This article examines the gendered effects of the intensification of public sector care work due to neoliberal reforms. It draws on an interview study of Finnish social and healthcare workers to argue that the expectations towards men and women in the reorganized field of care work are different, especially in the case of their emotional involvement in care practices. The article develops a conceptual framework based on Bourdieu's theory of practice and its feminist developments. We discuss caring as gendered, habitual and emotional work and as a lived social relationship that produces different states of autonomy and dependency for women and men. Our study finds that women in particular face contradictory expectations of being intensely involved in emotion work on the one hand and in the efficient performance of tasks on the other, which creates a clash between their habitus and the field of care work. We further suggest that the clash produces social suffering that is difficult to recognize because the practices in the field reproduce and reaffirm the differences in the emotional habitus of men and women.

This article considers the temporal variations of social and health care workers' agency from the point of view of the social structures and practices of the contemporary Finnish public service sector. It finds that the contemporary Finnish public sector increasingly operates according to market principles and economic framing of time, contrary to the relational understanding of time in care practices. To maintain their sense of self as skilled professionals, workers actively reassess and adjust their identities according to the exigencies of the contemporary working life, but not without difficulties. The results of the interview study reflect the intuitive, habitual and innovative nature of temporality of care practices, but also the constraints that the contemporary, economic-rationalistic temporal frame in working life poses on welfare service work. The results suggest that the question of time management is therefore central not only from the point of view of the efficiency of service production but from the point of view of welfare service workers' exercise of their professional agency.

Welfare service work is traditionally understood to comprise embodied, situational and social practices of care that are central to a worker's professional self-image. Over the past few decades, public management reforms have called for reassessment of welfare service workers' professional accountability through practices of medico-managerial service management. These practices promote the production of transparency and accountability in welfare services work through checking-based trust and disembodied professional practices. This article argues that the changes in the nature of trust toward welfare service professionals have implications for care work cultures and workers' professional agency that has traditionally built on the idea of the embodied, situational and social practice of welfare service work. Drawing on an interview study with Finnish welfare service workers (n=25), the article analyses front-line workers' descriptions of medico-managerial management in the social and health care sector. The results point to the significance of embodied practices of care in creation of client trust and for workers' professional self-images. The conclusion is that while disembodied professionalism offers opportunities for workers' self-management and evaluation of accountability and transparency of service processes, it may disregard the importance of embodied practices for the workers' professional self-images and client relations.

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