‘In the future, as robots become more widespread’: A phenomenological approach to imaginary technologies in healthcare organisations

Abstract

This chapter discusses imaginary technologies that do not exist yet but are expected to be implemented in clinical work in the near future. Adopting a phenomenological view on the politics of organisational time, we illuminate how the rhetoric of futurity and protentional anticipation dominate managerial acts in healthcare organisations. This future-oriented management includes strategies of risk assessment, investments in emerging technologies, and other actions to reduce external uncertainty and move toward an enhanced capacity to cope with potential challenges. However, we suggest that potentially harmful consequences of emerging technologies cannot be established reliably in advance by investigation, experiments, and risk assessments. The phenomenological notion of embodied information infrastructure allows us to consider how visions of complex technologies intertwine with clinical practices in healthcare professionals’ work. We use two examples of imaginary technologies—automated decision-making systems and care robotics—to concretise how the line between imaginary technologies and existing technologies becomes increasingly volatile in healthcare organisations.