ABSTRACT
Caring is fashionable these days. It's in, especially—even paradoxically—in mass technological societies. Politicians claim to care in order to attract votes; supermarkets display “we care” signs in order to attract customers; corporations claim that they care in order to attract investments. Sometimes, apparently, they do. But this rhetoric reads like an uneasy appropriation, by large, impersonal organizations, of a set of values that, in the dominant discourses of post-industrial-revolution western societies, have been represented as proper to a “private,” personal, largely middle-class, domestic sphere. 1 These are values that have counted as antithetical to the instrumental, disinterested rationality that allegedly governs “public” -sphere activities.
