Self controls were also important (Jones and Dewing,
1997; Abernethy and Stoelwinder, 1995). In all three
phases, home helps continuously performed extra tasks for
the pensioners and acted contrary to the managers’ directions,
even when financial pressure was high and home
helps recognised that they were in a financial crisis. We see
that tension existed between administrative controls and
social controls on the one hand, and self controls on the
other (Jones and Dewing, 1997; Llewellyn, 1998b). During
phases II and III administrative controls and social controls
were utilised with the aim being to influence home helps,
making them limit their work to the tasks written in the
social care contracts. Home helps should not do anything
extra for the pensioners, and standardisation was the key.
At the same time, they had self controls that reinforced the
importance of being flexible to the individual pensioner’s
wishes and needs in specific care situations. To understand
why self controls differed from administrative controls and
social controls, even during periods of significant financial
pressure, we must look at administrative, social and self
controls in terms of their distance from the pensioner. As
mentioned in the introduction, domestic care of the elderly
creates a special setting in that it involves human interaction
in the pensioner’s home (Llewellyn, 1998b). The
individual home help will become aware of some of the
pensioner’s problems and needs during task performance.
Both administrative controls and social controls are more
distant from the actual delivery of care than self controls.
The home helps’ behaviour was, to some extent, influenced
by the pensioners, i.e. extra tasks were performed if the
home help thought the pensioner really needed it. This supports
Llewellyn’s (1998b) discussion of emotional labour in
that health and social services are delivered through interaction
with the user and therefore front-line personnel are
often personally committed to their pensioners.