Stuck in the middle? Strategies, opportunities, and boundaries of the rehabilitation professionals in Italy between choices and needs

In recent years the reconfiguration of public sector inspired by the principles of New Public Management has been undertaken in many countries, with increasing privatisation of public services and a greater focus on improving productivity and efficiency. Within this framework, working conditions in the health care sector have changed significantly and, although bogus selfemployment has been studied in recent years, there is still no research that looks more closely at workers who are both employed and self-employed. This is particularly true for rehabilitation professionals, for whom it is difficult to make a clear distinction between different working conditions. To bridge this gap and by adopting the actor-centred institutionalism, we explore the positioning processes of rehabilitation professionals and present the results of a web survey involving rehabilitation professionals in Italy. The objectives were twofold: a) to overcome some of the limitations of official statistics, which often tend to overlook the different forms of employment and work of those who are both employees and self-employed; b) to analyse their working conditions, which represent a segment still little explored in the literature. If, on the one hand, the analysis shows how actors can make choices, adapt, or exploit the opportunities offered by the institutional context, on the other hand, it shows how the resources deployed are linked not only to subjective characteristics, but also to the room for manoeuvre offered by the organisational contexts in which they operate.