists no literature that examines how the labor share of elderly care sector and the relative wage rate of elderly care sector are determined by the aging and the subsidy for elderly care service. The author thinks that it is a very important analysis because many economically developed countries face the aging society problem.

This study analyses the different factors contributing to the retention and turnover of local- and overseas-born workers in the elderly care sector as an integral part of ensuring a stable workforce and quality care for the growing elderly population.

Using a respondent-driven sampling method, a sample of individuals who worked or are working in residential aged care facilities in Dunedin, New Zealand were surveyed.

The factors associated with intention to stay or leave are not necessarily the same factors influencing workers to leave.

Policies need to consider how to make workers want to stay and address the issues that make workers leave the aged care sector.

Results of this study can be used to develop more relevant labour and migration policies that reflect a more grounded insight into the experiences of those who are directly and personally affected by these policies.

There are limited international or national empirical studies on the economics of care worker migration and the labour market. This study can provide practical policy advice to help improve recruitment and retention strategies for care workers in countries dependent on global labour markets for health workers. In New Zealand, changes in policies concerning remuneration and immigration highlight the importance of ensuring that care worker needs are met both financially and in terms of institutional support.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the labor shortage is described at the national level and how these problematizations correlate to gender and diversity politics. The paper is overview of the governance of staff shortages in elderly care, how it is articulated and how the governmental scenario of solutions, which includes the channeling of unemployed migrants into elderly care. Politicians and public media describe the situation as desperate and the issue of the staff shortages in elderly care is described as a state of crisis. A highly profiled solution is to open up elderly care for unemployed migrants.

By analyzing specific management strategies for controlling a phenomenon, the paper will also be able to highlight values surrounding the phenomenon. The ambition is to understand how institutions, authorities and organizations handle practical forms of knowledge that are aimed to implement a particular policy or working method within the welfare system.

One important aspect of the findings is the ways in which these official political discourses link the issues of migration and the shortages of staff in elderly care. But also visualize factors in how the government bodies with the formal responsibilities and authorities express their concerns about these links and the quality of the elderly care more generally.

It is well-known that migrants are employed to take care of the growing population of elderly in Europe. In Spain and Italy, for example, immigrants are frequently employed directly by families to care for their elderly family members. This type of employment entails a series of new social risks. The most important of those risks is the global “care chain” that these arrangements incur for the sending families, who lose a family member on whom they depend. This paper is connecting the international research on the global “care chain,” but focuses on the Swedish context, where the migrants already are established and elderly care work is not linked to migration in the same way. However, the experience of migration and the importance of transnational and cultural knowledge can be influential in understanding the changing processes in Swedish elderly care, not the least as the question of staff recruitment has been linked to migration by the highest political levels.

The objective is to explore how the professionalisation of care jobs is constructed in the public and private sectors and to discuss whether the instruments used by public and private care providers contribute to solve the ambiguities linked to this type of work and which are the consequences for caregivers.

This paper compares the way in which the professionalisation of home care services for elderly people is achieved in the public and private sectors in the region of Brussels. The findings are based on the analysis of interviews with professional actors working in the care sector in Brussels.

The analysis shows that there is no agreement over the best way of professionalising home care services for the elderly and that the efforts made by public and private providers are profoundly different.

The divergencies are not only the result of the strict institutional framework to which public care providers are bound, in opposition to the relative freedom of the private sector, but they also derive from a different understanding of care work.

The starting‐point of this paper is the observation that, while intellectual capital (IC) management seems to be a potential approach for non‐profit elderly care organizations, there is a lack of empirical evidence on how it could actually be applied. This paper aims to add to knowledge of this issue.

This is an exploratory, qualitative case study including three case organizations. The case descriptions and analysis are based on interviews with managers of the case organizations.

The study describes which intangible resources are highlighted in the operations of non‐profit elderly care organizations, the existing practices regarding the management of IC factors and the IC needs of management in these organizations.

The study focuses on Finnish non‐profits. The operations of the third sector may vary across countries.

The elderly care sector is facing big challenges due to the changing age structure in many Western countries and due to the pressure to produce cost‐effective but still high‐quality services. The IC approach seems well‐suited as a managerial framework that can capture the intangible aspects of operations. However, more research and practical application experience are needed at this stage.

IC research on non‐profit organizations is rare and has so far been rather generic and conceptual. The paper makes a contribution by presenting empirical and industry‐specific findings.

The purpose of this paper is to study the appropriateness of applying “manufacturing sector” quality management strategies to residential care homes sector and to analyze its influence on the quality of care.

Observation and in‐depth interviews were conducted with 41 Spanish care home top and middle managers, consultants and employees.

The quality management paradigm based on ISO 9001 has certain shortcomings in the elderly residential care home sector. There is a need to fit general quality management models to the sector's specific characteristics and to integrate generic quality management with specialized models.

Research findings should be noted by different agents involved in the process of improving services.

Useful, up‐to‐date conceptual overview for different agents interested in the sector (managers, consultants, academics, etc.) as well as interesting evidence for reflection.

The increasing size of the elderly population is emerging as a primary catalyst for the escalation of healthcare expenditure, and a sense of urgency is manifest. However, the complexity of the health- and elderly care systems provides challenges in improving system efficiency. Hence, the system-level understanding of the main obstacles to integration care needs further exploration. In order to better integrate health- and elderly care, the study needs to identify the actual misalignments underpinning the issue. This study provides the theoretical foundations for resource misalignments and provides empirical examples of these.

Semi-structured interviews with multiple stakeholders on various hierarchical levels were carried out to create a more complete view of the system and resources deployed in health- and elderly care. The application of user-centered design methods and co-creation with employees have also been crucial to the outcomes of the study.

Results show that health- and elderly care is a large-scale complex system. The overlapping and mutually reinforcing misalignments are: (1) regulation and policy differences, (2) stakeholder quantity and variation, (3) external control of health- and elderly care, (3) decreasing collaboration and (4) communication channels and IT development.

This qualitative study builds on institutional theory and resource integration theory and contributes with empirical descriptions of misalignments in the health- and elderly care system. These descriptions will serve as points of departure for systems design to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health- and elderly care.

The paper aims to explore the consequences of new public management (NPM) inspired reforms in general and outsourcing of traditional public sector responsibilities in Sweden to private organizations in particular. At centre stage are the roles of entrepreneurs, women‐owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and socially constructed paradigms of gender in this process. The paper's aim is to explore, through a local‐level case study, the currently ongoing process of gendering and regendering in a female‐dominated sector. This is done by a qualitative real‐time study of the introduction of a customer‐choice system in elder care in a Swedish municipality.

The formal decision in Spring 2008 to introduce a “customer‐choice model” into home‐based elderly care in the municipality is the formal starting point of the research. The authors are given full access to all relevant information and informants including all questions and suggestions from the potential suppliers who were applying to be “authorized and certified suppliers”. Interviews are the main method but also written material like applications and newspaper articles and “letters to the editor” are studied.

The outcome of the changes are, from the decision‐makers point of view, disappointing. The consequences so far of the customer‐choice system, that have been examined here, can be labelled increased masculinism or even a masculinization of the elderly care sector. Whether the polarization is a presage of the process to come is too early to tell. If so, the masculinization observed in this paper extends along three dimensions: governing logic, leadership and ownership. These gender consequences are not those expected or intended by the leading local actors.

The study is made in an ongoing process. The politicians are making changes aiming at making better working conditions for SMEs and former employees especially women. It is therefore important to follow up what is going to happen in the future. Comparisons with other municipalities and other regimes, nationally and internationally, would also be valuable.

In this case, the practical implications are, almost, the same as the research implications.

The real‐time research design is used focusing on what is happening in practise at the lower organizational levels of an organizational “experiment” of this kind make this paper unusual and valuable both for researchers and practioners.

Since the end of the previous century social partners in different branches of industry have laid down measures to stimulate individual learning and competence development of workers in collective labour agreements. Special attention is given to stimulating learning demand among traditional non‐participants to lifelong learning, such as lower educated and older employees. The paper examines one such measure, the individual learning account (ILA).

This paper is based on a quasi‐experimental study, in which we evaluate the impact of ILA on learning intention and work floor learning culture is evaluated. The study focuses on lower educated employees in two sectors of employment: the elderly care sector and SME's in the technical installation (TI) sector. The point of departure is Ajzen'se theory of planned behaviour. In this study, we attempt to examine the effects of ILAs on intention to engage in learning activities and behavioural predictors such as attitude, perceived behavioural control and perceived learning culture. A number of authors point out the pivotal influence of supportive learning culture on learning behaviour, in which employer and employees are portrayed as partners. Therefore, for this study the variable perceived dialogical learning culture was constructed.

Differences were found in the effect of ILA on learning intention and perceived learning culture between both sectors. Especially, in TI companies ILA had significant effect on the learning intention of older employees and employees working in level three functions.

The paper assesses ILAs.

As marketization has gained ground in elderly care, satisfaction with care has come to play a crucial role in designing for high-quality care. Inspired by the service-profit chain (SPC) model, the authors aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the intricate interplay between supportive leadership practices, organizational climate, job satisfaction and service quality in predicting satisfaction with care.

A Swedish sample of frontline elderly care staff (n = 1,342) participated in a cross-sectional questionnaire study. Mediation analyses were conducted to test the proposed model.

As predicted, engaging in supportive leadership practices was directly and positively associated with satisfaction with care. In addition, as predicted, this relationship was partially mediated by organizational climate and job satisfaction. Moreover, job satisfaction predicted satisfaction with care with service quality explaining a statistically significant part of this relationship.

Managers in elderly care services may improve satisfaction with care in multiple ways but primarily by showing that they care about the staff and ensuring that they are satisfied with their working conditions. Employee job satisfaction seems to be particularly crucial for satisfaction with care, beyond what can be accounted for by care service quality.

The authors proposed a novel service-outcome model. Adding to the original SPC model, the model in this study suggested previously unexplored relationships including a direct path between leadership practices and satisfaction with service and a multiple-mediator model explaining this relationship. Also, new measures of organizational climate and supportive leadership were developed for which satisfactory reliability estimates were obtained.