Pragmatic Inattention and Win-Win Narratives: How Finnish Eldercare Managers Make Sense of Foreign-Born Care Workers’ Structural Disadvantage

The chapter examines the ways in which eldercare managers (e.g. head nurses, home care supervisors and ward managers) in Finland can justify the increasing recruitment of foreign-born workers to lower-level eldercare jobs that are decreasingly attractive to Finnish-born workers. The question asked is: How can eldercare managers discursively cope with the potential criticism according to which the prevailing recruitment and employment tendencies exploit actors in structurally disadvantaged labor market positions? Our analysis demonstrates how eldercare managers can maintain affectively appealing impressions of their own actions by constructing foreign-born workers as subjects who are inherently interested in eldercare work and less interested in wages and working conditions. When eldercare managers’ self-presentations depend on these win-win narratives, foreign-born workers’ abilities to mobilize counter-narratives at their workplace are highly limited.