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Paper short abstract:

In Australian residential aged care and residential care services for children, friction can occur between managing risk and what is valued in care work. The anthropology of care, and its methods, helps us attended to this and opportunities for alignment, contributing to insights and change.

Paper long abstract:

Research by the Brotherhood of St Laurence on residential aged care and residential care services for children (Out of Home Care residential units) aims to achieve system change, practice change and insights into service performance in Australia. It is the encompassing nature of the concept of care that helps us think about these two areas of research together. Prompted by insights from the anthropology of care, we look at what is valued at the institutional level, as evidenced by auditing and accountability structures designed to manage risk; and what is valued (implicitly and explicitly) in care work. In the context of scarce staff-time, there can be friction between these two value sets. As Tsing's (2005) use of 'friction' illustrates, such sites may hold opportunities for alignment or compelling cases for change. The sensitivity with which anthropologists can approach such friction, or articulate the values of care (e.g. Mol 2008), is due in no small part to the affordances of ethnographic enquiry. It is by embedding researchers within service delivery, rather than as objective outsiders, that we are well placed to learn about formal institutions and the care work that goes on in them. Drawing attention to the frictions and opportunities for alignment can yield insights into service performance while enabling system change and practice change.