Untimely Welfare Technologies1

Abstract

Welfare technologies are introduced to increase the quality and efficiency of the delivery of welfare services, due to its ‘time-saving' capacities. This study will examine that even though this might be the case, new technologies such as electronic floors, intelligent beds and electronic diapers, do more than this, they also introduce a time perspective of their own. New welfare technologies do not only change the rhythm and tempo of the nursing home, but they also contribute to the temporal complexity of the nursing homes. As a consequence, professional competence becomes increasingly a matter of how the individual care worker manage to coordinate the different temporal perspectives that are simultaneously at play within the nursing home. The article will argue that it is precisely the care workers ability to manage the increased temporal complexity of the nursing homes that decides what kind of care that are delivered at the nursing homes.