Paid care work has traditionally been marginalised within the sociology of work. This paper argues that this absence needs to be addressed and redressed as paid care is an increasingly important source of employment for women in Britain. Ethnographic material from a study of the labour of auxiliaries in a nursing home is used to illustrate how paid care is affected by factors similar to those which are salient in other forms of work. Like workers in non-care occupations, paid carers use resistance as an everyday strategy to get through their work. This paper argues that ethnographic approaches, favoured by sociologists who studied factory labour in the 1970s and 1980s, may prove to be crucial in revealing that care work is real work.

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Trust has been seen as operating within situations in which an individual's ability to assess risk or probability is absent and yet they still choose to believe in something. The development of new sets of knowledge in modern societies raises interesting questions about how the public come to trust the 'experts' who practice them and there is a paucity of work which addresses how trust 'happens' in these new relationships. This paper uses the accounts of patients who use cranial osteopathy to discuss the bases of trust in complementary medicine. It is argued that the practitioner and their therapy is not the basis of patient trust. For the initial attendance the patient relies upon the accounts and credibility of other people (network trust). After this it is the phenomenological work of the patient, who strives to find meaning in the treatments they experience, which is essential to the development of trust relationships. The paper demonstrated that patients mobilise ideas and understandings which they are familiar with to understand the unfamiliar and that it is this process of seeking meaning which is central to the creation of trust.

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