The Contested Notions and Meaning of Care

Abstract

Care is both a human ability and a human need: it is about considering the needs and interests of others. Important discussions about the philosophical foundations of care arose, along with questions about the role of employees, leaders, and managers in enacting care. Moreover, various philosophers in the distant and no so distant past were concerned with notions of care in the context of ethical living or care as an aspect of organising work. In contrast, the so-called ‘feminine’ insights have arisen from a renewed consideration of the ethical dimensions of personal and informal relationships among persons, which are also more closely associated with the notion of ethics of care. M. Fotaki draws on Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger’s work on matrixial border-spaces to consider relationality from a feminist poststructuralist and feminist psychoanalytic perspective, explaining how the notion of subjectivity is meaningless without consideration of others. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.