Understanding the negotiation of paid and unpaid care work in community services in cross-national perspective: the contribution of a rapid ethnographic approach

In the community services sector government policies and practices around the tendering and contracting out of services have a direct impact not only on the wages and conditions of care workers, but also on these workers' capacity to combine paid care work and unpaid care. The paper reflects on the qualitative methods employed in a large cross-national comparative study of community sector agencies, which contribute to a rich and gendered understanding of how work and family is 'done' in such workplaces. In particular, the paper focuses on the iterative 'rapid' ethnographic approach employed in the study and its macro and meso theoretical underpinnings, which are valuable in making the link between workplaces and the institutional and policy contexts in which they are located. The paper briefly illustrates the utility of this layered qualitative approach through selected findings on ways in which paid care work can trump unpaid care responsibilities.