ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a study of the contested status of elderly people and professional work at two nursing homes in Gothenburg. Within Swedish health care, nursing homes have arrived at a crossroads and are confronted with confl icting frames of organisation. The status of professional work and of the elderly has become questioned – a consequence of the recent introduction of new public management (NPM) ideas, especially those relating to customer responsiveness. In 1992 a government reform was implemented, which explicitly defi nes the elderly living in nursing homes as ‘customers’, i.e. as consumers of a particular kind of housing and complementary services.
