With 'efficiency savings' the watchword for health and social care services, reorganisation and labour rationalisation are the order of the day. This article examines the difficulties involved in (re)organising work which takes bodies as its object, or material of production. It shows that working on bodies ('body work') systematically delimits possibilities for labour process rationalisation which, in turn, constrains reorganisation of the health and social care sector. It does this in three main ways. First: rigidity in the ratio of workers to bodies-worked-upon limits the potential to increase capital-labour ratios or cut labour. Secondly: the requirement for co-presence and temporal unpredictability in demand for body work diminish the spatial and temporal malleability of the labour process. Thirdly: the nature of bodies as a material of production--complex, unitary and responsive--makes it difficult to standardise, reorganise or rationalise work. A wide-ranging analysis of body work in health and social care, as well as other sectors, fleshes out these three constraints and shows that attempts to overcome them and reorganise the sector in pursuit of cost savings or 'efficiency', generate problems for workers and the patients, whose bodies they work upon.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 January 2016.
All research outputs
#23,710,495
of 28,923,089 outputs
Outputs from Sociology of Health & Illness
#2,022
of 2,244 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#194,111
of 213,337 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Sociology of Health & Illness
#26
of 30 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,923,089 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 9th percentile – i.e., 9% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,244 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 11.6. This one is in the 1st percentile – i.e., 1% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 213,337 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 4th percentile – i.e., 4% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 30 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 1st percentile – i.e., 1% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
