Choreographies of Care: A Dance of Human and Material Agency in Rehabilitation Work with Robots

Abstract

This article seeks to advance the understanding of how human and material agency enmesh in human-robotic workplaces. By means of a qualitative study, the practical use of robots is investigated within two organisations for medical rehabilitation. The theoretical framework combines Andrew Pickering’s ‘dance of agency’ with a process-oriented view of technology as technical rationality. It shows how resistances and accommodations are enacted by both humans and nonhumans as analytical loci of the dance of agency, and it explains how the experimental activities that are concerned with technology adoption and use are emergently fixed in formal or informal rules of coordination of action – the ‘choreographies of care’. By extending the processual orientation of Pickering’s ‘dance of agency’, and by further elaborating on the organisational implications of technological change within it, the article increases understanding of how the transformation of material agency may enact processes of change in the organisational culture.