ILPC 2027

Personalisation and Self-Directed Support (SDS) are premised on the notion of improving care by increasing choice, autonomy and control among service users (Glasby and Littlechild, 2016; Pearson et al., 2014). By effectively controlling their own finances, and choosing who provides their care and what form it should take, service users are, in a sense, newly positioned as ‘customers’ (Korcsynski, 2002; Korczynski, Shire, Frenkel and Tam, 2000). For organisations and individual employees alike, a new requirement exists to satisfy customer-oriented norms, which has a considerable impact on the nature of work.

Personalisation is driven by a dual imperative of increasing quality while decreasing costs – in other words, providing more for less (Baines, Cunningham and Fraser, 2011). Where funding resources are not in place to sufficiently support care, the shortfall is made up by workers via factors such as donative labour (Becker et al., 2011) and unpaid overtime (Almond and Kendall, 2000). While these self-sacrificing behaviours have existed in the voluntary sector for some time (Baines and Cunningham, 2011), the accelerating uptake of SDS, combined with the deepening and worsening impacts of austerity, mean these coping mechanisms may no longer be adequate to ensure continuing service provision, or organisational survival. In the Scottish context, this is exacerbated by the fact that personalisation was introduced into the pre-existing context of austerity (Manthorpe et al., 2014), and is delivered via a differing model of government (Moffat, et al., 2012, Mooney and Poole, 2004).

The paper will report the findings from four case studies focussing on care-providing voluntary sector organisations, which examine the effect of changes to the employment relationship caused by personalisation within the context of austerity. The impacts of these pressures are examined in relation to notions of breach and violation of the psychological contract.

The papers findings demonstrate that organisational attempts to accommodate lower funding have resulted in a reduction in terms and conditions of employment, including lack of wage rises, lower pension contribution, and an overall failure to keep pace with inflation. The need to be reactive to customer needs has resulted in attempts to entrench flexibility via managing sickness and absence more closely, the prevalence of short fixed-term contracts at the expense of permanent ones, and part-time and sessional contracts over full-time. The analysis which results shows that new and potentially untenable impacts on employment relations are resulting in breach and violation of the psychological contract, which manifest themselves collectively as explicit tensions in the social order. These tensions present themselves in observable factors such as employees working to contract, reduction in Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB), growing union membership, and increasingly high turnover. Ultimately, while SDS improves the experience of care for service users, it also significantly intensifies the process of work, and escalating requirements for cost-cutting results in a degradation to terms and conditions of employment, which poses significant challenges to effective employment relations.