ABSTRACT
As part of an ongoing project looking at oral care as a life course project (Gibson et al., 2018), this chapter explores how a group of older people talked about ‘having work done’ as part of their oral care throughout their lives. We discuss about how we came across this idea based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 43 participants recruited from the cities of Edinburgh (Scotland) and Sheffield (in the north of England). Data analysis focused on developing a substantive grounded theory from within the perspectives of older people as they talked about oral care throughout their lives. The resulting theory links with existing theories of ‘everyday life’ and the ‘life world’ (Schutz 1962, 1967) in sociology. ‘Having work done’ involves temporal planning and disruptions to the ongoing flow of everyday life that enable work to be performed on the body. Participants talked at length about how body work in dentistry involved being able to tolerate blood, smells, discomfort, pain and emotions. The success of treatment was judged on the degree to which oral care returned the body back to the normal flow of daily life. Successful experiences of ‘having work done’ could quickly became the basis for having further work done and therefore repair the damage that past insults to the body and self from dental work had caused. The chapter concludes with theoretical reflections on the nature of body work and its centrality to any understanding of oral health and dentistry.
