“Perhaps we forgot about the essence”: Temporal entrainments and overflows in controlling home care services

Abstract

This paper reports early findings from a PhD thesis project investigating how
control techniques shape temporal structures and experiences of day-to-day work in the home
care services of a Swedish city. Tracing an eight-year process of control reforms in a public
home care organization, it demonstrates how the reforms altered temporal structures affecting
care workers, and how care workers mobilized a critique of temporal structures to defend their
interests in a way that contributed to thwarting the reforms.