Abstract
This article explores the ways in which developmental care work is haunted by histories of institutionalization, particularly in agency spaces where policy and practice are designed to reject the re-entrenchment of ‘institutional thinking’. Drawing from focus group and interview data, the article describes an emergent dynamic within the care sector in which disability service workers are tasked with complex forms of emotional labour to keep clientele protected from potential institutional abuse, but this paradoxically engenders client loneliness and isolation. This creates the conditions for moral distress – the experience of knowing the ethically appropriate course of action but being unable to act due to external constraints – within carers. Analyses of emotional labour and moral distress must be re-conceptualized as connected processes that are deeply impactful for carers.