Chapter 6: Care as a Way of Relating and Organising

Care has appeared in this Reader as an attitude, a lens, a form of judgement, a practice and an organisational principle. These are not competing definitions. Care begins as an attitude of valuing persons and the living world. It operates as a lens through which relationships, conditions and consequences become perceptible. Caring judgement asks what the particular situation requires. Care becomes practice when responsibility is expressed through decisions and actions, and it becomes an organisational principle when those practices are made reliable through roles, resources, policies, procedures and accountability. When these principles shape repeated relationships and practices across time, care becomes part of culture. 

Earlier, care was described as the way a festival takes responsibility for the relationships and conditions through which its purpose becomes possible. We can now make that definition more precise. Festivals may pursue different artistic, cultural and public purposes, but the way they pursue them affects the wellbeing of the people, relationships and organisations that make them possible. Care is the practice through which responsibility for these effects is exercised. 

REFINED DEFINITION 

• Care is the relational and organisational practice through which the conditions of personal, relational-collective and organisational wellbeing are created, protected and, when damaged, repaired.

These forms of wellbeing also depend upon material places, resources and living systems. Their ecological conditions will become increasingly visible as the Reader moves from care and power towards sustainability. 

Because care is often associated with kindness, harmony, rescue or protection, it helps to show how this definition differs from these common understandings. 

Care is not the same as kindness: it includes kindness but reaches beyond it. Kindness is valuable, but it can remain interpersonal while organisational conditions continue to harm people. A warm manager may still maintain an impossible workload. A hospitable festival may welcome audiences while relying on exhausted workers. Care connects interpersonal quality to responsibility for structures. 

Care is not conflict avoidance: it makes room for conflict. Protecting a relationship may require naming an unacceptable behaviour, declining a request, questioning authority or changing an arrangement that benefits some participants. A surface without conflict can indicate trust, but it can also indicate fear or exclusion. Care asks whether tension can be expressed without disproportionate cost to those who express it. 

Care is not rescue or unlimited availability: it shares responsibility. Rescue may temporarily protect an outcome while preserving the system that produced the emergency. When the same people repeatedly compensate for missing resources, unclear decisions or weak planning, their commitment becomes part of the organisation’s hidden infrastructure. Care interrupts the cycle by asking why rescue was required and who has authority to change the condition. 

Care is not paternalism: it involves the people it affects. Deciding what is good for others without their meaningful involvement can be motivated by concern and still reduce agency. Care combines attention with humility: the person affected may know something that the decision-maker does not. At the same time, participation cannot be used to transfer institutional responsibilities to those already carrying consequences.