A Vocational Calling: Exploring a caring technology in elderly care

In this article we explore the relationship of care of a group of health care workers in elderly care, through their descriptions of themselves and their work. We have an interest in how relationships of care may be explored and characterized in and across disparate vocational settings. This is a critical response to policy discourses of citizenship that are currently emerging for reemphasis in Europe through citizenship education and the idea of the active citizen. We mobilize two notions to help us in the analysis of interview transcripts. First, „calling‟ is used as a figure of thought. Past religious and secular discourses of calling to God and nursing provide us with glimpses of past relations of vocation and care through which to consider present descriptions. The term „technology of the self‟ is one drawing specifically from the work of Michel Foucault, through which we theorize the calling to care emerging from our interviewee descriptions as such a technology. Our analysis indicates that a specific calling to care and technology is mobilized by these health care workers in elderly care. We conclude that it is through such stabilizations of description that the health care workers‟ shape context-specific subjectivities, as caring citizens. Introduction In this article we explore the calling to care of a group of health care workers in elderly care in Sweden through their descriptions of themselves and their work. Workers in caring vocations may have strong and quite specific relationships of care. We want to find out whether and how these might be characterized as they emerge, and are shaped in and through care work. We have a wider and longer-term interest in how such relationships of care to others may be explored and characterized in and across disparate vocational settings. Our interest is as critical response to policy discourses of citizenship that are currently emerging for reemphasis in Europe through citizenship education and the idea of the active citizen (cf. EC 2001). Our criticisms are threefold. First, these discourses position citizens as deficient – as „needing‟ knowledge, values and competencies, and therefore as outside a community of citizens. This masks capacities that people already have and draw on in their activities. Second, discourses focus on citizenship in abstract and generalized ways, with a general rationality that people need stronger senses of responsibility and care to others within the European community and within their country of residence (cf. ten Dam and Volman 1998; Volman and ten Dam 2008). This fails to acknowledge that people already have senses of responsibility and care to others in the specific contexts of their lives and work. Third, European policy discourses of citizenship are significantly oriented toward rights and responsibilities and framed in terms of employability and vocational and eco-