Personal assistance (PA) is a model of support where disabled people take control of recruiting, training and managing their support staff. Direct payment relationships and symbolism borrowed from the corporate world frame PA relationships as instrumentally focused and largely free from emotional entanglements. Yet complicating this picture is research showing that PA often involves moral dilemmas and interpersonal conflict. We report on data from 58 qualitative interviews with disabled people and PAs. Findings reveal PA to be an embedded form of work, which entails convergent interpretive schemes informed by the world of work and also by indeterminate social relations. Applying Emerson and Messinger’s micro-politics of trouble, we outline how trouble comes to be framed in either conflict-resonant or deviant-resonant ways. This focus upon the moral dimensions of trouble sheds light on the relational dynamics of this prevailing model of care and embedded work more broadly.

个人协助 (PA) 是一种支持模式，残疾人可以控制招聘、培训和管理他们的支持人员。从企业界借用的直接支付关系和象征意义将 PA 关系框架为以工具为重点并且在很大程度上没有情感纠葛。然而，研究表明，PA 经常涉及道德困境和人际冲突，这让这幅画面变得复杂。我们报告了对残疾人和 PA 进行的 58 次定性访谈的数据。调查结果显示 PA 是一种嵌入的工作形式，它需要由工作世界和不确定的社会关系提供信息的融合解释方案。应用爱默生和梅辛格关于麻烦的微观政治，我们概述了麻烦是如何以冲突共振或异常共振的方式来构建的。