Katia Dupret

Moral Literacy in Technological Care Work

Many different professionals play a key role in maintaining welfare in a welfare society. These professionals engage in moral judgements when using (new) technologies. In doing so, they achieve that radical responsibility towards the other that Levinas describes as being at the very core of ethics. Also, professionals try to assess the possible consequences of the involvement of specific technologies and adjust their actions in order to ensure ethical responsibility. Thus, ethics is necessary in order to obtain and sustain ones professionalism. This presents care institutions with the challenge to design work processes and technology work in ways that include a sense of ‘the Other’ and make moral judgement an indispensable part of professional competence in technology. This article provides new understandings of the way ethics are involved in care institutions. Nurses’ moral judgements are sophisticated with regard to ethical perspectives. In hospitals, nurses combine Latours notion of symmetry in human/technology relations with an ethics implying ethical priority to human beings over other beings. This combination of ethics is not only sophisticated; it is also paradoxical, as it puts together mutually contradictory ethics. Instead of causing moral confusion, this ethical paradox is employed to produce a particularly refined notion of care situations, allowing nurses’ care to include patients and technology alike.

Performative Silences: Potentiality of Organizational Change:

The article highlights the importance of silence in the change process of organizations, making the claim that silence distributes authority and decision-making processes. It thus adds to existing organization literature that applies a performative approach to silence as neither static nor neutral. It creates new realities. Silence as an act, rather than a noun, is conceptualized as central to organizational change. Through an ethnographic study in a mental healthcare organization, it is shown how different performances of silence make new decision-making processes available and influence new work practices that are central to understanding the particular characteristics of psychiatric organizations. Although the performance of silence can have somewhat immaterial and mundane connotations, when one uses an actor-network theory approach to organization studies, the performance of silence becomes helpful in conceptualizing how new and old practices are often imbedded into each other.