Work and autonomy of health workers: considerations about theoretical and methodological assumptions of health work analysis

Abstract

The issues addressed in the article are related to the topic of work and autonomy in health work. The possibility of creating spaces of autonomy for workers in contexts of standardization and norms from public policies is questioned, but also from the constraints arising from the historical processes of restructuring health work. The theoretical perspective adopted considers the conditions of resistance, struggles, and active action of the workers in the spaces of conception and execution of work processes, but does not relativize the importance of structural conditioning in this process. Thus, we affirm the importance of not taking autonomy at work as a given, neither as an absence, but as a social construction that stems from the concrete experience of health workers. Without denying the importance of studies that emphasize the protagonism of the subjects in health work, the analysis emphasizes, therefore, the structural constraints in the analysis of the work and the autonomy (possible) of health workers.