Shaping Technology – Shaping Care Work? a Social Shaping of Technology Analysis on the Digitalization of Care Work.

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. Studies researching the technologization of this – often imagined as rationalization-resistant (Aulenbacher 2021) – sector show, how these technologies result in an intensification of work (Moore and Hayes 2017), being a means of control (McDonald et al. 2021), foster new divisions of labour, and creating gender(dis)order (Fahimi 2022) in this highly feminized sector. However, looking into the everyday work experiences of care-workers draws an ambivalent picture. I therefore ask, how are digital care technologies socially shaped and how does this shape care and care work? My theoretical framework draws from the concept of the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999), which emphasizes a myriad of aspects that are intertwined in the shaping of a technological artefact, such as economic factors, the state, gender and inequalities as well as technology itself and path dependencies. This is combined with concepts of the sociology of work and labour process theory to also understand how these technologies are shaping work. My contribution draws from qualitative interviews with care and tech workers as well as a document analysis of care technologies (i.e., robotics in care and digital documentation systems). Based on this research, I aim to give an insight in how these digital care technologies are shaped socially and explicitly by technology development, and thereby shape care and care work. My findings show, how digitalization of care work plays out differently depending on the technologies and the settings. The gendered division of labour, however, seemingly stays cemented since although technology moves into the workplace, the capacity to act on it, remains little.