Other People's Homes as Sites of Uncertainty: Ways of Knowing and Being Safe

Abstract

The home visit-when professionals work in service users' homes-is a growing phenomenon. It changes the configuration of home-both for home living and for those who go to work in other people's homes. In this paper we advance recent discussions of the emotional and political geographies of home through a focus on the home visit worker and her or his experience of other people's homes as sites of uncertainty. For such workers the home visit is played out as an interface between the private and intimate and the regulatory occupational safety and health frameworks of policy and corporate interests. It disrupts existing academic definitions of home and defines the regulatory interests of institutions. An examination of the home visit, we propose, has implications for theories of home and the search for certainties that is embedded in regulatory guidelines.

Refiguring creativity in virtual work: the digital‐material construction site

“…Likewise, Pink et al . (), describe how community nurses improvise in relation to working safely while navigating the complex and unpredictable environments of home visits. Acknowledging the role played by improvisation in safe working allows us to examine work‐as‐done rather than work‐as‐imagined in an idealised sense.…”

Reimagining home in the 21st century

“…These changes build on, or deepen, pre-existing contradictions. Recent changes to the labour market and work recast the domestic sphere as the site of both consumption and production, a return to the pre-industrial formation of home as a place of work (Holloway 2007;Pink et al 2015). The gendering of the home as feminine has been disrupted by new technologies and new visibilities of domestic labour (Cowan 1983;Lloyd and Johnson 2004; and for a contemporary, ethnographic take on the reconfiguration of gender roles see Meah and Jackson 2013).…”

Interdisciplinary research for occupational safety and health knowledge

“…Within the UK, the advent of the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) enforced a regulatory regime in which employers, workers and suppliers are afforded distinct roles in ensuring that people in work, or in close proximity to workplaces, are protected from harm. Practice-based approaches to researching workplaces have simultaneously provided new and rigorous ways of understanding workplaces as contexts where a culture of healthy and safe working is possible and practiced (Gherardi & Nicolini 2002), although often in ways that are generated by workers themselves rather than by safety and health regulations (Pink et al, 2010, Tutt et al, 2013, Pink et al, 2015. Within many workplaces, the contemporary context in which institutional and worker-innovated safety and health play out is shaped by a range of changing factors including: increasing complexity within and between technological and organisational networks; the shift from public regulation to private advisors; the intense pressure to achieve 'more with less'; and the pivotal responsibility and opportunity for OSH professionals.…”