Making Time to Care, and Caring for Time: ‘Tricking Time’ to Cope with Conflicting Temporalities in a Child Protection Agency

Anne Antoni (), Juliane Reinecke () and Marianna Fotaki ()
Additional contact information
Anne Antoni: Grenoble Ecole de Management
Juliane Reinecke: Saïd Business School
Marianna Fotaki: Warwick Business School

Journal of Business Ethics, 2023, vol. 188, issue 4, No 2, 645-663

Abstract: Abstract Care—concern for and attending to the needs of the particular other we take responsibility—requires enacting time in a way that clashes with the industrial ‘clock time’ dominating our lives. Ethicists of care have highlighted the tensions between the temporalities involved in caring as a situated, relational and processual practice and the organization of care work according to standardized clock time. Yet, the practice of care work within bureaucratic work organizations seems to reconcile temporal demands of care and clock time. In this article, we build on Barbara Adam’s concept of ‘timescape’ (Adam, Timewatch: The social analysis of time, Polity, 1995; Adam, Time, Polity, 2004) to inquire how care workers juggle apparently conflicting temporalities. Through a participant observation study of a child protection agency in France, we discover that care workers ‘trick’ time by carving out care timescapes that resist the clock—time as continuous, non-standardized, and in the present moment—while utilizing the structure of clock time in the form of ‘scheduling work’ to negotiate for and safeguard the process time they needed to ensure the provision of appropriate, ethical care. Confirming the centrality of time to ethical practices in organizations, our study further evidences and elucidates the intricate relations between clock time and process time in the ethical practice of care.

Keywords: Ethics of care; Clock time; Timescape; Social work; Care practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-023-05507-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:188:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s10551-023-05507-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-023-05507-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().