Sustainable Work and Employment in Social Care: New Challenges, New Priorities

ABSTRACT Human Resource Management (HRM) research focused on social care is sparse. This gap is surprising given the scale of the social care workforce in many countries, its vital role in meeting the increasingly complex needs of vulnerable community groups, and the persistent challenges in recruiting and retaining staff. Framing the special issue of articles on HRM in social care, we suggest the relative neglect stems from difficulties: defining the boundaries of the social care sector; scoping its workforce; capturing the diverse range of organizational service providers; and in a crowded research space, clarifying how HRM researchers might make a distinctive scholarly and practical contribution to the literature. The six articles comprising the special issue, together with literature from HRM and related fields, are explored through the organizational, systems, and stakeholder perspectives that underpinned the original call for articles. We develop a substantive characterization of HRM in social care comprising various parts. First, systemic features of the sector, including service fragmentation and light touch state regulation, are presented as pushing social care organizations towards opportunistic, low‐cost workforce management approaches that stakeholders—particularly employees and less directly service users—often experience negatively. Second, providers, nonetheless, retain some discretion to pursue alternative management strategies, with recent policy shifts towards networked care delivery models creating opportunities for more strategic, developmental HRM approaches. Third, leadership behavior and intrinsic employee satisfaction with care work can moderate the often‐degraded employment experience, albeit within limits, suggested by the sector's ongoing recruitment and retention difficulties. Synthesizing these insights through the systems, organizational, and stakeholder themes, we present a multi‐level analytical framework for the study of HRM issues in social care. Accompanying research questions aim to support the exploration of workforce issues by policymakers, practitioners, and HRM scholars.