CERGAS Seminar "Quality of working life in residential care facilities for older people in Italy: insights from the QWoRe project"

The employment dimension of Long-Term Care (LTC) has long remained in the shadows of policy debates and analyses, particularly within the fragmented landscapes of Southern Europe. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a sector built upon precarious foundations. The QWoRe project (2023–2026; PRIN PNRR 2022) has looked behind the walls of residential facilities to understand the "Quality of Working Life" (QoWL) of those holding the system together.
At the heart of this study is a multidisciplinary framework that views care work not merely as a set of tasks, but as a complex intersection of job quality, worker agency, and regulatory conditions. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the project has bridged the gap between quantitative data, institutional regulation and the experiences of worker.
Among our findings is a profound paradox. We see a workforce - predominantly female, aging, and increasingly reliant on foreign nationals - reporting deep personal pride and a sense of mission in their roles. Yet, this pride is constantly eroded by structural time poverty, pressure, perpetual emergency, where the demanding pace of tasks frequently crowds out the possibility of "true care", as the workers define the relational and emotional aspects of the job.
Ultimately, this project unveils the need to address a crisis of recognition by putting at the centre of the agenda the meaning itself of care and care work, its organization, regulation and funding, which requires to look at the interconnection between LTC, educational, employment and organizational policies.

Speaker:

Barbara Da Roit is full professor of sociology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. After obtaining a PhD in Sociology (Science-Po Paris) and in Urban European Studies (University of Milano-Bicocca) she worked as a post-doc at the University of Milano-Bicocca (2005-2007) and subsequently as an assistant professor at Utrecht University (2007-2013) and the University of Amsterdam (2013-2016). Since 2016 she has worked at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, first as an associate and then a full professor (2020-).
She teaches sociological theories, methodological courses and social policy classes at the BA and MA level. She is part of the Doctoral Board of the PhD programme in Social Sciences of the University of Padua. She is serving as Chair of the Ethical Committee of Ca’ Foscari University.
Her research, embedded in comparative welfare studies, focusses on the relationship between changes in social policies and in social practices with a specific interest in the interaction between care, employment and migration regimes. In this framework, she has conducted research particularly on long-term policies and practices, on cash for care schemes, on migrant care work. In her work, she combines qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods.
She is the scientific coordinator of the Horizon Europe Project LeT-Care (Learning from Long-Term Care practices for the European Care Strategy, 2024-2027), which studies contextualised care practices and policy learning models and she was also the Principal Investigator of the project QWoRe (Quality of Work in Residential long-term care services in Italy: determinants and strategies, 2023-2026).

Link zoom:

https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/99834638826?pwd=oI5da4b1Z5aG3ra1w1VaLBZAqri5TH.1

Meeting ID:

998 3463 8826

Passcode:

455005

Lunch at the end of the meeting: for those willing to participate in person, click here.