WEO Research Seminar: Shaping Technology – Shaping Care Work? A Social Shaping of Technology Analysis of the Digitalisation of Care Work
Event Date: 21 October 2025
Speaker: Anna Pillinger, Researcher, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Time: 14:00 - 15:00 GMT
Location: Online
For booking details, please email sbs-weo@strath.ac.uk
Abstract:
In the past decades, care and care work have undergone a drastic economic shift, accompanied by the emergence and implementation of a variety of digital technologies in the field. These technologies range from electronic health records or digital documentation, to ambient assisted living systems, platforms, sensors and robots. While some of them are already an integral part of care work, others are slowly entering care centres or remain pilot projects. Studies researching the technologisation of this – often imagined as rationalisation-resistant (Aulenbacher 2021) – sector show how these technologies result in an intensification of work, act as means of control or foster new divisions of labour. These tendencies mostly resonate with labour process analysis of technologies, rendering the introduction of new technologies as a means of the management to increase control over the labour process (Hall 2010). According to Hall (2010) and more recently Thompson and Laaser (2021) labour process analyses of technologies need to be renewed or revitalized. In doing so, they reference the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). While Thompson and Laaser (2021) focus on the political and economic forces that shape technology at work, SST emphasizes additional aspects, such as the role of the economy, the state, gender and social inequalities as well as technology itself and respective path dependencies. The empirical research is based on qualitative interviews with care workers (19) and people from technology development (10) and a document analysis of websites, materials, manuals and press articles of documentation systems and robots. All data was analysed with an inductive-deductive coding strategy (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2022) with MAXQDA. Based on this research, the contribution scrutinizes the following: First, it analyses how care technologies (i.e. robots and digital documentation systems) are socially shaped according to a heuristic drawn from SST. Second, it sheds light on the effects digitalisation has on care work. These findings show an ambivalent picture, while the implementation of digital documentation systems resembles a quasi-taylorisation of the work, as in other sectors, the deployment of robots in care homes is not in line with the often-prevalent control imperatives. I argue that tracing how these technologies were and are socially shaped, assists in making sense of the contingencies at play when care is being digitalised.
Published: 15 October 2025
