Care is both a human ability and a human need: it is about considering the needs and interests of others. We all require care for growing and flourishing. Care is associated with âgoodnessâ and being cared for provides a sense of security to individuals and fosters positive attachments among them. While the value of care in private life is well-accepted, the importance and role of care in the public sphere continues to stir public debate. For example, to what extent care is a public, and not only a private, value, and how it relates to other ethical concepts, such as justice or rights, remains ambiguous. This book participates in this political debate by addressing the issue of care in the specific domain of work organisations. As organisations and management scholars, we propose to explore what care means at work and what it means to enhance care in work organisations. The questions we address are: What conditions make an organisation an environment in which care flourishes? And what do caring organisations look like in practice? We also ask: how is care valued in society and how might public policies promote or impede caring behaviours in organisations?
This book results from a fruitful sub-theme on caring organisations convened jointly by the editors of this volume during the Annual European Group of Organisation Studies Colloquium in Copenhagen in July 2017. For over three days, a group of academics from different countries, with various research interests, gathered to exchange their views about the meaning of a caring organisation, the different forms of care and the practical difficulties of practising care in organisations. Important discussions about the philosophical foundations of care arose, along with questions about the role of employees, leaders, and managers in enacting care. This edited collection structures and summarises these discussions and debates about the role and importance of care in public life and the life of organisations; thus we hope that the volume will be of interest both to academics and practitioners.
Recently, an ethics of care has attracted the attention of business ethicists. This book speaks to this emerging interest while going beyond the discussion of the implications of care for business ethics, narrowly defined. Our project aims to both problematise and develop the political and practical aspects of care in organisations. In addition to empirical and theoretical contributions dealing with various aspects of care (e.g. care as a relational encounter at the micro-level, careâs enactment through practices at the organisational level, philosophical underpinnings of care at the societal macro-level and so on) this collection sees care as a profoundly political project. Hence, it explores issues of distribution of care along the lines of social solidarity but also highlights the ways in which care may be used and misused. These debates are reflected in the logic and structure of the book, with the first section devoted to different conceptions of care (including different philosophical and cultural traditions), the following one addressing different practices of care in diverse work contexts and a final section on what encounters of care can do for individuals within and outside organisations.
The choice of a book format, as opposed to scientific articles, reflects our endeavour to reach out to a broader audiences that include not only management and organisations scholars, but also students, managers, consultants, and policy-makers. This book aims to contribute to academic discussions on care in organisations, care work, business and organisational ethics, diversity, caring leadership, well-being in organisations, and research ethics. Managers, consultants, policy-makers, and students will find in the book reflections about the value of care as âgoodnessâ in organ-isations, and guidance about the ethical and practical difficulties to pursue the project of caring organisations.
What It Means to Be Caring in Organisation and the Contested Nature of Care
The nature and importance of care is at the centre of our inquiry as a running theme of the entire edited collection. Asking questions of what care is and why it matters is key for understanding how organisations can become better or liveable places for their employees while engaging with their consumers, clients and the users of services. In particular, we address questions of care that we believe have been understudied in academic research and bear great potential for enhancing collective well-being.
What it means to be caring in organisations does not call for an easy answer. Defining care is still a topic of vigorous debates. Many ethicists of care, including some feminist ethicists of care, rely on the parent-child relationship as an epitome of conceptualizing care (Noddings, 2003; Ruddick, 1995), and project how such caring relationships would transform other domains of the social life (Held, 2006; Tronto, 1993). Following their work, many have defined care as a relational practice that aims at addressing concerns for another personâs needs (see Bowden, 2000 in the context of nursing; Sevenhuijsen, 2000 in social policy; and Fotaki, 2019 in organisation theory). Three elements are key in this definition. First, care can only be addressed within a relationship. Importantly, the focus is on relationships with a particular other or others, and a functional relationship through which care can be administered. Second, care is a practice. It is not enough to have benevolent intentions, care results from a skilful practice, thus requires competence. As for every practice, it is possible to have innate abilities, but caring relies on efforts and can be learned and improved. Third, care involves addressing another personâs needs. This last part is the most problematic as the evaluation of needs is always contentious (Tronto, 1993; Held, 2006).
Care has been often addressed in the context of ethics and gender. The âethics of careâ approach perhaps best reflects the convergence of both concepts (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 2003; Bowden, 2000; Held, 1993; 2006) but there are other radical feminist approaches which see care as an aspect of social reproduction (Fraser, 2016) and the key component of reproductive labour sustaining capitalist accumulation (Federici, 2012). Such latter views point to a critical perspective in which care relations can, perhaps unwittingly, become complicit in relations of exploitation. Although associated with feminist literature, care is not merely a female attribute as Nelson (2015) argues, offering the example of male husbandry as a masculine approach to care. Moreover, various philosophers in the distant and no so distant past were concerned with notions of care in the context of ethical living (e.g. David Hume or more recently Gilles Deleuze whose work is discussed in this volume) or care as an aspect of organising work (e.g. Simone Weil, along with psychoanalytic approaches to workplace suffering by Christophe Dejours, also discussed in this volume). Recent feminist work also positions care at the heart of its ontology so as to situate it, even if this rejects the association of care with feminine trait or women. These approaches to care build on key feminist conception of relationality, as we discuss after presenting different approaches to feminist ethics of care.
Feminist Ethics and Ethics of Care
Feminist ethical theory reflects a wide range of perspectives, combining various angles of feminist theory with broader socio-political, philosophical and cultural analyses, including Marxism (Federici, 2004, 2012), socialism (Jaggar, 1983, 1992), class, work (Ferguson et al., 2018), post-work ethics (Weeks, 2011), postcolonialism (Mohanty, 2003; hooks, 2000), psychoanalysis and poststructuralism (Fotaki & Harding, 2017).
Following Jaggar (1992) and Tongâs (1993) distinction between feminist and feminine ethics, Bowden (2000, p. 37) usefully defines the former as concerned with the structurally organised inequalities of power and the often invisible workings of micropolitics that reinforce those structures. In contrast, the so-called âfeminineâ insights have arisen from a renewed consideration of the ethical dimensions of personal and informal relationships among persons, which are also more closely associated with the notion of ethics of care. Feminists working in this tradition criticise classic ethical theoriesâ exclusive focus on morality of rights, and their abstract notion of justice and individual autonomy (Noddings, 2003; Gilligan, 1982). They counter this by bringing in neglected aspects and perspectives of care and reject the principles-driven Western tradition in ethics as deficient, since it ignores, trivialises, or demeans values and virtues culturally associated with women (Tong & Williams, 2016). By raising objections to the gender-biased history of philosophical discourse in ethics, this perspective offers a prism of care that views morality in different terms, based on womenâs unique experiences. Though it suggests that the uniqueness of womenâs perspectives on ethics originates in the uniqueness of womenâs experiences, however, it could also imply that womenâs uniqueness is due to them being different beings as compared to men.
Gilligan (1982) specifically argues that women develop a distinctive moral voice, by speaking a language of care emphasising relationships and responsibilities. The embodied ethical caring practiced by women is about concrete ethical rules rather than the abstract ethics of justice constructed by men. Care ethics therefore claims that impartiality, following rules, and the use of reason to the exclusion of affect are all limited means for making moral decisions in the sphere of interpersonal relations (Keller, 1997). This perspective framed the debate in terms of two opposite care and justice perspectives, each with its own emphasis in moral reasoning; however, more recent theorising departed from considering these two as separate or conflicting, instead they are seen as complementary, and applicable across moral reasoning spectrum for all genders (see for instance Mussell, 2016 in the context of corporate responsibility). It is widely accepted that the different voice identified by Gilligan exists in everyone and that the âethics of care and justice do not exclude but complement each other in sophisticated moral reasoning: both capacities can be possessed by the same individual and used when solving moral conflictsâ (Juujärvia et al., 2010, p. 484).
Indeed, Juujärvia et al. (2010) suggest, type of moral conflict, rather than gender, enters into consideration in moral decisions. Moreover, it is has been argued, that the separation between feminine and feminist ethics may be used to reinforce the pre-existing inequalities given the asymmetry of power and feminisation in the context of health care, for example in nursing (Bowden, 2000). The crux of Bowdenâs argument is that a one-sided focus on âfeminineâ insightsâby care ethicists and their criticsâleads to misunderstandings of the full possibilities of an ethics of care.
Feminist ethics, on the other hand, situates the conception of care in a political and social context (Gregoratto, 2016), connecting it to wider debates on justice, the relationship between womenâs oppression and liberation, the class politics of the left, and various philosophical approaches to the concept of work in the public and private spheres (see Ferguson et al., 2018 for a discussion). Simply put, this exceeds the remit of the debate between rights and care framed by a care ethics perspective. For the influential political theorist Joan Tronto (1995), care is always political as it concerns the issues of distribution among various recipient of different types of care and considerations of care work involved in producing and providing it. She therefore argues that caring institutions should be built through a political process that considers the needs, contributions, and prospects of women along many different actors (Tronto, 1995). This suggests that care needs not necessarily be opposed to independence and self-realization, implying the need for a redistribution of paid labour and caring tasks between men and women, as well as a new approach to justice, morality, and politics.
Furthermore, care is not merely about moral sentiments but involves embodied work (Adams, 2017; Simola, 2012), and feminists of various persuasions have recognized that such âcare workâ is often precisely the type of work that the market does not value (cf. Dwyer, 2013, for the economic distribution of care work). As Ferguson et al. (2018) argue, the âsex/affectiveâ work of mothering and wifely nurturing exploits women: women give more nurturing and satisfaction (including sexual satisfaction) to men and children than they receive and do much more of the work of providing these important human goods. More radically, Marxist autonomist feminists posit that womenâs housework (and, by extension, affective/sex/care work) is part of the social reproduction of capitalism (Federici, 2019) and that the anti-capitalist struggle cannot be confined to improving working conditions but must also question and consider abolishing exploitative work altogether (Federici, 1975). Hence, âthe question of reproduction is essential not only to the capitalist organ-isation of work, but it is also central to any true revolutionary processâthat is, any process of genuine transformation of societyâ (Federici, 2012).
Social Reproduction and Embodied Care
Referring to the âcrisis of careâ, which is currently a major topic of public debate often linked to ideas of âtime povertyâ, âfamily-work balanceâ, and âsocial depletionâ, Nancy Fraser (2016) reframes the issue of care in social reproduction terms. She suggests this âcrisisâ can be âbest interpreted as a more or less acute expression of the social-reproductive contradictions of financialised capitalismâ (p. 99). Capitalist societies have separated the work of social reproduction from that of economic production since the industrial era at least and âhave remunerated âreproductiveâ activities in the coin of âloveâ and âvirtueâ, while compensating âproductive workâ in that of moneyâ (p. 102). In this sense, domestic and care work constitute âhidden abodesâ of capitalism (Fraser, 2014), spaces of disavowed exploitation whereâsimilar to the industrial factory in Marxâeconomic value is produced through relations of dominance without compensation at full exchange value. Though no society can survive without social reproduction of both, the human bodies and workforce or activities that sustain and promote social bonding âthe capitalist economy relies onâone might say, free rides onâactivities of provisioning, care-giving and interaction that produce and maintain social bondsâ (Fraser, 2016, p. 101). This fundamental contradiction in capitalist economy of âdependence on social reproduction and its disavowalâ in Fraserâs terminology, reaches its apogee in the financialised capitalist economy where states and the public are disciplined to respond to investorsâ short term interests, reducing spending on social reproduction (Fraser, 2016) such as public health and social care. Ultimately, systemic crisis results as the bases of social reproduction are undermined in a process by which capitalism pulls the rug from under itself by disavowing its own foundations.
Social reproduction relies on care and affective labour (Muehlebach, 2011). Care practices are enforced and sustained through subjectivation where social norms shape and structure subjectsâ attachments and their ways of relating and feel...
