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The purpose of this project was to study how middle managers look on and shape their work and leadership with regard to the demands and expectations that exist from different participants within the home help service operation. The participants are politicians, officials at central level, nursing staff, persons receiving care and their relatives.

The participants are eight managers in eight different home‐help service units. The units are spread out in four districts with high socioeconomic status and four districts with low. Four managers are at public units and four are at units with private executor. The majority of the managers had worked as leaders between three and eight years. The study is based on individual interviews and observations of the managers and of staff meetings. The data were subjected to content analysis. Two main categories and five subcategories were generated.

There were large similarities in how the managers perceived the demands and expectations, but there were differences when it came to how they handled them. Three of the managers experienced that they could handle the demands and expectations through organizing and structuring the operation and prioritizing the assignments, while five of the managers experienced difficulties to handle them and they conveyed that they suffered from stress. The managers who could handle the demands combine a professional and an organizational perspective in their leadership.

The knowledge from the study may be of great value in recruiting new managers in elderly care but also in creating programs of competence development for managers.

The purpose of this paper is to first elaborate on the notion of a learning environment based on an empirical study of care work. Second, to explore how aspects of a learning environment may differ between and within units in the same organization, and how to understand and explain such differences.

The study was based on a multiple case‐study design including four departments within two care units. Data were collected through direct observation of working conditions and work practices as well as semi‐structured interviews with all care‐workers within the two units (29 persons), and with the head and deputy head for each of the two units.

It was possible to distinguish between two qualitatively different patterns of working conditions and practices within the four teams. These patterns of practice were interpreted as representing an enabling and a constraining type of learning environment as these concepts were defined in this study. The evidence suggests that the emergence of an enabling learning environment was an outcome of a dynamic interplay between a number of factors that had the character of a virtuous circle.

The article adds to previous research through a distinction between two types of learning environment (enabling and constraining), and by linking these two types of learning environment to different conceptions of learning and to different working conditions and practices.