Claude Nélisse
pp. 73–85
Record
Abstract
This article looks at the contradiction between "natural help" and "professional intervention" by presenting them as two critical points on the same continuum: the logic of the work of so-called help. In opposition to the latter, the author specifies certain elements of a second viewpoint, that of intervention. The text concludes with a proposed analysis and a judgment on the shift in vocabulary that has led from help to intervention. Help is not the same as intervention: this is the argument maintained throughout the text.
Guido De Ridder and Claude Legrand
pp. 87–93
Record
Abstract
Professionalization presupposes technical skill based on a minimal level of knowledge institutionally guaranteed. In representations of women who provide children's daycare, the services offered (security, hygiene, food, basic socialization, moral instruction, etc.) are entirely dependent upon the provision of affection, which becomes the necessary and sufficient condition for the former. This ability is viewed as an extension of maternal love and skills to other people's children. Such a view explains the resistance to the professionalization of maternal care and the complexity of effecting an economic exchange.Beyond the financial aspect and the attempts to regulate this service, such care is still classified as a family service provided within neighbourhood support networks, due to the essentially discretionary nature of virtually all types of exchange. Thus the interpersonal arrangement between mothers and daycare providers requires that its openness to normative incentives be carefully considered.
Francine Saillant
pp. 95–106
Record
Abstract
Women's contribution to health and care production has been in the past, and remains in society today, of an essential and universal nature, regarding two primordial concerns: care for the body and support through mutual aid and accompaniment. The current orientations of western healthcare systems, including an ideological promotion of health and autonomy that results in a diminishment of certain values, especially those of interdependence, compromise the future of care to the extent that there is no care without the simultaneous existence of dependence and interdependence. Care represents a sort of ritual of accompaniment in life's passages, a work of mediation.
Jacqueline Brau and Madeleine Moulin
pp. 107–118
Record
Abstract
Suggesting that we decompartmentalize the levels and timing of social activity, this text uses an intersecting perspective—historical and sociological, micro and macro social—to question the justification of boundaries between "caring" and "curing," in that they are inevitably linked to both the sexual division of tasks and the ideological machinery implicitly governing the legitimization of social policy. Institutions caring for the elderly represent laboratories for analysis, from which new types of nursing and new forms of professionalism for caregiving staff are emerging. The professional practice of (often) older women with elderly people (often women) in an environment where it is more a matter of caring than curing is associated with a triple set of issues running through the entire ethical and political questioning of the social relationship: the limits of the definition and acceptability of domestic work in all its forms, enhancement of the role of non-technical work, and the status of caring work which is by nature not measured since it is not measurable.
Martine Bungener
pp. 119–124
Record
Abstract
The home hospitalization of confirmed AIDS patients is demonstrating the extreme capacities of lay (as opposed to professional) care that patients and their families can develop. They are thus attempting to push back the economic and medical limits of this method of care to reduce their use of traditional hospitalization. Whereas a half-century ago, lay, family and outside-the-family care of the sick pre-existed the offering of public services financed by healthcare insurance, such care has now been rehabilitated. The hospital structure in its current form is in fact no longer adapted to long-term care.
