Tilallisuus työssä ja sen muutoksessa

Kotihoidon työn ja organisaatioyhdistymisen tarkastelu fyysisinä, sosiaalisina ja mentaalisina tiloina

Abstrakti

This article investigates the work of home care nurses during a merger of communal social and healthcare organizations in the city of Turku. It analyzes how different spaces, as indicated in Tor Hernes’s spatial theory, appear in home care nurses’ work as physical, social and mental spaces. By nature home care nursing work is mobile, independent and fulfilled in customers’ homes. These special aspects of work make home care work a fertile setting to study spatialities related to work. Spatial dynamics is still rather undiscovered way to investigate aspects of work in different fields and settings. Yet, it helps to understand the different spaces in work and, at the same time, to view work as whole. In the light of Hernes’s spatial theory we pay attention to the connections between different spaces in the work of home care nurses. Without this understanding, there is a danger that an organized change in one of the spaces causes unexpected changes in the other work spaces.