Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine and reinterpret information ecology in the context of the changing environment of services, which has been strongly affected by digitalisation and increasing citizen engagement. Here, information ecology refers to the interaction and co-evolution of technologies, human beings and the social environment.Design/methodology/approach: The data consist of 25 thematic interviews conducted in a public Finnish organisation responsible for organising welfare services, and in its collaborating organisations. The interviews were analysed qualitatively. The analytical framework is based on Nardi and O'Day's five components of information ecology: system, diversity, co-evolution, keystone species and locality.Findings: The analysis shows that these basic components still exist in the digitalisation era, but that they should be interpreted and highlighted differently, for example, stressing the openness of the information system instead of closed systems, as well as emphasising the increasing meaning of diversity amongst digitalisation, and the dynamic co-evolution between the elements of the system. New capabilities, such as the ability to combine various kinds of information and knowledge, are needed in this adaptation.Research limitations/implications: The study illustrates a wider, updated information-ecology concept with the help of empirical research. Technology affects care organisations' information ecologies in numerous – often invisible – ways, which this study brings into light.Originality/value: So far, information-ecology research has overlooked social and healthcare, but this study provides findings concerning this societally important sector.

Elderly care practitioners are at specific risk of experiencing prolonged moral distress, which is associated with occupational health-related problems, low job satisfaction, and staff turnover. So far, little attention has been paid to the moral concerns specific to elderly care, a field whose importance is constantly growing as the populations in Western countries age. By drawing on seven workshop conversations as data and interaction-oriented focus group research, conversation analysis and discursive psychology as methods, we aim to study the ways in which elderly care practitioners discuss moral distress in their work. We found that the moral distress experienced was related to three topics that arose when client work and teamwork contexts were discussed: the power to influence, equal treatment of people, and collaboration. The interaction in client work and teamwork contexts differed systematically. The discussion on client work was characterised by negotiations on the rights and wrongs of care work, whereas the teamwork discussion engendered emotional outbursts, a potential manifestation of work-related burnout. Hence, attempts to improve the work-related health of elderly care practitioners require time and space for sharing the emotional load, followed by reflection on what could be improved in the work and what institutional solutions could help in morally distressing situations.

Purpose: In Nordic societies, the use of mobile phones for record-keeping during homecare visits has become an unquestioned routine. Care practitioners’ agency with these technologies has been explored mainly as a situationally constrained activity, neglecting their long-term orientations. Our empirical contribution is to explore care practitioners’ agentic relations to technology in a more nuanced way by including both dimensions. The theoretical contribution is to show synergy between temporal conceptualizations in theories of human agency and technology-in-practice, which highlight human agency as deliberation between situational and long-term temporal orientations. Design/methodology/approach: Seven Finnish care practitioners were interviewed, and their entire work shifts were observed, consisting altogether 48 video-recorded homecare visits. The analysis of the ethnographic material was focused on situational and long-term temporal orientations of the care practitioners related to technologizing care. Findings: Care practitioners in old age care approached technology use with three different kinds of temporal orientations: adapting – preferring to remain in the present; opposing – longing for the past; and engaging – viewing the technologization of old age care as positive for the future. Practical implications: The situational usability of technology is not the only problem to be solved when technology is adopted for human-centred care; longer-term visions of how care and care work will change should also be voiced in healthcare organizations. Originality/value: Temporal orientations may explain how and why care practitioners either just adapt to technology-use in care or act as change agents transforming both technologies and care.

Western societies tend to implement new technologies to elder care work to replace routines in order to make services more efficient and transparent as the population ages and public resources diminish. However, we have not paid enough attention to how care practitioners perceive their changed circumstances in elder care work. Drawing on the thematic interviews of 31 care practitioners in Finland, we analyzed how the emergence of mobile record-keeping during homecare visits, use of video visits in remote homecare and social media use in intensive service housing shaped what is perceived as good care. Leaning on empirical ethics of care approach we found that each elder care service context and its technology shape its own intra-normativities. Each intra-normativity brings different values into being in elder care, which impact on work practices and how the relations between care practitioners and clients, and with the wider public are enacted.