I omsorgens namn : Tre diskurser om äldreomsorg

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to describe and analyse three different discourses on elderly care, as they emerge in statements from care staff and research. Each discourse centres on a sign, or pair of signs: care, education/professional competence, and the elderly/ageing. Drawing its main inspiration from Laclau and Mouffe, and Foucault, the analysis is made with regard to how the discourses are constructed, what they include and exclude.The discourse on care interconnects family, homeliness and mutuality. Empathy, a good attitude, family ideals endow elderly care with distinctly feminine connotations. Theoretical concepts such as rationality of care and an almost exclusive research focus on women’s work have tended to construct the same nexus. Unknowingly, or sometimes despite intentions, the discourse in this way reproduces conservative gender roles.A discourse on ‘anti-care’, exemplified by disorganisation and incompetent management, is also created and invested with responsibility for shortcomings.The discourse on education and professional competence centres on claims to medical and executive tasks by nurses, the struggle against deprofessionalisation of assistant nurses, and the attempt of nurse aids to resist categorisation as ‘anybody’. Education/training are considered important to raise work status, but also leading to an instrumental attitude and distance from the core of the occupation – care.The discourse on the elderly and ageing characterises them as lonely and depressed. Also being violent and ungrateful, their behaviour undermine the notion of mutuality. Social interaction and outdoor walks are presented as means to improve their situation. Fundamental to the discourse is an ambiguous approach to ageing as both natural and something to be deferred. Ageing is further presented as decivilisation process, in which gradual loss of control over the body is also a loss of human-ness. The body is, paradoxically, what both defines and disqualifies the elderly as fully human.The depersonalising and biographing procedures of elderly care, sequential but overlapping, display its proximity to Goffman’s total institution and Foucault’s panopticon. Conversation plays an important disciplinary part in encouraging the elderly to want to do right, i.e., be socially active, and avoid amoral or asocial habits like drink, sex or solitude.