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Paid carers play an important role in helping older adults with care needs to remain living in their own homes. This paper examines changes in the home care field, specifically the emergence of self‐employed care entrepreneurs ('microentrepreneurs'). To do this, it employs Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus. Drawing on 105 semi‐structured interviews with stakeholders working in home care, the paper describes how the interaction of changes to field structures, and altered practices of care have challenged the taken‐for‐granted acceptance of traditional, transactional forms of care provision. This process has been highly dependent on local state actors, their ability to mobilise relevant forms of capital and the factors which shaped their habitus. It should be seen within the context of changes to local field structures and the hierarchical classification processes which underpin them. These changes threaten the distribution of capital in the home care field in ways that are beneficial to microentrepreneurs. Bourdieu might categorise these developments as 'partial revolutions', which do not challenge the fundamental axioms of the field. However, for care entrepreneurs, formerly employed as low‐paid home‐care workers, a revolution that is only partial may be better than none at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of disruptions to the organisation and delivery of healthcare services and efforts to re‐order care through emotion management during the COVID‐19 pandemic in the UK. Framing care as an affective practice, studying healthcare workers' (HCWs) experiences enables better understanding of how interactions between staff, patients and families changed as a result of the pandemic. Using a rapid qualitative research methodology, we conducted interviews with frontline HCWs in two London hospitals during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic and sourced public accounts of HCWs' experiences of the pandemic from social media (YouTube and Twitter). We conducted framework analysis to identify key factors disrupting caring interactions. Fear of infection and the barriers of physical distancing acted to separate staff from patients and families, requiring new affective practices to repair connections. Witnessing suffering was distressing for staff, and providing a 'good death' for patients and communicating care to families was harder. In addition to caring for patients and families, HCWs cared for each other. Infection control measures were important for limiting the spread of COVID‐19 but disrupted connections that were integral to care, generating new work to re‐order interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional accounts of emotional distress originate from within mainstream mental illness discourses and are underpinned by largely conjectural biomedical, brain‐based conceptions of disorder. Alternative, formulation‐based approaches remain delimited by cultural norms and linguistic resources. Service users frequently declare the most ordinary aspects of therapy the most helpful: listening, understanding, and respectfulness; these are not contingent upon the presence of a mental health professional. This paper describes ameliorations in states of emotional distress amongst volunteer trainee mechanics in a bicycle workshop, which has little overtly to do with mental health. Possible explanations for these ameliorations, or 'recoveries', are presented. In an enabling setting that offers the social and material resources conducive to particular ways of being, an applied actor‐network approach is introduced as a practical way to disentangle the concomitant complexities of bicycles and everyday life. This approach to analysing states of distress—introduced here as 'actor‐network therapy'—combines notions of enactment and enhandedness in the appreciation of 'engrenage' – the intriguing intricacy of locally generated, provisional realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]