Captured by care: An institutional ethnography on the work of being in a rehabilitation process in Norway

Abstract

The Norwegian rehabilitation policies and new public management reforms share some features and are divided by others. The features that divide them are so contradictory that they create difficulties for people who are in a process of rehabilitation. Having studied the everyday life of people being in a process of rehabilitation, I argue that the continuous change in organizational structures in general makes the processes hard to endure for service users, specifically the reforms characterized by neoliberalism, because they, to a large extent, contradict the holistic rehabilitation ideology. This further illuminates the paradox that the greater and more complicated the functional impairments are, the more work related to the rehabilitation process a person must do, and by extension, the greater the risk of deprivation.