{"title":"作为条件的创业精神:紧缩政策下心理健康服务工作(票价)的新地理格局","authors":"Ed Kiely","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.103996","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper investigates work undertaken by clients of voluntary sector mental health services in the context of austerity. While mental health geographers have often interrogated ‘work cures’, little attention has been paid to client work within traditional care-oriented services. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in a mental health day centre threatened with closure, I demonstrate that client fundraising can become a crucial source of income when marketised services face budget cuts. Clients are incentivised to act as entrepreneurs, developing creative strategies to secure funding. I conceptualise this as a novel form of conditionality, as access to services comes to depend on entrepreneurial activities. Existing theories offer a narrow conception of conditionality, as behavioural standards imposed through rules. Entrepreneurship appears more flexible, autonomous and voluntary than such rule-based conditionalities. Yet in practice clients face the same choice: work or lose access to welfare provision. I argue that entrepreneurship transforms the institutional geographies of services, directing them towards economic productivity. This can undermine longstanding practices of care, leading some clients to withdraw from services. By focussing on client responses to austerity, this paper makes a crucial contribution to geographical research into voluntary sector precarity, which has tended to focus on staff. More broadly, it advances understandings of the institutional geographies which embed the politics and economics of austerity within everyday experiences of care provision.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718524000575/pdfft?md5=9ff1e4a2b2910b962135ed9e2188e478&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718524000575-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Entrepreneurship as conditionality: New geographies of work(fare) in mental health services under austerity\",\"authors\":\"Ed Kiely\",\"doi\":\"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.103996\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<div><p>This paper investigates work undertaken by clients of voluntary sector mental health services in the context of austerity. While mental health geographers have often interrogated ‘work cures’, little attention has been paid to client work within traditional care-oriented services. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in a mental health day centre threatened with closure, I demonstrate that client fundraising can become a crucial source of income when marketised services face budget cuts. Clients are incentivised to act as entrepreneurs, developing creative strategies to secure funding. I conceptualise this as a novel form of conditionality, as access to services comes to depend on entrepreneurial activities. Existing theories offer a narrow conception of conditionality, as behavioural standards imposed through rules. Entrepreneurship appears more flexible, autonomous and voluntary than such rule-based conditionalities. Yet in practice clients face the same choice: work or lose access to welfare provision. I argue that entrepreneurship transforms the institutional geographies of services, directing them towards economic productivity. This can undermine longstanding practices of care, leading some clients to withdraw from services. By focussing on client responses to austerity, this paper makes a crucial contribution to geographical research into voluntary sector precarity, which has tended to focus on staff. More broadly, it advances understandings of the institutional geographies which embed the politics and economics of austerity within everyday experiences of care provision.</p></div>\",\"PeriodicalId\":12497,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Geoforum\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":3.4000,\"publicationDate\":\"2024-03-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718524000575/pdfft?md5=9ff1e4a2b2910b962135ed9e2188e478&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718524000575-main.pdf\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Geoforum\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"90\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718524000575\",\"RegionNum\":2,\"RegionCategory\":\"社会学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q1\",\"JCRName\":\"GEOGRAPHY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Geoforum","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718524000575","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"GEOGRAPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
Entrepreneurship as conditionality: New geographies of work(fare) in mental health services under austerity
This paper investigates work undertaken by clients of voluntary sector mental health services in the context of austerity. While mental health geographers have often interrogated ‘work cures’, little attention has been paid to client work within traditional care-oriented services. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in a mental health day centre threatened with closure, I demonstrate that client fundraising can become a crucial source of income when marketised services face budget cuts. Clients are incentivised to act as entrepreneurs, developing creative strategies to secure funding. I conceptualise this as a novel form of conditionality, as access to services comes to depend on entrepreneurial activities. Existing theories offer a narrow conception of conditionality, as behavioural standards imposed through rules. Entrepreneurship appears more flexible, autonomous and voluntary than such rule-based conditionalities. Yet in practice clients face the same choice: work or lose access to welfare provision. I argue that entrepreneurship transforms the institutional geographies of services, directing them towards economic productivity. This can undermine longstanding practices of care, leading some clients to withdraw from services. By focussing on client responses to austerity, this paper makes a crucial contribution to geographical research into voluntary sector precarity, which has tended to focus on staff. More broadly, it advances understandings of the institutional geographies which embed the politics and economics of austerity within everyday experiences of care provision.
期刊介绍:
Geoforum is an international, inter-disciplinary journal, global in outlook, and integrative in approach. The broad focus of Geoforum is the organisation of economic, political, social and environmental systems through space and over time. Areas of study range from the analysis of the global political economy and environment, through national systems of regulation and governance, to urban and regional development, local economic and urban planning and resources management. The journal also includes a Critical Review section which features critical assessments of research in all the above areas.