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Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.

This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society’s ‘dirty work’. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.

This study aims to conduct a systematic review of existing literature on ageism among older informal workers, as most studies have focused on formal work settings. Specifically, it seeks to identify the scope and characteristics of ageism that older informal workers encounter and its influence on their work and well-being.

This paper follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) framework to conduct a systematic review. Eleven studies from six databases were included and thematically analysed.

The findings revealed four main themes: the contextual nature of ageism, dimensions of work-related ageism, navigating work-related challenges, and effects on well-being. These themes highlight that, despite being perceived as experienced and reliable, older informal workers face exclusion from work opportunities as they are perceived as unproductive and less capable of acquiring new skills. These negative perceptions significantly impacted their willingness to continue working and overall well-being.

The findings offer an overview of extant research and the direction for future research and policy interventions to address ageism among older informal workers. The findings are crucial for enhancing older workers' quality of life, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where population ageing is the fastest.

This study is one of the few to systematically explore and evaluate empirical evidence on ageism in the informal work sector. It thus expands existing knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon of ageism in a least explored context.

There are over 300,000 male migrant workers in Singapore. Around 600 major workplace injuries are reported in Singapore each year, mainly in the manufacturing and construction injuries. Migrant workers who are affected by workplace injuries often face many challenges, including not being able to work and thus may be repatriated to their home countries, which affects their financial status and that of their families, whom they support. This research aims to explore the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of injured migrant workers in Singapore, towards disability and vocational rehabilitation.

Fifteen male migrant workers, from Bangladesh, China and India, who had acquired disabling injuries in their workplaces in Singapore, were identified through purposive sampling. They were interviewed by a male interviewer, either in Mandarin Chinese or with the assistance of interpreters for Bengali-English and Tamil-English. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, translated to English, then analysed thematically.

The interviewees generally had a pessimistic outlook on their disability, which often impacted negatively on their self-worth and familial relationships. Many of them also had little knowledge of vocational rehabilitation and had not yet seriously considered future job prospects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no similar studies exploring the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of injured migrant workers in Singapore towards disability and vocational rehabilitation.

First, with real-life examples and current research, this study aims to demonstrate the existence of various forms of ostracism (linguistic, gender, social and workplace). Second, following the “need-threat model,” this research addresses the previously unaddressed topic of coping with, reducing, mitigating or curbing workplace ostracism. Moreover, the researchers also proposed a “multiplying effect model” of ostracism.

Data was gathered from 199 service sector employees. The NVivo software is used for the thematic analysis of qualitative data(suggestions) gathered using open ended question on how to mitigate/reduce/curb ostracism.

The results generated were the suggestive measures, which were further categorized under three major themes: individual, society and organizational. The measures to reduce, mitigate and stop the practices of workplace ostracism can be initiated on all these three levels.

This is the only study that addresses the subject of decreasing, alleviating or eliminating workplace ostracism and explains the compounding effect of ostracism by suggesting a multiplying effect model. The study will pique the interest of the government and legislators to propose legal measures to prevent ostracism and achieve sustainable development goals (gender equality and reduced inequalities. The study’s practical, social, theoretical and managerial utility are discussed in the implications section.

To facilitate the reception and care of discharged patients, streamlining processes at the University Hospital and promoting a seamless transition to continuity of care services post-discharge.

Hospitalised patients undergo the Blaylock risk assessment screening score (BRASS), a screening tool identifying those at risk of complex discharge.

Pre-pandemic, patients with a medium-to-high risk of complex discharge were predominantly discharged to their residence or long-term care facilities. During the pandemic, coinciding with an overall reduction in hospitalisation rates, there was a decrease in patients being discharged to their residence.

The analysis of discharges, with the classification of patients into risk groups, revealed a coherence between the BRASS score and the characteristics of the studied sample. This tool aids physicians in decision-making by identifying the need for a planned discharge in a systematic and organised manner, preventing the loss of crucial information.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two financial inclusion measures adopted within the local welfare context of the city of Milan, Italy, examining their functioning and underpinning representations. The aim is also to understand how such representations take concrete shape in the practices of local actors, and their implications for the opportunities and constraints regarding individuals' effective inclusion. To this end, this paper takes a wide-ranging look at the interplay between the rise of financial inclusion and the individualisation and responsibilisation models informing welfare policies, within the broader context of financialisation processes overall.

This paper draws on the sociology of public action approach and provides a qualitative analysis of two case studies, a social microcredit service and a financial education programme, based on direct observation and semi-structured interviews conducted with key policy actors.

This paper sheds light on the rationale behind two financial inclusion services and illustrates how the instruments involved incorporate and tend to reproduce, individualising logics that reduce the problem of financial exclusion, and the social and economic vulnerability which underlies it, to a matter of personal responsibility, thus fuelling depoliticising tendencies in public action. It also discusses the contradictions underlying financial inclusion instruments, showing how local actors negotiate views and strategies on the problems to be addressed.

The paper makes an original contribution to the field of sociology and social policy by focusing on two under-researched instruments of financial inclusion and improving understanding of the finance-welfare state nexus and of the contradictions underpinning attempts at financial inclusion of the most vulnerable.

The purpose of the study is to explore the integration of facets of information technology (IT) governance at a professional council in South Africa with the view to develop a framework.

This critical emancipatory study used the Information Governance Initiative pinwheel to explore the architecture facet of information governance at the professional council, with a view to developing a framework for entrenching a culture of good corporate governance. Qualitative data was collected through interviews and document analysis. The study was a participatory action research project that involved collaboration between the researcher and study participants in defining and solving the problem through a needs assessment exercise.

The key findings report on the processes taken by a professional council in identifying and implementing the facets of information governance, that is, records management, IT, content management, data governance, information security, data privacy, risk management, regulatory compliance, long-term digital preservation and, even, business intelligence.

The study was a participatory action research project that involved collaboration between the researcher and study participants in defining and solving the problem through a needs assessment exercise.

The study’s findings suggest that, with the right information governance policy in place, adopting the facets of information governance can be used to address concerns related to information integrity in the short and medium terms. As a long-term option for retaining data and information, it would have various drawbacks and would not, however, ensure the initial dependability of the information.

A framework for information governance to ensure that the professional organisation and board members adopt a tailored governance system is suggested.