In this context of fluid and changing definitions of families, a basic core remains which refers to the sharing of resources, caring, responsibilities and obligations. What a family is appears intrinsically related to what it does. All the studies in this book suggest that while there are new family forms emerging, alongside new normative guidelines about family relationships, this does not mean that values of caring and obligation are abandoned. On the contrary, these are central issues which continue to bind people together.
(Silva and Smart, 1999: 7)
Silva and Smart’s comments about caring and obligation illustrate an important feature of contextualizing the meanings of care. Care should not be understood only in terms of a number of variables such as the social identity of the carer or its economic character or only in terms of a number of indicators, such as housework, caring for the sick or lobbying for environmental change. Care invokes a host of cluster concepts. In addition to obligation these include dependency, responsibility, friendship, duty, reciprocity and trust.
A classic example of this is the research into family care undertaken by Finch (1989) and Finch and Mason (1993). Their analyses draw on issues of reciprocity, obligation, inter-dependency and responsibility. For example, Finch and Mason emphasize the importance of recognizing that taking on responsibilities for care rests on a range of negotiating factors that are part of reciprocal relations. These develop over time as part of a two-way process that attempts to balance the giving and receiving of support. It is important that one party does not become over-dependent on the other. Rather, the aim is to achieve a mutuality of inter-dependence. In addition, Finch and Mason stress that it is the interweaving of the material and moral dimensions of family life which are significant in understanding the meanings of responsibility for care. In particular, they draw on the connection between moral values and identity through the ways in which people understand what it means to be a good mother, a caring sister or a kind son. Through the negotiations of giving and receiving care, reputations as a ‘good’ person are at stake. In these enactments of responsibility, therefore, people are constructed as moral beings. Moreover, reputations are public property, shared, though not necessarily consensually, with members of their kin group and can impact on negotiations at later points in time.
Research into being cared for also illustrates the conceptual partnering of care. For example, research that has been concerned with the experiences of receiving care has given close attention to the relationship between autonomy and caring. This linkage has not only been important in terms of an analysis of the material and subjective experiences of receiving care but also in terms of the broader politics associated with the field of care. This is because being self-sufficient and socially independent when one is receiving care has been an important strand in rights arguments (see, for example, Morris, 1993).
As these examples illustrate, cluster concepts form a chain with other concepts (see Figure 5.1). At its most simple level one might connect care and responsibility. Thus, as we have seen, feminists have highlighted how women are vested with the major responsibilities for care work in both the public and private domains. Yet this in turn relies on further concepts. For example, feminist research into responsibilities for care in the family has illustrated how this structures women’s dependence either on a male partner or the state. When dependency is invoked, the most immediate companion concept in this chain that we should be aware of is its opposite in the binary, that of independence. Thus the politics that arise from this awareness of women’s dependency
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Figure 5.1 Care: an illustrative chain of cluster concepts
focuses on ways through which women can be more independent. This may be through lobbying for childcare rights, the greater provision of workplace nurseries, increasing childcare benefits, and so forth.
A further complication is that the meanings of these companion concepts will also vary. Through a review of dependency as a key word in US welfare policy, Fraser and Gordon (1994) indicate that it has four registers of meaning. The first meaning is economic, when one depends on another person or institution for subsistence. The second meaning denotes socio-legal status as in the case of married women’s access to independent welfare rights. The third meaning relates to being subjected to an external ruling power. This may be expressed, for example, through theories of patriarchy or capital. Moral and psychological meanings form the fourth category where the individual is judged to be excessively needy or lacks willpower and where she is deemed to be over-dependent.
A similar case can be made for other concepts (see, for example, Hughes, 2001). For example, Figure 5.2 sets out a range of meanings invoked through the phrase ‘responsible for’ (see Piper, 1993, for a discussion of this usage in relation to divorce and mediation). As this illustrates, responsibility can be conceptualized as an act of agency when, for example, it is related to concepts of choice. It can also be conceptualized as oppressive when choice of whether to have responsibility or not is absent. Responsibility may be conceptualized as empowering when
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Figure 5.2 Responsible for: some common meanings
it is linked to status enhancement. It may be conceptualized as aspira — tional when it is linked with a desire for sought-after status.
Although meanings vary, they can be quite domain-specific. Within the low-status spheres of the family, greater attention is given to the oppressive meanings of responsibility in terms of ‘not relieved of’ or ‘too much responsibility for’. Within the higher-status spheres of employment responsibility can mean higher status and financial rewards. In this way responsibility may be viewed as more empowering in terms of ‘given responsibility for’. Perhaps to reinforce this point, Tronto (1993) comments that within employment markets caring labour is not conceptualized under the terminology of care. It is conceptualized as service, support and assistance. Thus, even the terminology will vary within each domain.
Fisher and Tronto (1990) link issues of domain with three main ways in which caring is conceptualized and organized in modern capitalist societies. These are through the household/community, through the market and through a bureaucracy. Their analysis of each sphere illustrates how care draws on domain-specific meanings. Fisher and Tronto argue that because caring about, taking care of and care giving constitute shared values and shared activities amongst women household/ community care:
caring also embodies a sort of justice and inspires a type of trust. Caring is seen as just when it refers to a shared standard by which each gives and receives her ‘due.’ Trust results because these standards are shared, and one can count on other community members to maintain them. (ibid.: 46)
This can be contrasted to care in the market place where care is a commodity and reduced to exchange relations. Within bureaucracies care giving is separated from taking care of. This means that care becomes a standardized routine and that those who receive care are mainly required to fit in with the demands of the bureaucracy.
The importance of the domain-specific meanings and varied terminology of care can be seen in Franzway’s (2000) exploration of trade union work. This illustrates how service is predicated on care within relations of exchange-based masculine cultures. Franzway begins by noting that there is a distinction between feminine and masculine interpretations of the meanings of the trade union ethic of ‘service to members’. This is translated in masculine terms as defending wages and conditions. It is enacted through ‘‘‘toughness’’ understood as dedication and commitment combined with a hard, assertive personal style’ ( ibid.: 266). As women, women officials are therefore positioned within a complex array of discursive meanings and practices. If they are too tough, then they are perceived to be ‘waspish’. If they are not tough enough, they are perceived to be ‘wimpish’. Franzway’s analysis indicates how women officials negotiate this terrain. Specifically, ‘From throwing themselves into a wholehearted but unrestrained care, they report shifts into a more discriminating, perhaps instrumental, or utilitarian exercise of care. . . Overall, the women officials construe taking care in terms of empowerment rather than of helping’ (ibid.: 266-7). Similarly, Thornley’s (1996) analysis of care in nursing illustrates how care is divided into important skill distinctions. Recent changes in the training of nurses has given much greater emphasis on higher education qualifications as a means of restricting entry to, and enhancing the status of, nursing. Such entry qualifications neither value nor recognize prior caring experiences in terms of the caring for one’s children or parents. In addition, this approach to the training of nurses places cure above care through a focus on the acquisition of technical rather than communicative knowledge.
Although the predominant meanings of care giving in family research have focused on its oppressive and unrelenting nature, in employment contexts certain forms of care have more recently been seen as an opportunity for women. This is because there has been a shift from what has been termed ‘hard’ discourses of human resource management to ‘soft’ discourses (Legge, 1995) ‘Hard’ discourses considered employees as passive repositories of the orders of their superiors. The emphasis was on forms of management that were autocratic and authoritarian. The discourses of ‘soft’ human resource management use terms such as empowerment and teamwork to convey a liberatory and egalitarian backdrop to these new management techniques. The core skills of care at the centre of ‘soft’ human resource discourses are those associated with relationality. Often termed ‘people management skills’, they include listening, discussing, taking an interest in and facilitating. As a discourse that is designed to fit with flatter organizational structures and so to some extent challenge traditional hierarchical relations between managers and workers, further skills that are required are those of subordinating one’s ego and needs to those of others. These are important in order to facilitate the team working that has formed part of more recent managerial responses to gaining competitive advantage. In addition, the management of emotions whereby ‘the employee is paid to smile, laugh, be polite, deferential or caring’ (Forseth and Dahl — Jorgensen, 2001) are increasingly viewed as important corporate assets (see also Hochschild, 1983; Fineman, 1993; Blackmore, 1999).
These aspects of caring have been analysed in research on women’s leadership (see, for example, Coleman, 2000; Ozga and Deem, 2000).
This has illustrated how women have a more relational style. Ozga and Walker (1995) comment that in contrast to masculine models of authoritative or consultative leadership, research has found that women prefer a participative style. Meehan (1999) distinguishes between those that assume there are internal factors that have given rise to feminine- masculine differences in management styles and those that focus on external factors. Those that focus on internal factors highlight issues such as early socialization and gender identity formation. Those that focus on external factors focus more strongly on organizational features such as company cultures. It is perhaps no surprise therefore that caring, when conceptualized as skills of relationality, should be viewed as an opportunity for women’s advancement.
Nevertheless, it has also been important in feminist research to distinguish between women’s styles of leading and approaches to leadership that accord more broadly with feminist politics. Strachan (1999) suggests that there are two aspects that distinguish women managers from feminist managers. One of these is a commitment to social justice. The other is the development of one’s own and others’ practices of caring. Ozga and Walker (1995) suggest that it is feminism’s rejection of authoritarian and hierarchical organization, its recognition of the masculine inherent in such structures and its politics of emancipation that create the value context for this. In this framework, feminist management is considered to be the doing of feminism ‘in such a way that it challenges and changes hegemonic institutional practices. This emancipatory practice is also imbued with an ethic of care in order that a sense of belonging, of being cared for, is built into organisational practices’ (Tanton and Hughes, 1999: 248). It is more broadly to conceptualizing care as an ethic that I now consider.