Foster Care on the Market - Social Workers' Feeling Rules and Actions in Conflict

This presentation focuses the emotional dilemmas of social workers who recruit and assess foster parents, in a context increasingly defined by market dynamics. Following privatization paralleled with increasing need for childcare, private and public actors today compete to contract potential foster parents in Sweden. For this paper, 43 interviews (with social workers and managers), 21 observation days (shadowing) and 24 investigation documents have been analyzed, theoretically informed by Arlie Hochschild’s conceptualizations of feeling rules, and a culturally rooted non-permeable wall between the family and the market spheres. The analysis demonstrates four ways in which social workers today make sense of and relate to this family-market division: They uphold and reconstruct the feeling rules by 1. placing “good” foster parents exclusively one side of the wall 2. getting angry when perceiving foster parents to be guided by the market logic and 3. expressing frustration over the consequences of privatization for social work practice. As a contrast, social workers also 4. cross over and make visits to the market side of the wall as actors to get the job done. The conflicting emotions and actions demonstrated by the social workers can be understood as expressions of a context where the market has advanced its positions and actions have adjusted, but where the individual actors’ emotions are not (yet) aligned. The results can contribute to understand the nuances of moral stress and ethical conflicts in human service organizations.