Criteria of implementing feeding assistance robots in disability care
a sociomaterial perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31265/jcsw.v8i2.100Keywords:
welfare technology, feeding assistance robots, disability care, sociomaterial, science and technology studies, criteria, valuesAbstract
This article discusses the entanglement of implementing welfare technology in disability care, and draws on ethnographic observations from a pilot project involving 30 disabled citizens from three different boroughs in Denmark. The disabled citizens suffered from diseases such as multiple sclerosis and cerebral paralysis. The article follows four care assistants and four citizens through a period of 10 months, focusing particularly on the experiences and struggle of two citizens. Against this background, the article takes up a number of conflicting values and criteria practiced by diverse interested groups: 1. employee retrenchment, 2. citizen independence and 3. workforce flexibility. The main argument is that the housing institution studied has turned into a battlefield, where professional values of authentic care meet a strong governmental discourse of modernization of the public sector. The study demonstrates that the implementation of welfare technology in disability care is highly fragile, which is predominantly due to the delicate body-technology assembly, and takes place in agony.
References
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Pickering, A. (1993). The Mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science, pp. 559-589. In American Journal of Sociology, vol. 99, no. 3.
Rice, A. K., & Miller, E. (1976). Systems of organization. Tavistock. London.
Star, S. L. (1991). Power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: On being Allergic to Onions (1991). In: A Sociology of Monsters – Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. In J. Law (Ed.), Routledge.
Suchmann, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
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Trist. E. L., & Bamforth, K.W. (1951). Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal getting, Human Relations, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 3-38.
Warren, S. (2008). Empirical Challenges in Organizational Aesthetics Research: Towards a Sensual Methodology. Organization Studies, vol. 29, no. 04, pp. 559-580.
Weick, K. (1979). The social psychology of organizing. Second edition. McGraw-Hill. New York.
Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. McGraw Hill. New York.
Weick, K., & Roberts, K. (1996). Collective Minds in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks. In Organizational Learning, M. D. Cohen, & L. S. Sproull (Eds.), Organization Science.
Zuiderent-Jerak, T., & Jensen, C. B. (2007). Editorial Introduction: Unpacking Intervention in Science and Technology Studies. Science as Culture, vol. 16; 3, pp. 227-235.
Akrich, M. (2000). The description of technical objects. In Shaping Technology/Building society. Studies in sociotechnical change. In W. E. Bijker, & J. Law (Eds.), The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Akrich, M., & Latour, B. (2000). A summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies in Shaping Technology/Shaping Society. In W. E. Bijker, & J. Law (Eds.), MIT Press.
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. (1996). Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method and Practice. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0201629836.
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28/3, pp. 801-831.
Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., & Pinch, T. (Eds.) (1987). The social construction of technological systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Blau, P. M., Falbe, C. M., MacKinley, W., & Tracy, P. K. (1976). Technology and organization in manufacturing. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 21, pp. 20-40.
Bramming, P., Hansen, B. G., & Gylling, K. (2009). SnapLog en performativ forskningsteknologi eller hvad grævlingelorten fortæller om lærertrivsel. Tidsskrift for Arbejdsliv, nr. 4.
Callon, M. (1986a). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? Sociological Review Monograph, 32 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Callon, M. (1986b). The sociology of an actor-network: The case of the electric vehicle. In mapping the dynamics of science and technology: Sociology of science in the real world. M. Callon, J. Law, & A. Rip (Eds.), London: Macmillan LTD.
Callon, M., & Latour, B. (1981). Unscrewing the big leviathan: How actors macrostructure reality. In K. Knorr, & A. Cicourel (Eds.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Londres, pp. 277-303.
Gherardi, S. (2010). Telemedicine: A practice-based approach to technology. Human relations, 63, (4) 501-524.
Hughes, T. (1983). Networks of power: Electrification in Western society, 18880- 1930, JHU Press.
Latour, B. (1986). Drawing things together in knowledge and society: Studies in the sociology of culture past and present, vol. 6, 1986, pp. 1-40.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2000). Where are the missing masses in Shaping Technology/Shaping Society. W. E. Bijker, & J. Law (Eds.), MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social – an introduction to actor network theory. Oxford University Press.
Law, J. (1994). Organizing Modernity. Blackwell. London.
Law, J. (1998). Heterogeneities http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/stslaw4.html
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge. Abingdon.
Law, J., & Moser, I. (2003). Managing, Subjectivities and Desires http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Moser-Managing-Subjectivities- Desires.pdf
MacKenzie, D., & Wajcman, J. (Eds.) (1985). The social shaping of technology, Milton Keynes, UK, Open University Press.
March, J. (1994). A primer on decision making. Free Press. Oxford.
March, J. (2005). Valg, vane og vision. Samfundslitteratur, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (Eds.) (2010): Care in practice. On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Mort, M., May, C., & Williams, T. (2003). Remote doctors and absent patients: Acting at a distance in Telemedicine? Science, Technology & Human Values, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 274-295.
Moser, I. (2006). Disability and the promise of technology: Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the normal. http://www.inforaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713699183
Moser, I., & Law, J. (1999). Good passages, bad passages. In Actor Network Theory and after, J. Law, & J. Hassard (Eds.), Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review.
Nickelsen, N. C. (2003). Arrangements of knowing – coordinating procedures, tools and bodies in collective product development. ATV Ph.D. series 9. Copenhagen Business School.
Nickelsen, N. C. (2008). The institutionalization of a routine: Identity, interaction, and materiality. In The anatomy of change, S. Scheuer, & J. D. Scheuer (Eds.), Copenhagen Business School Press.
Nicolini, D. (2007). Stretching out and expanding work practices in time and space: The case of telemedicine. Human Relations, vol. 60 (6), pp. 889-920.
Nicolini, D. (2011). Practice as the site of knowing: Insights from the field of Telemedicine. Organization Science, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 602-620.
Nordic Centre for Welfare and Social Issues (2010). Focus on welfare technology. Stockholm Sweden: EO Grafiska.
Orlikowsky, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at work. Organization Studies, 28, pp. 1435-1446.
Orlikowsky, W. J. (2010). The sociomateriality of organizational life: Considering technology in management research. In Cambridge Journal of Economics. 34, pp. 125-141.
Orlikowsky, W. J., & Scott, S. V. (2008). Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization. The Academy of Management Annals, 2:1, pp. 433-474.
Oudshoorn, N. (2011). Telecare technologies and the transformation of healthcare. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Perrow, C. (1986). Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, Random House, New York.
Pickering, A. (1993). The Mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science, pp. 559-589. In American Journal of Sociology, vol. 99, no. 3.
Rice, A. K., & Miller, E. (1976). Systems of organization. Tavistock. London.
Star, S. L. (1991). Power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: On being Allergic to Onions (1991). In: A Sociology of Monsters – Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. In J. Law (Ed.), Routledge.
Suchmann, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
The Norwegian Directory of Health (2012). Wellfare technology (Velferdsteknologi. Fagrapport om implementering av velferdsteknologi I de kommunale helse og omsorgstjenestene 2013-2030). Oslo. The Norwegian Directory of Health.
Trist. E. L., & Bamforth, K.W. (1951). Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal getting, Human Relations, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 3-38.
Warren, S. (2008). Empirical Challenges in Organizational Aesthetics Research: Towards a Sensual Methodology. Organization Studies, vol. 29, no. 04, pp. 559-580.
Weick, K. (1979). The social psychology of organizing. Second edition. McGraw-Hill. New York.
Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. McGraw Hill. New York.
Weick, K., & Roberts, K. (1996). Collective Minds in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks. In Organizational Learning, M. D. Cohen, & L. S. Sproull (Eds.), Organization Science.
Zuiderent-Jerak, T., & Jensen, C. B. (2007). Editorial Introduction: Unpacking Intervention in Science and Technology Studies. Science as Culture, vol. 16; 3, pp. 227-235.
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Published
2013-10-01
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Nickelsen, N. C. M. (2013). Criteria of implementing feeding assistance robots in disability care: a sociomaterial perspective. Journal of Comparative Social Work, 8(2), 169–197. https://doi.org/10.31265/jcsw.v8i2.100
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