Why Do We Desire and Fear Care: Toward developing a holistic political approach

Abstract

Care is a human need and capacity without which we cannot survive and flourish. However, care is often underpaid and considered an excessive burden in the economy despite being socially valued. Philosophical and political perspectives on vulnerability are essential for understanding the continuous undermining of care in organizations and society. This article draws on the feminist psychoanalytic idea of embodied vulnerability, defined as our intrinsic dependence on others, to explain the ambivalence surrounding care in contemporary societies and organizations. The argument I develop in this paper is that this dependency is erroneously associated with a weakness we must avoid or ignore. Neoliberal ideology – a dominant influence permeating public life – casts such interdependency as a moral failure and juxtaposes it with the fantasy of the rational individual, who is disembodied and free of any social obligations. In the paper, I challenge this view and argue for a deeper social and political conceptualization of care as an alternative basis for understanding the constitution of organizations and society. I draw on psychoanalytic insights as a footing for this conceptualization and elaborate on how it allows us to reframe care not only as residing in the fabric of relations underpinning organizations and society but as in an existential sense giving life to them. As I conclude in the paper, such an expanded and holistic view of care might help us address our societies’ profound challenges.