Careless Care: The Violence of AI-Delegated Care (Johan Jönsson)
12. Jan
The Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) invites you to the upcoming talk with Johan Jönsson (Lund University). The talk is given in collaboration with Leuphana Center for Organization & Social Transformation (LOST).
Tuesday, January 12th / 2–4 pm / C40.154
- This event is in English.
- This event is in-person with a hybrid option. Contact us to receive the Teams Meeting link.
- Registration is not necessary.
Technological tools designed to replace, augment, or surrogate for caring practices are increasingly being developed and deployed in organisations and elsewhere. Through an empirical study at a Scandinavian museum, this paper explores how staff members experienced one such tool. The museum had introduced an AI-powered leadership tool designed to support caring leadership through the generation of actionable and objective organisational data for its managers. Every third week, the tool invited staff members to respond to a set of questions regarding their experiences at work ranging from job satisfaction, meaningfulness, working equipment, stress, and the workplace. We argue that the tool constituted a “promise” of caring for the staff, through a “care-like”-design. However, our paper shows that this promise was not simply left unfulfilled but the tool rather instilled various feelings of actively not being cared for amongst staff. For instance, the tools’ design led to semantic problems (arbitrary questions and answers) with few or no possibilities for dialogue, which engendered feelings of frustration, disappointment, and neglect among staff. The manuscript, authored by Johan Jönsson, Peter Svensson, and Sverre Spoelstra at Lund University, conceptualises this breakdown of fulfilled promises as “careless care”, a double-edged practice that involves both a lack of care and an inconsiderate treatment of the staff under the pretense of caring.
Johan Jönsson is a postdoc at the department of Business Administration and Organisation studies at Lund University, School of Economics and Management. His doctoral thesis “Performing Numbers: An ethnography of numbers in organisational life” was awarded the Oscar Sillén prize for best doctoral thesis in business administration in Sweden 2024. Since then, his research has focused on how digital technologies affect leader-follower relations, particularly on questions of distance and proximity. He also leads a research project on the language and functions of mediocrity in organisational life through ethnographical work and life story interviews.