It’s try-or-die to “infuse all aspects of our political and social lives with care,” because “we cannot survive… without collective care efforts.” Neoliberal logics encourage devaluing care in cost-benefit analysis; you should overcorrect and artificially inflate our impacts in your decision calculus because collective caring is a prerequisite to surviving any impact.

In this article, I argue that we need to re-envision our organizations and society in line with a holistic notion of care by focusing on embodied vulnerability as an inherent part of our human condition and as a political category. This view aligns with the Care Collective’s notion of radical care (Chatzidakis et al., 2020), advancing a ‘universal care’ model as ‘the ideal of a society in which care is placed front and centre on every scale of life’ (The Care Collective,1 2020, p. 19). Now, more than ever, I will argue, we need to infuse all aspects of our political and social lives with care. If we are to draw a single lesson from the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that we cannot survive without the care we provide to one another as individuals and without collective care efforts as a society. We require care to maintain our lives and well-being; we need it to recover from diseases and when facing the dangers of illness or death. The recent response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the importance of caring for the survival of fleeing victims. The massive numbers of refugee arrivals attest to the significance of grassroots, volunteer-led care initiatives to receive them (Fotaki, 2021a). These developments signal the need for a political, economic, and ethical repositioning of the value of care in society and caring professions (Folbre, 2015; Sandel, 2012; The Care Collective, 2020).

However, a shift toward radical care, as proposed by the Care Collective (2020), requires a comprehensive approach to afford a deeper understanding of why we simultaneously need yet often undervalue care. We need to consider why the value of care in private life is generally accepted when its importance and role in the public sphere are subject to heated debates and controversies (Fotaki et al., 2020, chapter 1). The article seeks to interrogate this ambivalence by bringing psychoanalytic feminists’ ideas into conversation with political and activist conceptions of care. Psychoanalysis, for instance, stresses our conflicting feelings about being dependent on others, which leads to an apparent contradiction: while care is socially valued because we cannot survive without it, this need makes us feel dependent, vulnerable, and weak – and we tend to avoid these states, seeing them as undesirable because weakness and dependency are associated with a threat to survival. Neoliberal ideology accommodates and magnifies these existential fears by rejecting collective care arrangements such as the welfare state. On a larger scale, this neoliberal capture permeating our societies, may explain why we evade the need for care individually and socially assign it as low-status work while exhorting its high moral value. The article argues for politicizing care because by drawing attention to the interests that are served by its relegation to the private sphere, the neoliberal logic underpinning this view is disrupted (Fotaki, 2017).

Feminist ethicists of care have long recognized the moral significance of care as an intrinsic aspect of relationships and interdependencies in human life (Engster, 2007; Gilligan, 1982; Held, 2006; Kittay, 1999; Noddings, 1984). A few organizational scholars have engaged with these ideas despite influential works on the value of a feminist ethics of care in competitive business organizations (Liedtka, 1996), including its capacity to enhance inclusivity and teamwork (Lawrence & Maitlis, 2012). Related work has drawn on a feminist ethics of care to argue against the logic of the short-term maximization of shareholder value (Burton & Dunn, 1996; Freeman & Gilbert, 1992), reorienting business organizations towards a stakeholder-based approach (Wicks et al., 1994). McCarthy (2017) uses a feminist Foucauldian perspective of an ethic of care for the self to propose ways of achieving women’s empowerment and gender equality in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Nevertheless, these works neither theorize why care is systematically undervalued in organizations and society nor focus sufficiently on the political underpinnings of care (Fraser, 2013; Sevenhuijsen, 2005; Tronto, 1993, 2010). In contrast, feminist political writings have demonstrated that care is inherently gendered and performed mainly by women owing to their subordinate societal position (Tong, 1998), explaining the generally low economic value afforded to care work (Harrington, 2000). Other feminist authors have also highlighted the neglected economic role of care in promoting capitalist accumulation (Federici, 2004) and power disparities between care givers and care receivers globally (Hochschild, 2000; Fraser, 2016). However, when organizational scholars examine the implications of the ethics of care for businesses, they rarely consider the broader mechanisms and causes of inequalities in the distribution of care labour and care benefits. Yet, as I argue in this paper, such a political approach to care might offer an in-depth understanding of why and how multiple forms of discrimination and inequalities arise and, indeed, persist in organizations.

Another critical point is that although care is crucial for our flourishing and survival, we tend to avoid realizing the need for care because it reminds us of a dependency on others. Organizational scholars have so far rarely embraced psychosocial and affective approaches concerned with embodied vulnerability and interdependence as the foundation of our subjectivity (for notable exceptions, see Ashcraft, 2017; Barsade & Gibson, 2007; Fotaki et al., 2017; Kenny & Fotaki, 2014) although embodied affect is critical to understanding the expression and experience of care in capitalist societies (Lynch, 2022).

In this article, I address these gaps by deploying feminist psychoanalytic insights into the unconscious, intersubjectivity and intercorporeality to rethink the ethics and politics of care. Specifically, I develop a framework centred on embodied vulnerability to show why feminist theory and practice might redefine our individual, organizational, communal, and global relationships by building on rather than repudiating it. I bring together ideas from Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin and Bracha Ettinger, relating to how individual precariousness is foundational to the human condition, with a politicization of care that sees it as inextricably linked to societal inequalities (Tronto, 1993). The proposed re-theorization of care, drawing on psychoanalytic feminist ideas, explicates the political consequences of equating vulnerability with weakness and a threat to survival, as epitomized by neoliberal societies. The reframed political conception of care with vulnerability at its centre contributes to organization theory by demonstrating how and why we undervalue care by disavowing our interdependence and existential precariousness. It also highlights how unequally distributed vulnerabilities are, in fact, political categories leading to socially generated forms of precarity, and I provide a theoretical framing that offers ways to address this issue.