Abstract
The Heideggerian strand of organization studies has highlighted important aspects of organizational practices. Because of the emphasis of the practice-oriented approach on routine practice, researchers have taken a special interest in how innovative, improvised action arises. One of the dominant views is that innovative action is the outcome of different variations in everyday practices. Insightful though these studies are, they do not recognize the role of the body in their conceptualization. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenology, suggesting that the body, as a carrier of practices, is the locus of innovative action. The article proposes that innovative action emerges in our bodily expressive-responsive skilful coping mode. In illustrating this argument, we make use of case study material focusing on practices involving elderly care service provision. We show how the care workers under consideration cope with the demands of their unpredictable work by adapting their bodily expressive-responsive abilities innovatively to emerging situational calls. Practice innovation emerges as the outcome of a tension between what it makes sense for the care workers to do based on the practical intelligibility underlying their own practices, on the one hand, and bureaucratic rules and requirements inscribed in terms of economic rationality and cost-efficiency, on the other. Because bureaucratic rules are perceived as alienating and unethical, innovation would inevitably be a form of resistance. The article specifies this form of practical resistance, concluding with some implications of this approach for organization studies.
Keywords
Recently, practice theory has excited the interest of several organization, management and strategy theorists (Ahrens and Chapman, 2007; Brown and Duguid, 1991; Cook and Yanow, 1993; Gherardi, 2000; Jarzabkowski et al., 2007; Orlikowski, 2010; Whittington, 2006; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). Among the many sources of inspiration of this practice perspective are Heidegger’s (1971) two modes of engagement: dwelling and building (Chia and Holt, 2006; Chia and MacKay, 2007; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Tsoukas, 2010; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009; Zundel and Kokkalis, 2010). The core idea of these studies is that humans engage in practices though different modes ranging from non-deliberate, absorbed, unreflective immersion to deliberate, theoretical detachment. In their absorbed coping mode practitioners are engaged in everyday practices without being aware of their involvement in them. Their action involves spontaneous responses to developments in the situation at hand. Drawing on Heidegger (1962), researchers assume that innovative action and improvising are the outcome of various breakdowns (surprises, interruptions or disturbances) in our absorbed coping (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Tsoukas, 2010; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). However, Heidegger’s (1962) existential ontology, which, although gives primacy to the practical being-in-the-world over epistemology (which separates the subject from the object), it tends to neglect the role of the body (Aho, 2009). Heidegger’s failure to acknowledge the role of the body in his analysis of everyday human existence (Dasein) has generated ‘a cottage industry of criticism from such prominent continental figures as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Derrida, and Irigaray’ (Aho 2009: 1). As Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Schatzki (1996) emphasize, bodily habits involve a ‘practical intelligibility’, which is a skill, a capacity for action and interaction and a principle for action (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Coping skills are absorbed into the body as ‘teleo-affective structures’ (e.g. feelings and emotions) that motivate and animate actions (Schatzki, 1996). As noted by Sandberg and Tsoukas ‘the embodiment of practice … guarantees the “correctness” of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules’ (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011: 344; quoting Bourdieu, 1990: 54). If the body can carry a practice and guarantees its sustenance over time and its ‘correctness’ more reliably than social rules, then we need to understand how innovative action occurs. It is thus the aim of the present article to extend current practice-oriented organization studies by focusing on the body as the locus of innovative action and improvisation. We do so by buttressing Heideggerian-inspired organization studies with Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) views on the body and Wittgenstein’s (1953) and Shotter’s (2000, 2003a, 2003b, 2005) approach to the role of language in practice. As an illustration of this argument, we make use of case study material focusing on practices related to elderly care service provision. We concentrate in particular on how care workers in two Swedish municipalities were coping with the demands of their unpredictable work by adapting their bodies innovatively to their material and social environment. As research is still needed to show empirically how practitioners handle surprises in the midst of action, in different types of action, with what results (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009), we offer a first contribution to the literature. We show how innovative, improvisatory action takes root in spontaneous responses to changing circumstances. Innovative action, or improvising, refers to enacting/uttering appropriate responses/expressions spontaneously, in a real-time and an online fashion, without being guided by an explicit framework, rules or instructions.
The article proceeds by first reviewing the evolving interest in Heidegger-inspired literature related to practice theory with regard to novel action, pointing out the neglect of the role of the body. Thereafter, Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenological approach to the body, describing the process whereby performances are absorbed into the body as ‘body schema’, as a set of spontaneous incorporated, expressive-responsive skills is discussed. Subsequently, we present our interpretive phenomenology-inspired method and the material related to the investigated care giving setting. In the Discussion, we illustrate our argument drawing on this material. Finally, concluding remarks, implications and suggestions for further studies are outlined.
Modes of engagement in practice-oriented organization studies
The Heideggerian perspective on organization studies does not provide a clear understanding of how innovative action emerges in everyday practice. Chia and Holt (2006: 634) define the consistency of action ‘in terms of pattern and direction, with other previous actions … [and] not from being goal-direct [sic] or from an overarching strategic plan, but from internalized predispositions that orient actors in a particular way in their engagement with the world’. This view would suggest that innovative action occurs in practice, as an immanent event in everyday practice. However, Yanow and Tsoukas (2009: 1351) hold that innovative action cannot occur in our absorbed coping. Innovative action requires involved thematic deliberation (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). Whereas Chia and Holt (2006) recognize the powers of skilful coping and bodily habits themselves as flexible principles capable of improvising and of generating innovative, Yanow and Tsoukas (2009: 1353) seem to hold that routine practice, by definition, would not entail improvising, in the sense that ‘improvisation is required when routine action is interrupted and no longer possible’ (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009: 1353). Accordingly, improvisatory, innovative action is habitually the result of breakdowns, interruptions, disruptions, tensions between practitioners and their environment. However, such breakdowns can also be mild ones (Yanow and Tsoukas 2009) or surprises (Dalton 2004) resulting from routines, as the perfection of bodily habits, and not only from the failures of previous practices (Dalton, 2004). An artist, a teacher or an athlete may attempt particular ways or exercises that incrementally maximize their performances. For instance, Sudnow (1978), in Ways of the Hand, emphasizing the role of the body, presents a sophisticated model of skill development based on his own experience of how he learned to improvise jazz on the piano. His work is inspired by Merleau-Ponty (1962), who places consciousness or subjectivity in the doings of his improvising hands at work. According to Merleau-Ponty (1962: 137) consciousness is not a matter of ‘I think that’, but rather one of ‘I can’, that is, constituted in practice. Intelligibility of thought and action is in the everyday practices, not in some hidden process of thinking or of history (Dreyfus and Hall, 1992; in Simonsen, 2007: 169). The next section outlines the phenomenological understanding framing our view of embodied practice. This view helps us in analysing and further coming to grips with how innovative action occurs spontaneously, in our coping mode, and as a the result of tensions that occur in carrying out our everyday activities.
A phenomenological approach to practice theory
Humans’ meaningful engagement with the world is organized by various practices ranging from simple forms of embodiment to increasingly socially and linguistically rich practices (Claycomb and Mulberry, 2007). Whereas bodily practices may minimally rely on the use of linguistic action and largely on ‘brute’, physical action, most practices combine sets of doings and sayings (Schatzki, 1996). As put by Taylor: The situation we have here is one in which the vocabulary of a given social dimension is grounded in the shape of social practice in this dimension; that is, the vocabulary would not make sense, could not be applied sensibly, where this range of practices did not prevail. And yet this range of practices could not exist without the prevalence of this or some related vocabulary. (1985, 33–34, quoted in Rouse, 2006: 504)
According to this ontology, people’s understanding of the world, their consciousness and their ideas are the outcome of their engagement in everyday practices (Simonsen, 2007) which provides the ground from which both ‘doings’ and ‘sayings’ derive their meaning.
Embodied modes of engagement
At a basic level, humans engage in their daily practices as bodies; for being in the world is grasped through the body It is through the body that we have access to the world. Perception hence involves the perceiving subject in a situation rather than positioning them as a spectator who has somehow abstracted themselves from the situation. There is an inter-connection of action and perception: every perceptual habituality is still a motor habit. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 53)
The body (including the mind) is the medium for experiencing the world; perception is not merely the passive recording of external cues, but is also a creative, responsive action. There is a reciprocal, interactive relationship between what a setting affords, that is, what opportunity for action it presents, and the nature of our perceptual skills such that what we perceive is reflected in the shape of the physical capacities of our body. Our body conditions what it perceives and does, but it is also conditioned by what is seen and done, for seeing presupposes being seen (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Perceiving, thinking and acting do not involve distinct moments, but form a whole, a gestalt that appears to an agent as the thing that it makes sense to do (understood as a fusion of feeling, thinking and doing).
Skill acquisition and body schema
This reciprocal ability to receive and respond skilfully to situational demands, to be tuned to one’s environment and others, is what Merleau-Ponty (1962) refers to as ‘skilful coping’, which is further developed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2005) in their model of skill development in which they identify five stages a learner goes through: ‘novice’, ‘advanced beginner’, ‘proficient’, ‘competent’ and ‘expert’.
When learning a skill, practitioners acquire a bodily orientation toward a task, which requires a set of performances under varying circumstances. Initially, the learner is given a host of instructions to follow. With increased expertise, the learner becomes able to recognize more gestalts, or relevant lived, situational features. Gradually, under stressful circumstances and felt responsibility for their actions, learners begin to make and incorporate finer and finer discrimination in the domain. Progress towards proficiency and expertise can only be achieved if, and only if, experience is assimilated in an ‘embodied, atheoretical way’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005: 786).
Benner (1985, 1994) applies this model to the nursing context where she argues that, rather than seeing patient care as bits of unrelated information and a series of tasks, the expert is able to integrate various aspects of patient care into a meaningful whole, a gestalt, which, among other things, requires various forms of involvement and moral agency. As the learner moves from novice to expert, the degree of emotional involvement and moral agency increases. According to Benner (1985, 1994), nurses who failed to develop such skills did not progress to the level of expertise. Ethical comportment and relational capacities are the hallmark of experts.
What distinguishes an expert from a non-expert is that the former ‘does not calculate, or solve problems: s/he just does what normally works’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005: 788), whereas learners may step back, resorting to explicit rules, instructions and or forms of reflective deliberation; this is so because they have not yet achieved their skilful coping mode. Embodied agents become the agents they are in a perpetual need to develop these practical skills that matter for the practices in which they happen to participate. Note, however, that experts are not in any final, perfect ‘end-state’ in which no further improvement is possible. Instead, they too, continuously improve their capacity to perceive and respond to solicitations and tensions in the environment.
Becoming an expert amounts to incorporating in the body a set of skills, or ‘body schema’ that requires an engaged rather than a detached stance. The notion of body schema refers to an integrated set of skills that are poised and ready to anticipate and incorporate salient features of the world. It involves an extra-intentional operation carried out prior to or outside of intentional awareness. Body schema manifests itself in the form of habits conceived of as a kind of non-cognitive, pre-conceptual ‘motor intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 110).
The body schema establishes a stable perceptual background against which practitioners perceive and respond to changes and movements in their environment. As Merleau-Ponty conceives it, the body schema is not a product but a condition of cognition, for only by being embodied can one be a subject in the world at all: ‘I am conscious of my body via the world just as I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body’ (p. 82). The body is not a mere container or instrument of our agency, rather it involves ‘stable organs and preestablished circuits’ (p. 87) that function according to their own logic, as it were, below the threshold of conscious intention (Carman, 1999).
The flexibility of bodily skills
As noted above, body schema manifests itself in the form of habits, which consist in ‘principles’ of action, which do not mechanistically determine our actions. Habits are a moving equilibrium (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), which generates actions and actions further create new habits. Practitioners are continually confronted with novel contexts and new possibilities for action, which require variations in the responses they produce. Merleau-Ponty (1962) uses the term habitus in much the same way as Bourdieu (1990). However, for Merleau-Ponty (1962), habitus, as noted above, involves a set of bodily skills and even bodily intentionality, rather than mere dispositions. Whereas Bourdieu (1990) regards habitus as structured by a practitioner’s social class, Merleau-Ponty (1962) confers to it a more richly expressive and flexible dimension. However, both regard it as a largely unconscious source of innovation and ‘regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 57). Every action requires ‘the innovative adjustment to particular circumstances that can neither be neither precisely foreseen nor completely routinized’ (Dalton, 2004: 617).
In contrast to the view of habits as causally induced repetitions, Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) view of the flexibility of bodily skills means that practitioners do not merely repeat the same movements, or the same connections between environmental cues and bodily responses (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005). Instead, bodily skills permit flexible and innovative performances in response to slightly different circumstances. In learning a skill, we acquire an ability to adjust our performances to varying circumstances. Notice that Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2005) concede that repetitive or rule-following movement is a characteristic of novice rather than expert behaviour.
Maximum grip on the world
[O]ur body is not the object of an ‘I think’: it is an ensemble of lived meanings that finds its equilibrium. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 153)
The constant changing of our practical horizon occurs while the body maintains its perceptual grip on the world, because the body is always situated (Aho, 2009). When we are looking at a picture, for instance, we tend, without thinking about it, to find the best distance for taking in both the picture as a whole as well as its different details. When grasping something, we tend to grab it in such a way as to get the best grip on it (Dreyfus, 2002).
The form of motivation behind agents’ perpetual attempts to refine their skilful coping is primary, resulting from the body’s needness to strike a balance with the world, to keep a maximum grip on it (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Rouse, 2006; Todes, 2001). This need is not given, but emerges in practice, in finding ourselves, perceptually and practically, in the throes of situational challenges. In our everyday skilful coping, our perceptual practices are experienced as a steady flow of skilful activity in response to our sense of (or orientation in) the situation. For Merleau-Ponty, maximum grip explains how we are able to constantly keep our balance as we walk into new settings: [T]hings are encountered prereflectively by ‘bodying-forth’, not in terms of objective distance (i.e. the table is ten feet away) or geometrical measurements (i.e. the door is five feet wide); rather, they are initially encountered in terms of regional familiarity. Distance is not an external relationship between things but already understood in terms of preobjective involvement, in terms of the constant dialectical interplay between the ‘bodying-forth’ of the body and the things that it encounters. (Aho, 2009: 40)
However, when we sense that our situation deviates from some optimal body-environment relation, our e/motion takes us closer to that optimum by reducing the ‘tension’ in order to achieve an equilibrium, which preparatory and temporary though it is, functions as a springboard for the renewal of needness, and as a ground for further exploration (Rouse, 2005: 44).
What this implies is that the body is simply solicited by the situation to get into equilibrium with its environment, and to achieve an optimum grip on the world. In this continuous ‘upgrading of our skilful coping and as our skills are improved and refined to cope with more and more things and situations, things show up as soliciting our skilful responses’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005: 787). For instance, the background against which a nurse finds a particular action as the one that makes most sense to carry out at a particular moment will typically show up differently to a non-trained person. In their everyday practices, participants find their way through successive situations that call out for particular actions. Our skilful coping mode relies on our perceptual skills, such as seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling and moving our bodies. Such skills are absorbed into the body through repeated experiences and processes of imitation and responsiveness within and to an environment and others.
Relational, expressive-responsive ability
Since we are all ‘perceiving-perceptibles’ our experiences are transitive; we share sensuous experiences and even partially inhabit the ‘feeling’ side of another’s body … One does not just perceive another body as a material object; rather one is affected by the meaning of its appearance. The other body is animated and its animation communicates and calls for response. You do not contemplate the communications of the other, they affect you and you reply to them. (Simonsen, 2007: 170)
Several theorists have stressed the tight connection between everyday practice and language (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Schatzki, 1996; Shotter, 2005; Wittgenstein, 1953). In order to be able to competently carry out the performances underlying a given practice one has also to be able to express oneself and respond linguistically to others’ utterances. Although Merleau-Ponty (1962) regards thought and language as two sides of the same coin each needing its ‘other half’ for its own existence, it is Wittgenstein, in particular in his late work Philosophical Investigations (1953), who most clearly establishes a solid ground for connecting language to activities in social practices (Simonsen, 2007). On this view, our understanding of the world is not a private matter, but rather it is worked out in joint action and dialogue with others, in ‘doings’ and ‘sayings, as Schatzki (1996) put it.
To recall Taylor’s (1985) view, language and practice co-constitute each other with language playing a significant part in the production and ongoing reproduction of practice. Of course, as Shotter (2005: 116) notes referring to Wittgenstein (1953), there are many different kinds of use of language. Thus, over and above people’s talk about states of affairs, in which something is pictured or portrayed, we need also to understand (among its many other uses) the expressive use of our embodied talk. Indeed, unless we can understand how others as 1st-persons, as ‘I’s’, manifest or exhibit crucial aspects of their ‘inner’ lives to us, e.g. their surety and confidence, their uncertainty or humility, their pomposity and arrogance, their respect or contempt for us, and so on, in the present moment of their acting, we cannot understand how, so to speak, to ‘relate’ to them. (Shotter, 2005: 116, emphasis in original)
Thus, when talking, people do not only put their ideas into words, but they respond to one another’s utterance in an attempt to link their practical activities in with those of the other around them. At the same time as they use language to coordinate their on-going activities, they also construct various forms of social relationship.
According to Shotter (2003a, 2003b, 2005), relationally responsive understandings between people require a specific kind of knowing, which he calls ‘knowing from within’, an understanding that differs from the more conventional forms ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’. As its designation suggests, ‘knowing from within’ is a kind of understanding that can only be acquired through one’s expressive-responsive performance and participation in a given practice. Given its relational nature, this expressive aspect of language is meaningful only between those to whom it is relevant. Because it takes account of, and is accountable to those other relevant people it has a moral dimension, for although it is spontaneous, it requires judgement and appraisal as to whether its expression or use is actually fitting in and appropriate to the situation or not (Shotter, 2005).
Furthermore, our spontaneous, expressive-responsive bodily performances ‘point beyond’ themselves (Shotter, 2005), implying a notion of temporality that insures their continuity in time. For an utterance to make sense in a certain situation, not only must it have some connection to already existing aspects of the situation, but it should also be ‘pointing’ toward possibly available ‘next steps’ to participants. The utterance must be performed against a background of anticipation and expectation that is tacitly shared by the participants so that they understand it without confusion.
Finally, ‘knowing from within’ has also a constitutive role in that it shapes the direction to our spontaneous, expressive-responsive performances with regard to events in our surroundings. To the extent that the content of this ‘knowing from within’ is derived from its circumstances, what it affords and constrains also depends on those very circumstances; for under such circumstances we find ourselves invited to perform in an expressive-responsive way, ‘not out of our own inner plans or desires, but [invited] into a context shaped by another, and thus to act creatively, in new ways not already embodied as a part of ones ways of being in the world’ (Shotter, 2005: 123, emphasis in original). In our interactions with others, with their own unique, every-day-changing ‘inner lives’, we can still come to understand them afresh from within in each new encounter (Shotter, 2005). Given that our spontaneous, expressive-responsive performances are ‘not the result of thought, that is, not the result of following an already existing system or framework, they can sometimes provide the beginnings of entirely new and novel language-games’ (Shotter, 2005: 115). Accordingly, our expressive-responsive abilities are always challenged to confront new situations and thus to innovate in order to gain a bodily, expressive-responsive grip on what is going on in our surroundings (as previously discussed). A discursive, linguistic grip on the world enables language users to competently exchange, receive and respond to audible, visible or tactile signs. These embodied, expressive-responsive abilities are the impetus for innovative action, as will be illustrated in the next section.
Method and material
The phenomenological approach outlined above has significant methodological implications for the present work. At a premium is the challenge that human practices are not objects that can be frozen in time or explicated fully (Heidegger, 1962) to an outsider. Thus, our inquiry does not seek to unearth thoughts and ideas hidden inside individual heads, rather our central concern will be with spontaneous, responsive-expressed, living, relational activities occurring out in the world for all to see (Shotter, 2005). As suggested by Wittgenstein (1953) and elaborated by Shotter (2005: 118), we assume that the ceaseless flow of spontaneously responsive, expressive activity that we are trying to grasp can be regarded as a ‘landscape’ that we will survey together with the help of some of those who are participating in its making.
Data generation
The scene to be surveyed involves two Swedish community care organizations. These are local welfare agencies or municipalities that provide tax-funded, long-term, non-medical home care and support services to frail elderly individuals who need assistance in their daily activities. Our initial interest involved the knowledge and creativity embedded in actual practices (Benner, 1985). To learn more about this, we deployed several data generation techniques. Firstly, a series of open-ended interviews took place in 2003 with 20 front-line employees (care workers) in the first community care organization, which we refer to as ‘A’. The duration of the interviews ranged from 60 to 90 minutes. The interviews revolved around the everyday delivery of home-help services, the challenges involved and the ways of dealing with them. The interviewing author paid particular attention to empowering the care workers under consideration to tell their story about their practices in their own words. Frequently the interviewer repeated what the informants had said in a questioning voice to allow them to protest or confirm what the interviewer had understood (Benner, 1994). Further, observations 1 of the care workers’ bodily performances were conducted on six occasions, with each lasting four hours. Notes were taken immediately after in-home visits and then refined in the evening. More open-ended discussions were conducted between each visit (referred to as conversations in the empirical presentation). This allowed the interviewing author to informally probe into the care workers’ practices and behaviours. Interviews and conversations were audio-recorded and later transcribed.
A second series of (ten) interviews and (16 hours) of ‘observation’ sessions of front-line care workers employed in a second community care organization ‘B’ were undertaken in 2005, using similar approaches to those in the first set. It is worth noting that, from the perspective of this article, the use of the expression ‘observation’ is not adequate, because one cannot be a detached observer. Rather, observing means participating (as shortly discussed).
Follow-up phone calls (a total of five) were conducted in 2007 to gain more details and discuss questions that remained unclear when we embarked upon the interpretive phase. We also consulted documents (written rules, ‘service plans’ and laws about public service delivery). The participants were all front-line service employees, aged between 19 and 50 years, with various degrees of experience of care work ranging between five months and 30 years. The majority (19 of 30) of the participants, however, had a considerable experience amounting to more than five years in the sector. In the presentation of empirical material, we refer to ‘new’ care workers as having less than one year of work experience, and experienced care workers as having more than one year of work experience.
These various techniques provided valuable insights in different ways. The interviews allowed the care workers to attend to their practice (Claycomb and Mulberry, 2007) by accounting verbally for the concerns and considerations that shape their experience and perception of their everyday work. As noted by Benner (1994), narratives are meaningful accounts that point to what is perceived, what is worth noticing and what concerns the storyteller. We also felt that the rich stories of the care workers about the nature and meaning of emotional responses made their ethical concerns more visible to us. Observation and informal follow-up conversations/discussions were important to access spontaneous, taken-for-granted aspects of the practice under consideration (Benner, 1994). For instance, while the workers frequently mentioned the limitation of rules and their reliance on ‘what feels right’ in interviews, ‘observations’ and subsequent discussions with workers made us more aware of differences and similarities. For instance, effective performances of a practice require a constant, spontaneous, creative adjustment or renewal of the ‘rules’ of the practice. This ability, in its turn, is dependent on the extent to which a given worker has accumulated expressive-responsive bodily skills about each senior, and has developed a specific relationship with each particular senior—which is part of knowing from within.
Mode of interpretation
In stage 1 the verbatim transcripts from formal interviews and notes from observations and informal conversations were translated into English and read through to obtain a holistic sense. The material was then analysed to identify and abstract emergent themes that suggested how the care workers use their bodily skills in performing their daily tasks (Creswell, 2003). Our observational notes were important here, including descriptions of not only talk but also sequences of body movements and utterances and—as far as this was possible—notes on the phenomena to which the workers were attending (Goodwin, 1994). Meaningful patterns, stances and concerns were considered rather than more elemental units of information. The identified themes included the importance of the care workers’ accumulated ability to spontaneously perceive and creatively respond to contextual solicitations, depending on the degree of their skills and ethical stance. We went back to the literature in order to become sensitized to the potential meanings of the themes indicated. We then continued to move back and forth between portions of the text and portions of the interpretation. We developed a preliminary coding framework, which evolved as we continued to discuss the field notes. This interpretive process can be said to be emergent rather than prefigured and set up in advance (Creswell, 2003). Once we had identified a pattern of meaning, exemplars (Benner, 1985) were extracted from the texts to demonstrate similarity or contrast. We have carefully developed a range of exemplars that allows the reader to recognize the distinctions we are making and to illustrate the patterns of practice innovation we observed without presenting a narrow, formulaic account of this mode of engagement. Each exemplar is intended to add nuances, the overall aim being to make qualitative distinctions, rather than establishing mutually exclusive categories with no shared attributes.
Throughout this process, we have placed our bodies as ‘central ’sites’ for generating and interpreting our empirical data through the techniques accounted for above. Thus, consistent with Goodwin (1994) and others, our perceptions of events during observations were influenced by issues that we felt we could ‘act on’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). We further assume that our bodies (our body language, emotional expression, etc.) affected our informants during observations and the interviews (Dale, 2001). Finally, while we have tried to make sense of the care workers’ world through hearing, seeing and understanding their context, we do not assume their bodily and verbal actions to be privatised or purely subjective, but rather as a set of publicly observable behaviours, of embodiment and lived understanding of a ‘world and set of local clearings created by social groups, practices, skills, history, and situated events’ (Benner, 1994: 100–101). As argued by Benner (1994), the goal of interpretive phenomenology is to uncover commonalities and differences, not private idiosyncratic events or understandings.
The tension between rules and practitioners’ expressive-responsive performances
In this discussion, we first focus on how the care workers’ behaviour differs, based on their degree of experience with regard to the so-called service plans. These service plans constitute a set of instructions outlining how the service practice is to be delivered during the visit to the senior. One example of such service plans reads as follows: … Name: Aina [a fictive name], Condition/Need: suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, very anxious […]. Granted service: Daily: Help with getting up from bed, getting dressed, hygiene, making the bed, preparing breakfast at 8.30 am duration: 20 min; lunch at 12.30, duration: 15 min; dinner, at 16.30, duration: 15 min. Help with getting undressed, hygiene, and going to bed at 22.00, 15 min. Once a week: Help with shower 30 min … .Extract 1: Service plan document, A
However, although these rules are explicitly formulated, their application varies depending on the degree of expertise the care workers under consideration have reached and on the particular circumstances, as amplified in what follows.
Flexibility of experienced workers’ performances
One of the first points we have observed is that the more the care workers are able to (sensorially and verbally) perceive subtle cues the more likely they are to be prompted to spontaneously transform their performances and deviate from the rules: … Naturally, the service plans are my point of departure. But these cannot help me deal with all situations. Rather, what helps me is … the more I get to know the senior, the better I am able to serve them … now I can adjust much better to my seniors. I can help them with their food differently depending on what they look like on each particular occasion. I can ‘see’ and ‘feel’ what they want and need—almost before they themselves know it … Of course, they still and often surprise me—all the time! But I rarely face situations where I feel completely lost or clueless … I mean, you do have a feeling of what to do … . Extract 2: Conversation, B
During an observation session, one of the authors noted the following episode upon visiting a senior: The care worker asks the senior whether he needs any help. The senior answers ‘no’. Then the worker asks him if he wants to eat. The senior answers ‘no’. Not taking ‘no’ for answer, the worker takes a knife and fork and sits at the table, inviting the senior to join her in a very friendly and reassuring manner. The senior joins in and begins to eat. The worker keeps talking in a low voice, creating a positive atmosphere that places the senior in such a comfortable disposition that he revealed that he needs help with opening a tin. Apparently he was embarrassed to say that at first. Extract 3: Observation I, A
The senior’s ‘no’ did not cause an interruption in delivering the service. Based on the joint judgement of eye, hand and ear, the care worker spontaneously refined her response, habitually adjusting it to the on-the-spot situation based on her experience of talking and physically interacting with the senior in question. Naturally, this episode took longer than prescribed by the service plan for this senior, therefore, there was less time left for making the bed. Commenting on this the care worker said: … oh, I’ll make the bed better next time. You have to decide what is most important in every particular moment, today I felt he was unusually tense and I just had to spend some extra time talking to him to make him eat his meal. I’m sure that’s more crucial to him than a well-made bed … [. . .] Sure, I’ve known this guy for several years, which makes a difference … . Extract 4: Conversation, A
In a similar fashion, another care worker says more explicitly that not following the rules as dictated by the service plan is almost an ethical necessity: … I really don’t plan to deliver the services in exactly the same manner every time, exactly in the order specified in the service plan. That would really mean that I would not look after the well-being of the senior … I would not do my job then. It’s really about placing yourself in that person’s situation … . Extract 5: Conversation, A
Rather than the service plan, it is the workers’ moral agency that finally shapes the nature of the service delivered: . . . I only try to listen to the seniors. For example, I don’t want to force them to eat when they refuse to. I think it’s wrong to treat another human being as if they knew nothing. [. . .] … I just can’t bring myself to do it. It feels wrong! You need to do what is good for them … .Extract 6: Interview, B . . . [a senior] sometimes says he doesn’t want to take a shower, saying ‘oh, I’ve already taken a shower!’ when it is obvious that he hasn’t, given the smell and the look of him … It is not hygienic and it does not feel good to leave him like that without trying to do my best to convince him to take a shower … . Extract 7: Interview, B
The moral principles that guide the workers’ sense of what to do in a particular situation are the outcome of their experience with the seniors and are not obvious to a non-trained observer. For instance, the observing author could not grasp what the care worker meant by her actions in the following episode: The care worker walks through the bedroom where a senior is lying in bed. Then she goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge and examines it carefully then looks at the rubbish bin; and returning to the senior’s bedroom, she pats his hand, saying: ‘Well, everything is in order!’. Extract 8, Observation, B
The worker was asked whether she ‘plans’ in advance what she will do every time she pays the seniors a ‘check-up visit’. She replied: … I just do it. It’s not like I first think that I’ve got to smell whether there is a strange smell or not … then I’ll go and touch the senior’s hand and feel if it’s as cold as usual or not … if I smell something strange I need to find out what it is and respond accordingly … . Extract 9: Interview, B
Another informant talks about what she actually does when performing her ‘check-up’ visits at the seniors’ homes: … I simply see whether everything is OK … I really can’t say exactly what I check, since that depends on many things! […] … I normally feel straight away whether something is wrong … For example, Ingrid is extremely tidy, and if I notice that her kitchen is not as tidy as usual I begin to check more closely whether there is something wrong with her … . Extract 10: Conversation, A
This suggests that the worker does not direct her vision towards any particular aspect of the environment, in search of explicit pieces of information; rather, certain actions appear to the worker as what needs to be done. The worker’s habitual performances are constantly renewed based on variations in the solicitations in every situation. To take another example, when the observing author joined another worker during a visit to a senior, this author noticed that the senior’s garden was in need of tidying up and watering. When asked (by the author) whether she had noticed this, the worker replied: … Was it? I don’t pay attention to everything … I don’t even see if the senior has a computer or not since that’s not my concern … I only note ‘problems’ that I can do something about … . Extract 11: Conversation, A
Our observational notes also suggest that the workers incorporate principles concerning time limits into their body schema, which generate certain variations in the enactments of care delivery practice. The following excerpt involves a care worker who wanted to communicate to the senior, bodily and verbally, that she was in a hurry and was not able to talk to him for long on that particular occasion: In a rush, the worker places the food in the fridge, turns around and smiles at the senior who sits at the kitchen table. Worker: ‘how are you?’ Senior: ‘oh not too bad, but I do have my pains, sleeping disorders … and . . .’ The worker shakes her head, politely and says: ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ She takes a quick but serious look at the senior and touches his forehead. Worker: ‘you don’t seem to have a fever, that’s good’. Worker: ‘Maybe you should contact the primary care centre, maybe you could do with sleeping pills?’ Senior: ‘Nah … I don’t know if that’s necessary . . .’ The care worker kept moving around the whole time and looking at her watch!’ Extract 12: Observation, A
The care worker subsequently explained her behaviour was due to the fact that the senior likes to talk making it difficult to get away. This is ok when she has the time, but when in a rush she has to adopt this behaviour. The observing author asked her how she could be sure that the senior did not need further assistance. Her reply was: … I remember in the beginning, how I was not able to anticipate or imagine that a senior could continue to talk for so long. I was so polite. You learn to be ‘short’ in your tone and with your whole body language towards some seniors. If you sit down or stop moving, you’re stuck. With him I have learned to adopt that behaviour. Of course, that is only when I am sure that he is ok. These things you learn out of habit … . Extract 13: Conversation, A
Numerous other occasions during observations suggested that experienced care workers creatively renewed their performances as responses to emerging issues pre-reflectively without experiencing major frustrations and without stepping back to a ‘detached’ mode of reflection. Although these responses are part of their routinized performances, they are also open to possible variations and improvisation. Each habitual, embodied adjustment is the result of what it makes sense to do in a particular situation. This ability to perceive and respond to tensions so as to maintain a grip on the situation is spontaneous and bodily: The care worker put the food in the fridge silently. Then she handed me [the observing researcher] the rubbish bin saying: ‘could you please throw away the rubbish?’ I took the bin and when I went out I noticed that it was empty. When I went back the senior gave me a smile. ‘Thank you!’ She says … . Extract 14: Observation, B
Talking about this episode afterwards, the care worker told the observing author that she understood from the behaviour of the senior that the author’s presence made him uncomfortable and that is why she made up a reason for her to go out.
Although not being fully conscious of what they do, experienced workers’ performances are not random; rather steered by concern, by what appears to them as what needs to be done, based on the perceived situation. For experienced workers, there does not seem to be any pre-plan to follow or an explicitly formulated purpose behind their actions. They continuously and effortlessly seem to renew their performances, striving to keep themselves tuned to the changing circumstances. However, this is not the case with less experienced workers, who tend not to be as responsive to the situations they face and rely more on written or verbal instructions than on a reciprocal synthesis between their body and the situation. Because their relation to the seniors is history-less, they are unable either to produce an adequate response or anticipate a next move.
Less experienced workers’ performances
New recruits undergo a period of apprenticeship during which they receive verbal advice from more experienced colleagues on how to deliver the specified services. In these situations, new workers try to learn by imitating the body language and jargon of experienced workers before beginning to adjust their performances in innovative ways: … although I had listened to X’s [an experienced worker] advice and watched how she showered her [a senior], I felt far from sure about how to do it myself. Sure, I had watched her several times until I learned that by heart. Still, it was quite a different thing to actually do it by myself … I had to find my own way of doing things. Now, I do not think of the advice or the service plan: I just work my way through it … . Extract 15: Interview, B … Sure, helping seniors shift sides in bed or get out of bed requires certain bodily techniques. It’s hard to explain how you learn this … X [a colleague] taught me a lot of things about this … in the beginning she used to tell me to use my left arm to do that and to bend my knees to get more strength … and she kept reminding me to be relaxed while doing that … and so on … I had a hard time being friendly at the same time as concentrating on getting the moves right … . Extract 16: Interview, A
According to instructions, workers are supposed to knock at the door when visiting a senior, but if they do not get any answer within a certain period of time they have to use the key and enter the senior’s home. However, workers were not told how many times they should knock before opening the senior’s door and how long they should wait before using the key. When visiting a male senior’s house, a less-experienced worker was very hesitant about whether to use the key or keep on knocking: The worker knocks several times—with increasing strength—then hesitantly unlocks the door. As she walks through the hall she talks to me [the observing author] wondering whether or not she had followed the instructions correctly: ‘maybe I did not knock hard enough?’ We find the senior lying on the couch; he said: ‘sorry, I am just too lazy to get up and open the door’. Extract 17: Observation, A
These kinds of tentative behaviours and reflective, self-monitoring moments are the characteristics of less experienced workers. Very frequently, new workers are confronted with challenging situations that they cannot solve:
‘I did not move at all today; I just sat reading, sleeping and watching TV. No sweat in those activities … [The care worker looks tense]
‘But, it might be nice to take a shower, don’t you think?’
‘What’s nice about it? No, and I have the right to decide for myself when I want a shower or not, don’t I?’
‘Yes … but … ’. Extract 18: Observation, B
After the visit, the observing author asked the inexperienced worker to describe how she felt about the senior’s refusal. The answer was: … Sure, I tried to ask myself what was right, should I let her skip showering today or not? But I went confused, not knowing what to do in such a situation; there was nothing to guide me. Really, I tried to remember what my colleagues had told me … But I just thought of the paragraph ‘maintain the dignity of the care taker’ as stipulated by the law, and that could mean in this case, any of the two alternatives: either responding to her wish or following the service plan … . Extract 19: Conversation, B
Faced with unexpected situations the new care worker resorted to rules and reflection. She also searched in her memory for a situation to ‘copy’. However, these resources could not help her much. Similarly, observation of another new worker illustrates how she tries to ‘think’ her way out of conflicts, as she did not have the perceptive capacity to respond spontaneously: The senior, who looks very frail, is not wearing his safety alarm.
‘I see that you are not wearing your safety alarm … you don’t like it?’
‘No, I don’t like it! It itches!’
‘But it is important that you wear it, you know’
‘I know, I know. But I usually have it next to me!’
‘Yes but … you should wear it!’
‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Let’s talk about something more interesting! How was your weekend?’
The worker goes into the bedroom and makes the bed, then returns to the kitchen.
‘You should really wear the alarm. Can I help you put it on?’
‘No, dear, thanks!’. Extract 20: Observation, A
In this case, the senior refused to wear the safety alarm although the worker tried her best to persuade her to do so. When making the bed, the worker tried hard to think of a trick to make the senior wear the alarm but because of lack of experience she could not arrive at a specific understanding of that unique senior, and therefore could not ‘go on’ in her spontaneous, expressive living bodily interactions.
From innovative performances to practice change
Through collective narration, both successful as well as less successful improvisatory actions are key to the development of the caregivers’ practice. It is by narrating stories about their achievements that they come to articulate and share their skills, shedding new light on the nature and structure of their practice. Of critical significance, the telling of their experiences with the seniors, especially while discussing newly-invented ways of responding to their needs of the seniors provide an occasion to question or reject some aspects of their practice as prescribed by bureaucratic rationality. Says a care worker: … After having paid several visits to a senior for over a year, I managed to figure out an effective way of handling her in the shower. It is difficult to explain how, but I have tried to tell my colleagues, for physical reasons, the rules cannot be applied. In her case we need more time and new tools. We discussed ways of changing the rules … . Extract 21: Interview, B
After a few rounds of discussions and deliberations, this request was added to the service plan. It is in this way that practices are constantly re-made, by inscribing new innovations in written rules (service plans) or in non-written but articulated and agreed upon rules: … If you notice that, one day, a senior is in a bad mood, and this usually shows on their facial expression, a good thing to do is to tell them an old joke. However, this can be detrimental if they are not in a joking mood; but if they are, and you manage to make them laugh, everything goes smoothly. Telling jokes has become almost a ‘rule’ for us … . Extract 22: Interview, A
Adds another worker: … moving her [a senior] from her bed to the chair is stressful for her, but once I rocked her just before placing her in her chair and this changed everything. Now I do it every time. And I’ve even convinced the group leader and my colleagues to apply that as a rule for this senior … Another common problem is that the seniors often refuse to eat, especially when they are left alone. Hence, I had the ‘brilliant’ idea to have my lunch together with one of them. And now this has actually become a common practice among my colleagues as well … . Extract 23: Interview, B
Through talking and deliberation, individual innovative acts are crystallized, become integrated with those of others. When and if they become widely accepted, they can be used as proposals for action, of how to carry out the practice of care giving. It is in this way that individual improvisations result in practice transformation.
Discussion
In this discussion, two main themes will warrant our attention. First, we focus on how skilful coping is learned through lived experience involving the body and mind of care workers. Second, we consider the tensions that practitioners encounter and to which the skilled, care workers, responded innovatively by following their sense of what feels ‘right’ to do, sometimes at the risk of breaking the rules set up by their organization.
The centrality of bodily skilful coping in practice
As intimated above, the empirical insights indicate that the experienced care workers rely on their bodily, responsive expressive skills more than the less experienced ones. For the experienced care workers, each interaction with a senior has its unique and distinct demands and, therefore, their performances are bound to vary accordingly. Because the contexts in which performances occur are open spaces of indeterminacy, the body’s creative responsiveness and expressiveness are necessary to address indefinitely new challenges, such as when a senior refuses to eat or take a shower (e.g. extracts 3, 6, 7, 23). This skilful coping can be understood as the body’s ability to act with an implicit, embodied ‘intention’ to orient itself and strike a balance between its incarnated dispositions and whatever possibility for action or resistance it may face in the environment (e.g. extracts 9–12). The more perceptual skills the individual acquire to discriminate between and respond to situations, the more their bodies accumulate and become more skilled to perceive more refined structures and features in the environment. In this process, small tensions and disharmonies are not experienced as obstacles, but as parts of the habitual challenges they face in their everyday tasks, such as when a senior refuses to take a shower. Bodily responsiveness is not totally devoid of any conceptualization or reflection; rather, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) notes, it is the result of past experiences and ways of knowing, doings and communicating.
By contrast, the performances of the less experienced workers seem to draw more on rules and instructions as stated in the service plan (e.g. extracts 15–19). As put by Polanyi: ‘rules [as social structures] of art can be useful, but do not determine the practice of an art; they are maxims, which can serve as a guide to an art only if they can be integrated into the practical knowledge of the art [and] cannot replace this knowledge’ (1958: 50). The less experienced care workers are more prone to encountering disruptions and tensions in their practical coping mode, which give rise to reflective moments.
Collective narration and innovative action
Referring to Schatzki (1996) and Shotter (2003a, 2003b, 2005), practices involve not only doings but also sayings. The care workers use language as part of their embodied interaction with the seniors in order to respond expressively and competently to their requests. They are affected by the seniors, and merely reply to them (Simonsen, 2007). In extract 3 (Observation I, A) initially, the senior did not want to reveal what was wrong. The care worker understood that there was something wrong so she kept talking to him in a low and reassuring voice until he disclosed that he needed help with opening a tin. Through talking, the care workers form an understanding of the seniors’ behaviour towards them, such as the fact that the senior was embarrassed to disclose too much information about his physical inability to the care worker. An experienced care worker spontaneously knows when a senior is in a bad mood or not, and immediately elicits the appropriate response (Extract 22: Interview A). This relationally responsive kind of understanding is specific to each senior. In this context, the infusion of linguistic acts into the embodied mode makes explicit tacit understandings underlying a practice, as widely documented by several researchers (Cook et al., 1993; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Orr, 1996).
However, in other contexts, practitioners’ talk can give rise to practice change (such as in extracts 21–23) resulting from a deviation from the rules. For although, individual practitioners may innovate and improvise, such improvisatory actions will remain individual and local without affecting the practice as a whole without the use of narration. This is also where the role of language becomes crucial, lifting individual innovative performances to the social level of the practice. Indeed, the care workers use language to share their experiences with one another, to talk about performances (Shotter, 2005), discuss what they have done and what needs to be done, and sometimes question and suggest changes to their ways of doing and communicating in their practice. As an illustration, care workers’ talk, in extracts 21–23, develops into new proposals for action aimed at changing certain aspects of the practice. Such proposals for action are subsequently reinserted into the practice of care giving, leading to its innovation. In this process, individual innovations become shared among other participants and occasionally inserted in the practice: … the seniors often refuse to eat, especially when they are left alone. Hence, I had this ‘brilliant’ idea to have my lunch together with one of them. And now this has actually become a common practice among my colleagues as well. Extract 19: Interview, B
A change in practice is frequently the result of a struggle between care workers’ spontaneous, expressive-responsive performances and bureaucratic rules that seek to dictate in detail how certain tasks are to be executed. Invoking Shotter’s (2005) notion of ‘knowing from within’ and the moral dimension it implies, the care workers, in their skilful coping, are torn between their sense of what ‘ought’ to be done in harmonious reciprocity with their situations, on the one hand, and following the instruction book inscribed in economic, efficiency terms (as exemplified in extracts 2 and 4–6), on the other.
This echoes Benner’s (1985) work where the experienced care workers have to cope with two conflicting demands: their moral sense of caring for their patients, and what their organization expects them to do. In the face of this conflict, the care workers in our study report that they would at many occasions give priority to their sense of what feels right to do for their seniors, rather than succumbing to organizational plans and rules. Driven by a need to do what ‘ought’ to be done, the care workers’ incarnate responses tend to lead them to deviate in innovative ways from the imposed bureaucratic order, its rules and norms (e.g. extracts 19–20). Such a form of resistance occurs in practitioners’ continuous, non-eventful and inevitable skilful coping; it is an outcome of a misfit between pre-defined rules and plans, on the one hand, and bodily adjustments to emerging circumstances such as when the senior needs more time than prescribed, on the other (see Extract 5: Conversation A; Extract 21: Interview B). Care workers’ understanding of their work is supplied to them by their skilful coping, not by the rules and the service plans they were given by management. Invoking Wittgenstein’s (1953) concept of rule-following, no rule can be drafted so as to encompass all future circumstances (Tsoukas, 2010). Flexibility of the care workers to improvise and innovate, with regard to the use of the rules seeking to govern their practice, is necessary in order to cope with emerging requirements.
Practitioners’ predisposition to improvise is thus often thwarted by the bureaucratic pursuits of efficiency and control; and as engaged workers, they adhere to another type of a more ‘humane’ order of efficiency and control. 2 Orr’s (1996) work also provides an illustration of how practitioners’ practical improvisation was at loggerheads with management control at Xerox. For managers at Xerox, the practice of the technicians does not require any innovation, assuming that instruction manuals exhaust all eventual actions. In this way, management rationality assumes that a practice can be captured in instructions and rules that can be amenable to control.
Indeed, organizational rules encompass a power that threatens participants’ established skilful coping, because rules authoritatively seek to specify what it should make sense for them to do, feel and think in a particular situation. This kind of power imposed upon practices purports to offer models for shaping practitioners’ behaviours and sometimes even require them to abandon some of their embodied understandings. Being inscribed in standardized ways of experiencing, acting and communicating, and articulated in disembodied ‘facts’ and purged of values, this power poses ethical issues (Claycomb and Mulberry, 2007). Among other things, it does not take into account participants’ sense of orientation, dangerously leaving them alienated from themselves and the seniors they are meant to care for. This power is hostile to practitioners’ most fundamental ethical values governing their practical intelligibility. It challenges their ethical stance that provides for that accumulated ability to spontaneously perceive and respond to contextual exigencies.
Finally, care workers’ practical innovation is also related to issues of resistance to power. However, this form of resistance is different from other forms of resistance studied by other theorists (such as Fleming and Spicer, 2003). Improvisational resistance, if we may call it so, is practical, semi-reflective and spontaneous, rather than abstract, ideational, ideological, psychological or cultural. It is located and created in practice, being the outcome of a bodily, expressive-responsive need, and even a moral call, to act in a certain way (Simonsen, 2007: 170).
Concluding remarks and implications
The main argument of this article is to suggest a corporeal ground for innovative, improvisatory action. Although the last three decades or so have seen a renewed interest in the creative role of the body (e.g. Dale, 2001; Goodwin, 2000; Grosz, 1990; Hassard et al. 2000; Heath, 1986; Heath and Luff, 2007; Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007; Shilhab et al. 2008; Shilling, 2005), little attention, if any at all, has been paid to its creative role in practice theories. By grounding innovative action in the body’s skilful coping, the present study has sought to illustrate some of the many ways in which the body, as the carrier of practices, can learn, act innovatively, and resist bureaucratic power. Our work thus extends current Heideggerian-inspired and practice-oriented organization studies by showing empirically how practitioners handle surprises in the midst of action, in an absorbed coping mode, and the role played by sensorial and verbal interactions in this context; of course such issues are recognized but not resolved in the extant literature (e.g. Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Tsoukas, 2010; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). Departing from a phenomenological approach (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) and drawing on interviews and participant observations from two care giving contexts, we argue that practices are renewed and re-invented in situ, based on practitioners’ practical, embodied skills. Experienced care workers are able to perceive more cues, solicitations and needs that call them to respond verbally and non-verbally. Incrementally, their receptivity and responsive abilities evolve as a ‘flexible skill, a power of action and reaction’ (Crossley, 1994: 12) that enables them to effortlessly innovate in a routine way. In the skilful coping mode, the propensity to innovate is prompted by the body’s perpetual needness to orient itself in interacting with its environment (both social and material). This does not mean that we cannot be motivated to learn and to innovate, but what is meant is that as we acquire a skill we do not try explicitly to discriminate more and more subtle situations and pair them with more and more subtle responses (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005). But rather, once we get involved in a practice, the body takes over and does the rest, as can be gathered from the differences between the performances of the experienced and less experienced home care workers that we have studied.
As argued by Merleau-Ponty (1962), Todes (2001) and Shotter (2003a, 2003b, 2005), embodied expressive-responsive skills are governed by practical intelligibility that specifies what it makes sense and feels right, ‘ought’ to do or say in particular circumstances, without much regard for social rules. In this context, improvised action, which is a deviation from the norms, instructions and rules governing a practice, runs into a collision course with bureaucratic, managerial ambitions. In performing their practice, practitioners may face moral dilemmas, as they often find themselves torn between the sense of what ought to be done in the face of the practical exigencies, and the disembodied facts divorced from values as imposed by managers on practices.
An inherent danger in these attempts to steer the understandings and undertakings of social practices along predictable ways is that they challenge practitioners’ practical intelligibility, their ethical responsibility towards their seniors. Such managerial attempts expect practitioners to abandon part of the ordinary understandings carried out in their everyday practice (Claycomb and Mulberry 2007) and they thereby interfere with the workings of everyday practices and practitioners’ established senses of how they should do or should act. Because of its inability to deal with the intricate relationship between the factual and the ethical such interventions tend to reduce the practice of care giving into universal ‘facts’ that could unproblematically be inserted into human experience. As an alternative to this reductionist (Galilean) approach to social intervention is the ‘Platonic dialogue’, as elaborated by Gadamer (1975) and suggested by Claycomb and Mulberry (2007). Dialogue presents a promising framework of how theories can fund a practice without disrupting its understandings and workings. To engage in a dialogue means to ‘participate in intercourse with the world, with others, and ultimately with oneself in open, attuned way’ (Claycomb and Mulberry 2007: 191). In this dialogue, each participant brings their own background and their experience to the issue under consideration. At the same time, each focuses on the issue and allows their prior understandings of that issue to be tested by the force of the contrary views. The outcome of this intercourse is an entirely new way of thinking about and experiencing the subject matter. Rather than reducing human experience into abstract facts, dialogue delves into pre-established structures of experiences. Such structures are not evaluated by against universals, abstract prescriptions, but rather are challenged and tested by way of their use in the dialogue (Claycomb and Mulberry 2007: 191). Furthermore, dialogue leaves values entrenched in its facts, recognizing that any new understanding of the subject matter is bound up with its participants’ self-understandings, rather then extricating them from human experience. Dialogue shows how even scientific theories—such as managerial, economic theories—are activities that shape and are shaped by humans’ ordinary ethical and practical dealings with the world (Claycomb and Mulberry, 2007).
Finally, the present article suggests that practical improvisation, as a form of resistance, is different from ideological forms of resistance (Fleming and Spicer, 2003). It is a response to the body’s urge to act appropriately and ethically, as the situation demands, and not the result of a discursive or psychological process. Rather than construing resistance as an individual, conscious process whereby workers seek to carve out spheres of autonomy with regard to control mechanisms, resistance as bodily innovative action directs our attention towards the unreflective, spontaneous and tacitly grounded sense of what it makes sense/feels right to do/say in a particular situation. This constitutes a research opportunity to explore how improvised action can be regarded as a form of resistance to some pre-established rules, and describe in more detail the role of ethics in practice transformation and that dialogue is one means to transcend the tension between practical intelligibility and reductionist, theoretically grounded abstractions.
Limitations
In a note of self-critique, we can say that this study is based on workers in two Swedish municipalities and on a specific sector; thus our conclusions concern the studied care workers rather than care workers in general. Further, the study may fall prey to the critique that not all human activities rely on physical performances to the same degree as care giving activities do (see for instance Jensen et al., 2007). However, we would like to maintain that even the most ‘intellectual’ or ‘cerebral’ activities such as mathematics, science and philosophy require the incorporation of principles as habits and bodily skills [e.g. specific ways of computing, reading, writing, reasoning, etc. (Crossley, 2001; Wacquant, 2005)]. For, ‘[a]ll these bodily activities then include also routinized mental and emotional activities which are—on a certain level—bodily, as well’ (Reckwitz, 2002: 251).
Another possible limitation of the present study is the absence of a gender-driven analysis, in spite of its emphasis on the body. This weakness is mainly due to the fact that all the care workers included in our study are women. It is thus difficult to look for differences in performances based on gender-related bodily specificities, which provides an opportunity for further studies of this aspect. Finally, our articulation of innovations as forthcoming in workers’ bodily, expressive-responsive performances is inevitably limited. We do not share the care workers’ background, as we are novices and non-members of the practices we have studied. We hope, however, that we have given readers a glimpse into the creative role of the body that, from our situated perspective, was salient in the practices we have studied.