My doctoral thesis is a speculative, personal, and affective inquiry into practising caring in organisations and organising. Caring – as a verb or doing – is an underexplored phenomenon within organisation studies. I investigate how caring is experienced and theorised processually, by exploring the dynamic effects of difference in a health and social care context during a period of unprecedented change to healthcare strategy, leadership, and delivery.My study is oriented around two interrelated curiosities – how might I travel with diffractive inquiry as a research logic, and what might be discerned differently about practising and theorising caring from an ontologically processual stance?As I move beyond methods and methodology, my research logic is informed by an understanding of classical pragmatism as a philosophy of experience, and feminist technoscience expressions of diffraction as ethical practising of mattering. What is novel is fidelity to experience as a stimulus for learning and consequential action, and the always ethical nature of our entanglements as we become with.Drawing on feminist technoscience, classical pragmatism, care ethics, and caring theory, I explore how an ethos of caring as response-able practising – attuning, inquiring, and coattending to the entangled flourishing of ourselves, others, and our worldings – is experienced in everyday encounters. My argument is that in theorising and practising caring, we need different vocabulary and language: generative, performative, and rooted in everyday experience as it is experienced.My contributions comprise an invitation to look more closely at how caring – as a social dynamic – is continuously unfolding in the day-to-day of organisational life Secondly, I propose a vocabulary of caring, which conveys the ongoingness of care in practice. My third contribution is to suggest that ‘ethos’ – rather than ‘ethics’ – conveys how caring unfolds in practice. A further contribution is in showing how ontological inquiries may generate insights that epistemological studies miss or discount; as well as foregrounding entangled and co-creative relations between researcher, participants, ideas, and situations, and the ethical mattering of crafting doctoral output. A final contribution is experimentation with diffraction as inquiry logic, as a way of surfacing seemingly inconsequential and yet catalytic differences in day-to-day organising, relating, and doing.
| Date of Award | 12 Sept 2023 |
|---|
| Original language | English |
|---|
| Awarding Institution | - University Of Strathclyde
|
|---|
| Sponsors | University of Strathclyde |
|---|
| Supervisor | Barbara Simpson (Supervisor) & Dave Mackay (Supervisor) |
|---|