A vocational calling: exploring a caring technology in elderly care

Abstract

In this article we explore the relationship of care of a group of health care workers in elderly care, through their descriptions of themselves and their work. We have an interest in how relationships of care may be explored and characterised in and across disparate vocational settings. This is a critical response to policy discourses of citizenship that are currently emerging for re‐emphasis in Europe through citizenship education and the idea of the active citizen.

We mobilise two notions to help us in the analysis of interview transcripts. First, ‘calling’ is used as a figure of thought. Past religious and secular discourses of calling to God and nursing provide us with glimpses of past relations of vocation and care through which to consider present descriptions. The term ‘technology of the self’ is one drawing specifically from the work of Michel Foucault, through which we theorise the calling to care emerging from our interviewee descriptions as such a technology. Our analysis indicates that a specific calling to care and technology is mobilised by these health care workers in elderly care. We conclude that it is through such stabilisations of description that the health care workers' shape context‐specific subjectivities, as caring citizens.

Keywords:

• caring technology
• calling
• vocation
• elderly care
• Foucault

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by a research grant from the Swedish research council (VR).