A Glass House of Care: Sheltered Employment for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

Based on data from ethnographic fieldwork in Norway, we explore relationships of care between workers with intellectual disabilities (ID) and staff in the context of sheltered employment. Care relations in a sheltered workshop are analysed using Annemarie Mol’s (2008) ‘logic of care’, which we combine with the concept ‘the logic of the market’. In this context, relations of care enable persons with ID as workers, but tensions between care and market logics influence the operation of the workshop and its workers. We argue that processes of care transform market logics, and at the same time, market logics also transform processes of care. The logics are found to support each other, but the balance between them is fragile. This results in unstable conditions for care in the sheltered workshop.