Sexual harassment is illegal and may have very damaging effects on the people exposed to it. One
would expect organizations, employers, and institutions to take very good care to prevent employees
from exposure to sexual harassment from anyone in their workplace. And yet, many people, mostly
women, are exposed to sexual harassment at work. In care work, such behaviour is often directed
toward their female caregiver by elderly citizens in need of care. Contemporary Nordic studies of
working life and work environment have primarily investigated the interpersonal dimensions of sexual
harassment, thus focusing on the relation between elderly citizens in need of care and their professional
caregivers. In this article, we argue that sexual harassment from the elderly toward newcomers
in elder care should also be seen as an effect of institutional practices. Based upon a Foucauldianinspired
notion of practice-making, the article carries out a secondary analysis of three different
empirical studies in order to explore how sexual harassment is produced and maintained through institutional
practices in elder care. The term institution in this perspective includes three dimensions; a
political, an educational (educational institutions in health and elder care), and a work organizational
dimension. By examining elder care in these different dimensions, we identify how sexual harassment
of professional caregivers is produced and maintained through institutional practice-making in elder
care. The article thus contributes to our knowledge on working life by expanding and qualifying the
understanding of the problematic working environment in care work, and by offering an alternative
theoretical and analytical approach to the study of sexual harassment. Together, these insights suggest
how elder care institutions might act to prevent sexual harassment toward caregivers.
