Caring as a collective knowledgeable doing : About concern and being concerned

• Care is not an innate human capacity; rather, it is an organizational competence, a situated knowing that a group of professionals enact while attending to their everyday tasks. We propose a post-humanist practice approach to reading care as a matter of concern for those producing care and for society at large. Care is framed as a collective knowledgeable doing', it is not an object or a quality that is added to work; rather, it is caring', an ongoing sociomaterial accomplishment. Through an ethnography in a nursing home for the elderly, we describe: (a) how caring was collectively performed in keeping a common orientation, (b) how caring was inscribed in a texture of practices, and (c) how a technological change in nutrition practice mobilized ethics as practice in situated decision-making. Since natural nutrition is being increasingly replaced by artificial feeding, we describe how the collective and organizational ethic of care with tube feeding is talked about in practice, in a front-stage situation and in the back-stage one. In this process, the duality of care as a matter of concern and as the process of being concerned by caring becomes visible.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Artificial feeding

care

matter of concern

practice-based studies

situated decision-making

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)