Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics...
Ok – so I’ll start with the assumption that most everyone fell asleep by the end of page three of the Noddings chapter. Honestly, the first few pages were the hardest – then it became a bit easier…really.
Noddings is clearly a well-respected “expert� in feminine ethics especially as they apply to education. A quick Google of her name results in a lengthy list of her writings and educational accomplishments – many associated with her time at the University of California.
In this first chapter of her book, Caring: A Feminine Approach To Ethics & Moral Education, Noddings lays out several of the fundamental ideas on which she bases her philosophy. It is a chapter that explains what is to come in the rest of her book so I will pick a few of her ideas, explain them basically, and ask some questions that come to mind.
Two of the pillars of her philosophy are “engrossment� and “displacement of motivation.� (Generally, a good frame of reference from which to understand this chapter is a concept familiar to most of us: empathy.)
Engrossment is the idea that we take the time to get to know and understand another person’s situation honestly and thoroughly so that we may show our caring appropriately. For Noddings, caring isn’t necessarily about the action of caring so much as it is about the consideration we give to a situation before we act (20).
Displacement of motivation is the idea that through engrossment, we know the other person’s needs and wants and are able to act from the other’s perspective (14). Our motivation is not our own but is a sort of proxy for the would-be motivation of the other person. (These are both oversimplified explanations but hopefully adequate for this posting.)
Questions: What is empathy’s role in leadership? Are leaders compelled to be empathetic to the needs of their followers? Where is the balance between a leader’s responsibility to those she leads and her responsibility to the organization (thinking about a staff-supervisor or department-director relationship here)? Can a leader be empathetic to an organization as well as a person?
From the idea of engrossment, Noddings continues to point out that caring is subjective; we take into account what she calls a “constellation of conditions� (13) when considering whether and how to care.
Question: As I think about leadership and the importance of core values, I wonder at what level are those values objective? It feels to me like the “higher up� you go (higher = further away from the particulars of any given situation), the closer to objective our values-based actions become. Depending on their roles and responsibilities managers are frequently advised to make rules or policies that may be objectively applied - no one wants to be perceived as playing favorites after all. I wonder how Noddings would react to that.
Noddings also makes a distinction between caring-for and caring about. She says it would be foolish for each person to care-for everyone that crossed paths with them. We simply have neither the time nor energy to do this. Noddings says that instead, we care about some people without actually caring for them. For those whom we care about, we are committed to the possibility of caring for them at some future time (18).
Interesting. I have 25 staff that I “manage� (i.e. care about). At any given time I am (actively) caring for a percentage of them while I am certainly committed to caring for any and all of them at some point.
Questions: If I change my verb from “manage� to “lead� what happens? Is a leader leading everyone all the time? What happens when a person decides they do not want to be either managed or led? As a manager, I have a commitment to care about and to care for my people. I also have a commitment to care about and for the University. What do dignity and respect look like in a relationship with a person who rejects what I might consider their responsibility to themselves, their profession, their co-workers, their workplace and the people for whom they serve? I might owe it to the University that I will care about and care for every one of my staff, but what becomes of a person’s dignity when that caring is “imposed?� Is that just the nature of being an employee? Certainly there is a balance between a supervisor’s responsibility to her employer and her responsibility to her employee(s).
This chapter was fairly academic compared to many of the reading we’ve done thus far. There’s certainly much more to be said about Noddings’ ideas but I’ll end it there and will look forward to reading your thoughts and responses.
--scott marshall
Comments
Scott -- I found this article bore out some worst fears I've had about the complexities that people bring to the nebulous subject of "caring." Although this article was heavily academic, the subject material cuts to the core of conflicts between two people and among groups of people. The truth resides within each individual perception, and is maintained within a construct of their own unique mindset. If evidence of caring requires a demonstration of a "state of mental suffering or engrossment, or anxiety, fear, or solicitude," then I now know why my younger sister occasionally alleges that I don't care about her problems -- I just want to fix them.
Noddings doesn't offer suggested diagnostic tools to bridge that gap, but I can now admire this problem better as I realize that it's not likely to change. I'm not sure that makes me feel any better, me being from the "teach them in the way to go" and "Love One Another" school of parenting and caring that Noddings finds "unattainable in any but the most abstract sense and thus a source of distraction."
You ask about "lead" and "manage" and I turn to the "teach them in the way to go" aspect of caring. Leaders provide resources, skills, permission, guidance, training, whatever is necessary for employees to feel competent and be competent. Is that not caring of the democratic kind to ensure everyone has what they need for doing their job?
If you have not read the sections on team leadership in Leadership for the Common Good, The Evolved Self or Flow, I encourage you to do so. Noddings touched on the same concepts of appropriate detachment but came to very different conclusions, "When my caring is directed to living things, I must consider their natures, ways of life, needs, and desires. And, although I can never accomplish it entirely, I try to apprehend the reality of the other." In that same section on p. 14, Noddings would have us "struggle toward the reality of the other and say, "I must do something." She tells us "we must act to eliminate the intolerable, to reduce the pain, to fill the need, to actualize the dream."
Absolutely not! Is that not each individual's job, starting in childhood, to quest through the complexities of their own lives and experience the moments of optimal experience that define their own self while teaching them how to differentiate and enjoying others? In fact, the more someone with perceived authority meddles around in that aforementioned list, doesn't that fundamentally serve to undermine the confidence and erode the personal authority and even dignity of the other person? In the case of work places, can't that constitute interference with job performance, or prompt inequities between coworkers?
There is some fascinating research about human resilience that I'd like to nominate into this equation. Emmy Werner's "Journeys from Childhood to Midlife: Risk, Resilience, and Recovery" follows a generation of people into their 40's, documenting the events of childhood, adolescence, and early and middle adulthood with diagnostic assessments and observation. Some fared far better than others at making decisions and crafting a life that was rewarding and positive, others did not. Werner and others spent a considerable amount of time considering all the data they had collected from these men and women, looking for patterns. With regard to the concept of "caring," I couldn't help but notice that on the chart that correlates protective factors to the quality of adult adaptation at age 40, there was a significant difference between what helped men and what helped women (figure 5, pp. 154-155).
Men at age 40 who reported more satisfaction with interpersonal relationships scored higher on Scales of Psychological Well-Being, Environmental Mastery, Personal Growth, Positive Relations with Others, Purpose in Life, and Self-Acceptance. They relied more on their spouse as a major support of emotional support than did high-risk males who had trouble making commitments.
Woman at 40 faced a different situation. Those who reported satisfaction with interpersonal relationships turned more often to spouses, parents, friends, and coworkers as sources of emotional support and expressed less fear and distress on the Temperament Survey than did women who were dissatisfied with interpersonal relationships. They also scored higher than the dissatisfied women on all dimensions of the Scales of Psych Well-Being except for autonomy.
(This is taken verbatim from the text).
As usual, we are working from Noddings' book excerpt, so we do not know if she recommends assessments for personality, temperament, or other tools that can help individuals become more self-aware and help teams find a language for talking through issues without divisiveness. However, without any valid evidence to guide discussions about "caring" and "needs," I would think there would be danger of a loopy conversation filled with emotional ambiguities that could divide people instead of bringing them together.
In the workplace, does effective team leadership include a moral imperative to ensure the accommodation of emotional supports underneath every single employee in perpetuity? Is that wise leadership to pay that disproportionate attention to certain others to the exclusion of others, or establish an expectation that caring comes ahead of the line work of the day?
When I first encountered the Werner text last year in a class filled with clinical psychologists and medical professionals, I was surprised by the wide range of assessments that are available for precisely the purpose of understanding "the reality of the other." I do not know what the cost of such diagnostic tools are for employers, but I am quite confident that the cost is less than the complete disruption of a workplace.
Several times in my career as an administrator I have been tremendously grateful for capable employee assistance program staff, or top flight human resources professionals who could help discern if an employee had personal needs that warranted more than ad hoc "caring" on my part. I am not putting that word in quotes to connote cynicism or any negativity whatsoever. I'm putting it in quotes because Noddings cut the word apart and then published wide generalizations that, frankly, didn't make me very confident I understand what, if anything, to do differently moving forward.
I've tried to clean up my own loopiness on this subject a few times, but am just going to send it for argument's sake. I really do care what you think -- in my own rational-objectivisit way. Wendy.
Posted by: Wendy Wustenberg | February 18, 2008 05:04 AM