Yes, we care? Sociomaterial perspectives on care work and robotic technology

Abstract

With the end of the so-called Fordist sexual contract (Adkins and Dever 2016) and an aging society many industrial countries face an increasing demand for care services. There are certain hopes that the technology of the future can provide solutions to social problems. The intentions of so-called care technologies range from increasing the autonomy and quality of life for clients to “creating work that is smarter and more qualified” (Kamp et al. 2019:1). Besides these goals, political strategies also intend to produce “labor-saving technologies” (Kamp et al. 2019:2). This emphasizes the relevance to examine critically how these new technologies are designed and how they are perceived by the workers affected.

To date, the technology development in the field of elderly care has predominantly been driven by technological feasibility. Instead of searching for meaningful roles of technologies in a care context, new application fields for emerging technologies are searched. This limited view does not do justice to the potential of new and innovative technologies such as robotics and AI, nor to the requirements of professional care.

To overcome these shortcomings, we propose to take Wanda Orlikowski’s (2007: 1437) socio-materiality approach to understand the “constitutive entanglement” of the social and technological. With her practice lens, Orlikowski (2000) emphasizes the importance of the (technological) context in investigating organizational social practices. Applied to a healthcare setting, this approach was used to detect shifts within the power configurations of different occupational groups when introducing a robotic system (Barrett et al. 2012).

In the context of the research project “Caring Robots//Robotic Care”, we analyze from a socio-material perspective how robotic technology affects care workers' perception of their own professional identities and their role within the labor process. Previous studies (e.g. Kamp et al. 2019) showed care technologies failing and provoking resistance among workers when they conflict with care values and professional identities. We want to understand how far new (robotic) technologies are perceived as unruly objects or to what extent they can be reconciled with the values and professional identities of those working in care. Furthermore, we want to investigate how power, control, and skills within work relations are (re-)negotiated regarding new robotic technology in care (Windsor 2015, Frennert et al. 2020, Ajslev et al. 2019). Therefore, we additionally draw on Feminist Science and Technology Studies (Wajman 1991, 2010), as technology is still strongly associated with a hegemonic form of masculinity, while care and medical professions have a long history of gendered hierarchies and skills (Wetterer 2002).

To reconstruct the entanglement of care work and technology, we combine a participatory design methodology with analysis methods based on Grounded Theory (Frauenberger et al. 2019, Teram et al. 2005, Charmaz 2008). The presentation focuses on the theoretical and conceptual analysis and presents research questions and the first empirical findings.