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This paper examines how certain care values permeate, legitimize and authorize hospitalized-older-adults’ care, technologies and practices. The purpose of this paper is to expose how values are not benign but operate discursively establishing “orders of worth” with significant effect on the ethics of the care-setting.

The paper draws from a discursive ethnography to see “up close” on a surgical unit how values influence nurse/older-adult-patient care occasions in the domain of older-adults and functional decline. Data are from participant observations, conversations, interviews, chart reviews and reviewed literature. Foucauldian discursive analytics rendered values recognizable and analyzable as discursive practices. Discourse is a social practice of knowledge production constituting and giving meaning to what it represents.

Analysis reveals how care values inhere discourses like measurement, efficiency, economics, risk and functional decline (loss of capacity for independent living) pervading care technologies and practices, subjugating older adults’ bodies to techniques, turning older persons into measurable objects of knowledge. These values determine social conditions of worth, objectifying, calculating, normalizing and homogenizing what it means to be old, ill and in hospital.

Seven older adult patients and attendant nurses were followed for their entire hospitalization. The ethnography renders visible how care values as discursive practices rationalize the social order and operations of everyday care. Analytic outcomes offer insights of how dominant care values enabled care technologies and practices to govern hospitalized-older-adults as a population to be ordered, managed and controlled, eliding possibilities of engaging humanistic patient-centered care.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the values of IT in elderly care.

The paper is an empirical investigation based on four in‐depth case studies concerning IT in elderly care. The study draws on Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) and Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) with a focus on different actor groups' sense‐making regarding the role of IT in elderly care. The empirical analysis is, however, influenced by Grounded Theory (GT). Values are studied through the concept of “value areas”, which is a categorization of various actor groups' anticipated and experienced effects of developing, implementing, and using IT in elderly care.

The paper finds that the values of IT in elderly care can be organized in four related value areas: administration values, integration values, care values, and professional values. Research limitations/implications – Although the findings in this paper are related to elderly care it is believed that the value areas could be valid for all kinds of care work. Practical implications – The paper illustrates how different values are present during the development of IT, and discusses the importance of not only including, but also permitting, various actor groups' interests and values to influence the design process.

This paper examines the value of IT in elderly care, as well as presenting an approach for analyzing the values of IT. The paper and its findings should be valid for researchers, as well as for practitioners.

This paper aims to explore the effects of the increased influence of accounting on core values and practices within the services providing home care in Sweden – a public sector setting involving inter‐organisational cooperation.

Case study data were obtained primarily through semi‐structured interviews with managers and front‐line staff involved in home care.

When accountingisation is extended to include inter‐organisational cooperation, a form of heterogeneous accountingisation occurred in the home care services: an internal domain (with a low level of accountingisation) could be differentiated from an inter‐organisational domain (with a high level of accountingisation). When the accounting‐induced disturbances intensified, there was a redefinition of core values. In the internal domain, core values of pensioner‐oriented focus and flexibility during service delivery persisted. In contrast, in the inter‐organisational domain, core values had the legal boundaries of the organisation as their central foundation, standardisation was emphasised, and inter‐organisational work practices were defined as the other organisation's responsibility. The findings also extend the research on absorption groups by indicating the rise of a new type of absorption process. Absorption was not undertaken by a few individuals, specialist work groups or satellite organisations, as described in the literature; instead, all front‐line welfare professionals were involved in absorbing the accounting‐induced disturbances when performing their tasks.

This case study research is context‐specific and the meaning and consequences of accountingisation may differ within the public sector because of the status and strength of professional groups concerned.

To date, research on accountingisation has primarily employed an intra‐organisational perspective. This paper analyses accountingisation in an inter‐organisational setting.

The purpose of this paper is to present some of the findings from an empirical, mixed methods research project that reveal the importance of the personal value frameworks held by individual staff in the prevention of abuse of older people in private sector care homes.

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a sample of 36 care home personnel, including proprietors, care managers and care staff.

A significant number of respondents identified the importance of personal value frameworks among staff providing care as a potential contributory factor in the prevention of abuse of older people.

Though the research draws upon the experiences of only 36 care home personnel through interviews, data suggest that the personal evaluations of staff towards those in their care is a significant contributory factor to the occurrence of abuse.

The research has identified individual staff value frameworks as a causal factor in the occurrence of abuse. The research also confirms that the perceptions of “values” among respondents directly involved in the provision of care are at odds with common understanding of “values” often cited elsewhere in connection with staff recruitment and training as a means of preventing the occurrence of abuse.

Humans care about things. The truth of this claim is obvious, yet scholars who have evaluated student interventions and outcomes in higher education have largely neglected how student values might inform their experience with those interventions and outcomes. This chapter will rely on a philosophical conceptualization of a particular type of value known as “caring” to explore what students value as they weigh various collegiate decisions. Elaborating on findings from a qualitative study of 143 college students from eight American universities, I will summarize previous findings related to what students cared about, how those cares were structured, and what the cares and structures meant for students' pathways through college. The categorical and theoretical patterns I share demonstrate how students approached values in ways that have not typically been considered by scholars or institutional administrators. After summarizing my previous findings, I offer a conceptual argument for a “dialectical” approach that considers the mutually formative interaction between student and institutional values. The practical result of naming and understanding the dialectic realities of values in higher education is the opportunity for institutions to use their relatively greater agency to help individual students pursue what is worth pursuing without reducing the agency of those students. Thus, the dialectic places necessary boundary lines on both the institution and the student while also clarifying the opportunity to help students develop moral expertise and navigate their collegiate pathways successfully.

The purpose of this paper is to describe staffs’ perceptions of digital support for medication administration (DSM) and out of the perceptions interpret underlying values.

In total, 22 persons working in elder care participated in the study. The study had a qualitative approach and focus group interviews were used to collect data. To analyze the manifest content a phenomenographic method was used. An interpretation of perceptions was then undertaken aimed at identifying underlying values.

Three descriptive categories, “utility,” “impact on working environment” and “economic impact” were the result of the manifest analysis. The values of having a “good working environment,” “benefits” and “good economy” were interpreted as guidance for staffs’ acceptance or rejection of the DSM.

The care-giving process and its challenges from the perspective of the staffs need consideration. Staffs in this study sometimes expressed strong emotions as a sign of frustration for losing prerequisites to perform their work well. In big complex organizations where economy and effectiveness are often discussed, knowledge of power relations in innovation and implementation processes would be beneficial. Although moral distress is a well-known phenomenon, future research may be needed to find solutions that diminish this negative trend in more economic focussed organizations.

This study had a twofold approach with the intention of going beyond descriptions. To gain a deeper understanding a normative interpretation was completed. Ethical conflicts are frequently characterized as conflicts between at least two values. In this study staffs expressed fear of losing prerequisites needed to perform their work well. Prerequisites that were identified as values and these values were threatened by the DSM.

This study aims to examine the impact of cultural values [power distance (PD), uncertainty avoidance (UC), individualism vs collectivism (IC) and time orientation] and users’ perceptions on the adoption of big data analytics (BDA) within the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) health-care sector. It uses the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model as its theoretical foundation.

A cross-sectional survey involving 256 health-care organization users in major hospitals across the UAE was conducted. Smart partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling was used to assess users’ behavioral intentions (BI) to use BDA in the health-care context.

Results indicate that performance expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions and perceived trust significantly predicted respondents’ BI to use BDA. However, effort expectancy, perceived security and time orientation were found to have insignificant impacts on BI. Interestingly, the remaining cultural values (PD, UC and IC) did not significantly affect the relationship between social influence and BI in the context of BDA adoption in health care.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the role of cultural dimensions in BDA adoption within health-care organizations, particularly in the underrepresented UAE health-care context. Moreover, it extends the application of the UTAUT model to the BDA adoption in health care, providing insights into the factors affecting users’ BIs to use the technology.

Within the context of health care reform and its evaluation, a major gap exists in relation to our understanding of the values which seniors hold regarding their health care. This paper reports on a modified participatory, ethnographic study of such values, using transcribed interviews with ten seniors from across Canada. Members of the National Advisory Council of Canada, most of whom are themselves seniors, participated in designing the study, carrying out the interviews and interpreting the results. Clusters of values were identified concerning health care services, service providers and the overall health care system. While the numbers involved in this study preclude generalizing to the population, a number of recommendations emerged from the study which could impact on future research and begin to influence health policy at local and national levels.