Cripping time in eldercare: waiting for the home care service

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through an ethnographic study of older people’s experiences of the home care service organised by a large Swedish municipality, this article shows how care users are affected by the neoliberal governing of eldercare and of age itself. The article explores how fragmentation and standardisation, driven by the quest for cost reduction, redirect the time and needs of care users so that they align with market logic. One of the central experiences of the interviewed care users is the day-to-day uncertainty of waiting for the home care service, with the consequence that the care user’s bodily integrity and self-determination are compromised. Drawing from a theoretical framework of the sociology of time, care ethics, and critical disability studies, five different time-regimes are identified: clock-time, care-time, everyday-time, body-time and crip-time. The article argues that the concept of crip-time needs to be added to the analysis; it captures overlooked aspects of bodily temporality that are crucial to conceptualise for understanding what the effects are when the needs of ageing bodies are measured according to ableist assumptions and the neoliberal premise that all forms of time can be streamlined.