Digital Transformations in Care for Older People by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367725570
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Digital agency in care work

Chapter 6

Temporalities of digital eldercare

Annette Kamp

DOI: 10.4324/9781003155317-6

Introduction

For many years, time optimisation has been the centrepiece of rationalisation efforts in health and social care. Consequently, meticulous planning of time, place, and tasks has formed the basis for working life. In eldercare, for example, this development has been enabled by use of ICT systems and personalised technology, Personal Digital Assistants, aiming at managerial control of how time is used during the day. The resulting linear time regime (Durkheim and Swain, 2012), where time turns out to be a resource that must be used as optimally as possible, and activities are separated and streamlined independently in order to achieve maximum efficiency. This has been subject to much criticism in studies of care work (Wrede et al., 2008; Kamp, 2012; Trydegård, 2012; Hansen and Kamp, 2019). Some even called this development ‘digital taylorisation of work’, thus pointing at a disciplinary regime aiming to govern temporal and spatial elements of care (see e.g. Rideout, 2008). However, as several studies point out, this kind of technology that intends to control and make the use of time visible is actually used in unexpected ways, and hides the complex temporalities that characterise practice (Tufte, 2013; laCour, Hecht and Stilling, 2016; Bergschöld, 2018). As La Cour et al. argue, rather than creating transparency, the technology opens up space for hiding the internal contradictions in the organisation of eldercare.

One often emphasised contradiction refers to the special character of care and care work. Attending the needs of care does – as many researchers in this field have highlighted – imply an overall attention to care relations and involvement in activities such as bathing, feeding, and toilet visits. This implies working with tasks that are unpredictable and difficult to schedule. Care relations thus play an important role in professional identity (see e.g. Dahl, 2005). Feminist sociologists like Davies (2001), who is inspired by Wærness and her understanding of the rationality of care (Waerness, 1984), propose the concept of processual time in order to grasp how care involves following the needs of older people and weaving activities together. Subsequently, Twigg (2000) suggests the concepts of body time and domestic time in order to expand our understanding of the different non-linear temporalities involved in care work. Hence, she points at how professionals have to adjust temporality to the bodily rhythms and the rhythms of everyday life in the homes of the older people.

The clash between the temporalities of care and the temporality of ‘industrial clock time’ thus does not come as a surprise. Several studies show how care workers attempt to negotiate conflicting temporalities, that is reordering time schedules so that they fit into the bounded timeslots allotted to this ‘service’ (Hirvonen and Husso, 2012; Tufte, 2013; Andersen and Bengtsson, 2019). In this chapter, this study explores how the recent wave of digitalisation of care work – comprising a diverse array of technologies like automatic toilets, feeding robots, advanced alarms, and screens for telecare – affects temporalities of care and thus adds to this complexity.

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