Introduction

The book examines the role of support workers, particularly in their interface with the health professions. This disparate, but very large, group of workers is defined by providing face-to-face care and other support of a personal or confidential nature to service users in a variety of settings. However, crucially, they do not hold qualifications accredited by a professional association and are not typically formally regulated by a professional body (Saks and Allsop 2007). The volume is original as there are no known books to date that analyse from a sociological or wider social science perspective the role of support workers in the health care labour force in these or other terms. This edited collection attempts to do just that from a largely neo-Weberian theoretical perspective which examines professions in terms of the various forms of social closure that they have gained in a competitive market, underwritten by the state – based on legally underpinned and exclusionary registers of practitioners protecting them against outsiders (Saks 2010). The achievement of this position, which brings privileges of income, status and power to insiders, is seen as being linked to the interests of players in such top-dog occupations. Although neo-Weberian writers have been criticised in practice for not giving sufficient attention to non-professional workers in their analyses of professionalisation (Saks 2016a), this volume puts such groups centre stage, including in their relationship to professions.

The focus here, though, is on the health arena – in particular on research on various aspects of the operation of the huge cohort of health support workers who are critical providers of health care globally. In so doing, the book takes an international perspective drawing on illustrations from several modern neo-liberal countries, spanning from the UK, The Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden through Japan and Australia to Brazil and Canada. As such, it variously examines the relationship of such relatively invisible workers with the myriad of health professions which sit at a variety of levels in the pecking order.