Navigating the field of temporally framed care in the Danish home care sector.

The organisational and temporal framing of elderly care in Europe has changed in the wake of new public management reforms and standardised care services, the strict measurement of time and work schedules have become central aspects of care work. The article investigates the crafting of care in this framing: how care workers approach the services specified in their rotas and navigate between needs, demands and opportunities in the daily performance of duties. Applying feminist theory on time and anthropological theory on social navigation, it examines the practice of home care work in two Danish municipalities. Data are derived predominantly from participant observation. The article identifies two overarching temporal dilemmas in different home care situations: one where process time prevails over clock time and another where the care workers balance the two. Focusing on how care workers respond to these dilemmas in practice, the article identifies various navigation tactics, including leaving time outside, individualised routinisation, working on different paths simultaneously and postponing tasks. By assessing care workers' performance in the temporal framing of work and focusing on care workers' mediation between different time logics, this study provides an in-depth perspective on the broader feminist literature on the dilemmas of care.

Beyond Activity Based Funding. An experiment in Denmark.

Over past decades Activity Based Funding has been an attractive tool for hospital funding and governance, but there has been growing frustration especially with its unintended effects. There are numerous examples of alternative models, but there is little in-depth knowledge about how these models came about. The aim of our study was to analyse how the discourse of Activity Based Funding was successfully challenged. This contributes insights into how international/national debates are translated into concrete alternative models through specific discursive mechanisms. The analysis used a discursive policy approach and was based on a case study from Denmark ('New Governance'). The data consisted of project and policy documents as well as qualitative interviews with regional and national experts. The analysis identified four discursive mechanisms: the problem definitions underlying 'New Governance' were clear and simple; the underlying assumptions both accepted and challenged the premises of Activity Based Funding; the alternative of 'New Governance' was defined in rather broad terms; and it was produced, disseminated and defended as part of interweaving processes regionally but also nationally. Our study showed that new models of hospital funding and governance need to be carefully engineered and that they draw on a mix of governance logics. Future research needs to study more examples from a broad range of institutional contexts and points in time.