Rule breaking in social care: hierarchy, contentiousness and informal rules

Abstract

Taking a longitudinal case study approach, this article examines the process of rule breaking in a newly formed UK domiciliary care provider. In this study, the founder acted in such a manner so as to partially decouple the organization from externally imposed institutional rules and regulations, allowing the emergence of informal rules between carer and client. These informal rules increasingly guided the behaviours of care workers over time, resulting in the breach of formal strictures. Building on the dimensions of hierarchy and contentiousness, rule breaking is conceptualized here as a phenomenon which occurs as a result of the tension between competing formal and informal rules, at multiple levels throughout the organizational hierarchy.

Moral economy, solidarity and labour process struggle in Irish public transport

“…Unions also stressed members' shared moral understandings about tendering implications for passengers, mediated by driver reflections on informal ties and social connections with them (Breslin and Wood, 2016). However, as profit-driven employers and extrinsically instrumentalized employees are pressurized to meet heightened customer service-user expectations, workplace control regimes may intensify, limiting moral worker-manager connections and social compromise (Bélanger and Edwards, 2013).…”

“…ME has emerged in recent scholarship on economic and industrial democracy (Bolton and Laaser, 2013;Breslin and Wood, 2016;Darr, 2011;Khurana, 2017;Umney, 2017). Our empirical case study applies Laaser's (2016) Relatedly, Laaser's (2016) framework encourages us to theorize manager-employee conflict not only as clashing concerns, but also as disconnected moral understandings.…”

“…Similarly, moral economy (ME) studies have increased recently, with some identifying worker resistance (Breslin and Wood, 2016;Khurana, 2017;Laaser, 2016;Mulinari, 2019). However, very few empirical studies (see Laaser, 2016) merge Sayer's (2005Sayer's ( , 2011Sayer's ( , 2015 ME approach with labour process theory (LPT) (Thompson and Smith, 2009Smith, 2016).…”

The Mirage of Procedural Justice and the Primacy of Interactional Justice in Organizations

“…The flexibility of organizational procedures is not necessarily conducive to unfairness since applying rules in a pharisaic manner, i.e., adhering to the literal meanings of rules, can also result in the denial of justice (Perelman 1963(Perelman , 1980). Yet, formalities in bureaucracies and rules designed based on technical rationality are inherently not capable of answering moral questions on their own (Breslin and Wood 2016;Brubaker 2006;Camic et al 2005;Hodson et al 2013;Jackall 2010;M. Weber 1991).…”

Moral economy, intermediaries and intensified competition in the labour market for function musicians

“…Given this, it is potentially highly relevant to work and employment sociology, and is garnering renewed interest (Bolton and Laaser, 2013). It is highly applicable to caring professions, where workers develop strong informal rules regarding the appropriate treatment of service users (Breslin and Wood, 2015). It has also been used to show how the imposition of market discipline on firms may undermine workplace norms and relationships (Laaser, 2016), and how the pooling of tips can help counter the individualized precarity of service work (Mulinari, 2016).…”