Caring as a collective knowledgeable doing: about concern and being concerned

Abstract Care is not an innate human capacity, rather it is an organizational competence, a situated knowing that a group of professionals enact while attending to their everyday tasks. We propose a practice approach to read care as a matter of concern, for those producing care and for society at large. Care is framed as a collective knowledgeable ‘doing’ in daily working practices that may be learnt, improved or abandoned. It is not separate, nor separable, from its ‘doing’, it is not an object or a quality that is added to work; rather, it is ‘caring’, an ongoing accomplishment. Through an ethnography in a nursing home for elderly, we describe: i) how caring is collectively performed in keeping a common orientation; ii) how caring is inscribed in a texture of practices; iii) how a technological change in nutrition practice mobilizes ethics as practice, in situated decision-making. Since natural nutrition is increasingly substituted by artificial feeding, we describe how the collective and organizational ethic of care in tube feeding is talked in practice, in a front-stage situation and in the back-stage one. In this process the duality of care as a matter of concern and as as the process of being concerned by caring become visible.