Timework and temporalities in digital elderly care

Abstract

This article explores how new digital technologies in care work change temporality – time, space and rhythms – in care work and illuminates how this may affect care and care work. Temporality is conceived as complex, multiple and contradictory, and as continuously negotiated in timework (Flaherty, 2011). Timework involves a reorganization of time, space and rhythms, aiming to create temporal qualities that are meaningful in relation to care tasks. Based on ethnographic studies of two technologies, sensor floors and virtual home care, assumed to affect time and rhythms in work in different ways, I present an analysis of employees’ timework, and the new temporalities created. The analysis shows how the employees negotiate new temporalities characterized by acceleration, compression and fragmentation with “body time” and “home time”. The clients’ participation and the use of technology also play a role in this process. Paradoxically, timework as a strategy for negotiating conflicted temporalities often further contributes to compressing or fragmenting time. The article points to how temporality can be an important key to understanding digital care work, where digital technologies are brought to use in specific political and socio-material contexts, often with unexpected and unintended results.