Time for Care, and Care for Time: Coping with Conflicting Times in a Child Protection Agency

Abstract

The rationalized and commodified time of the ‘time economy’, conditions the value of work and in particular undermines the value of care work. Care – concern for and actual attending to the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility – requires enacting time in a way that clashes with the ‘industrial time’ dominating our lives. While the antagonism between care and industrial time has been highlighted by ethicists of care, how carers are juggling in practice between industrial time and specific care time is still to be researched. In this article, we address this question through an in-depth qualitative case study of a social care service in France. Building on Adam’s work on the multiplexity of time (1995, 2004), we discover that while enacting industrial time through ‘scheduling work,’ carers are nevertheless carving out specific temporal features – time as continuous, non-standardized and in the present moment – that are necessary for care. Moreover, we highlight how carers also utilize the clock time that pervades the work organization as resource for care through normative and social dimensions. Thus, this research contributes to deepening our understanding of how care workers cope with the clock time hegemony to carve out a space for care practices. Finally, this research also contributes to showing the affective workings of time, and how it shapes socio-economic practices.