Abstract
Traditional understandings of care-giving assume care practices are clear to others and unambiguously altruistic, reflective of the selfless and humane bearing of care professionals. However, a range of organisational research has noted the complex and often contradictory ways in which enactments of care are interwoven into organisational relations of power and control. Through a narrative analysis of interview data, our paper focuses upon practices of inaction and concealment as ‘veiled’ care set within the power-laden complexities and contested meaning-making of organisational life. Our notion of veiled care extends debates about care as a social practice in everyday work relations in two ways. Firstly, it provides a greater focus on the less discernible aspects of care-giving which are significant but possibly overlooked in shaping subjectivities and meanings of care in work relations. Secondly, it develops the discussion of the situated ambiguities and tensions in enacting care that involves overcoming care-recipient resistance and an arguably less heroic but nonetheless important objective of non-maleficence, to avoid, minimise or repair damage.
Highlights
The research question posed in this paper is: how might we theorise the care effects that emerge not from clear interventions of support and solidarity but from care-giver inaction and concealment? The answer we offer is through the concept of ‘veiled care’
We have been inspired by interview narratives of being gentle at work to develop the concept of veiled care as self-reflexive practices that hold back from action and that conceal meaning in order to avoid, repair or minimise damage to others
The concept extends and develops the understanding of care as social practice enacted in everyday organisational life
Summary
Care for clients, customers and employees is becoming an increasingly important concept in organisational and management research (Fotaki et al, 2019; Rynes et al, 2012), with research into sites of professional care-giving (e.g. Molterer et al, 2019) as well as scholarship on caring leadership (Tomkins and Simpson, 2015), managerial care (Kroth and Keeler, 2009) and compassion (e.g. Dutton et al, 2014; Kanov et al, 2017). The concept of ‘veiled’ care emerged through interacting with this range of literature, where the social effects and the subjectivities generated cannot be read in simplistic ‘either/or’, good/bad dualities but rather in terms of more complex ‘and/and’ shifting interpretations (Collinson, 1994; Cunha et al, 2013) It was informed by papers on qualitative research methodology and analysis, where what is left out of performance creates meaning (see Mazzei, 2003; Morison and Macleod, 2014), to capture the sense of intentionality and action that the narrator constructs in the interview conversation but that is hidden from the characters within the narrative being told. Some interviewees constructed narratives that work straightforwardly towards the other person’s best interests; others produced more complex narratives entailing more difficult, compromised goals and subjectivities, where they were working towards care-recipient interests but in more
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