An Interview with Nel Noddings, PhD

Citation

(2013), "An Interview with Nel Noddings, PhD", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccm.2013.13620baa.004

An Interview with Nel Noddings, PhD

Article Type: Defining Care From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 20, Issue 2

By: Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD, Lead Editor and Interviewer, Professor of Management, Director of MBA Programs, St. Georges University, Grenada, West Indies, Email: kristinekawamura@yahoo.com, Phone: (1) 310 567 7603.

Riane Eisler, JD, Contributing Editor and Interviewer, President, Center for Partnership Studies, Carmel, CA, Email: eisler@partnershipway.org, Phone: (1) 831 624 8337.

Interview Date: 26 November 2012.

Background

Nel Noddings is Professor Emerita at Stanford University, where she was a member of the Stanford University faculty from 1977 to 1998 and the Associate Dean of the School of Education. She is internationally known for her groundbreaking work in the philosophy of education and educational theory, which has had a major impact on progressive education. She has also greatly impacted the field of ethics and morality through her pioneering work on an ethic of care. Dr Noddings has published 17 books and more than 200 articles and chapters, including the “deeply original” book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (University of California Press, 1984), which provides a foundation for relational ethics based on ethical caring. Other books include Women and Evil (University of California Press, 1989), Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (Teachers College Press, 1993), Philosophy of Education (Westview Press, 1995), Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach (Cambridge University Press, 2006), The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality (University of California Press, 2010), Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and her forthcoming book Education and Democracy in the 21^st Century (Teachers College Press, 2013). Dr Noddings is a member of the editorial board of Greater Good magazine (The Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley). At Stanford, she received awards for teaching excellence in 1981, 1982, and 1997. She taught at Columbia University and Colgate University and held the John W. Porter Chair in Urban Education at Eastern Michigan University. Dr Noddings is past President of the John Dewey Society and the Philosophy of Education Society.

Summary

Dr Nel Noddings presents a definition of the ethics of care, which is a form of relational ethics that differs from individually oriented and principle-based ethical traditions. Though it is often associated with the “feminine”, care is primal and part of all humanity because the desire to be cared for is universal. Furthermore, if people emphasized cooperation over competition and responsibility over accountability, they would want to protect those for whom they are responsible rather than protecting and defending themselves. Healthy competition is possible when people enjoy what they are doing, are improving because of their competitors, and admire and appreciate the performance of their competitors. Real joy, resulting from the development of human relations, may help to reduce anxiety and anguish.

Interview

You have done groundbreaking work to reframe the conversation about morality, education, and other key aspects of life by refocusing it on the importance of care. How does your ethics of care contrast with the traditional moral framework used to make decisions?

Well, there are a couple very important contrasts. First of all, care ethics is basically relational. It does not concentrate on the individual. It concentrates on the relation between both parties – the “carer” and the “cared-for”. And that, of course, is quite different. If you look at Kantian ethics, there is a concentration on the individual and the application of liberal principles. If you look at utilitarianism, again, you have the individual and the whole collective, and the application of principles. The closest in traditional ethics would be virtue ethics, but even that is a dramatic difference, because in virtue ethics, we concentrate on the character of the moral agent. We don’t think much about the one who receives the care. And then, second, there’s a difference between an emphasis on emotion and reasoning. Now, care ethics, of course, requires a very high level of reasoning but recognizes that the motivating factor is emotion. And in that sense, we would trace some of our roots to David Hume.

How would you in a nutshell define the ethics of care?

The ethics of care is a normative moral theory based on relations (rather than individuals) and concentrating on needs more than rights. It is now recognized as having application over the whole range of human activity-personal, occupational, political, and global.

What led you to this groundbreaking work? Are there some personal experiences that were important?

I think that it comes mainly from my experience in teaching and mothering. I’ve raised a lot of kids.

How many kids?

I guess you’d say ten! We had five of our own, biological kids, and then we adopted. And then, we took in two more, permanently, and off and on we’ve had others in the house as well.

And was there any particular experience that comes to mind?

This was developing over a period of time. For me, there was something not quite right about our traditional ethics. I guess it was around 1981 or so that I wrote my first paper on caring. I presented it at the California Association for Philosophy Education. I was a little bit nervous about it because they are a very rigorous group. And it went so well that afterwards people sent me letters and memos and all kinds of stuff suggesting more that I could put in the paper. And I said, gosh, I can’t put this all in a paper, so I wrote a book!

Well you certainly filled an enormous need. Was your work in any way influenced by Carol Gilligan?

Yes, I was definitely very influenced by her. But oddly enough, not so much by her 1982 groundbreaking book [In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press, 1982)], because that came out just as I was going into proof [on my book]. I was more influenced by some of her earlier work.

I believe you also wrote in your book [Caring] that you were influenced by Kohlberg’s work, where he said that girls were essentially stuck in the third stage of his moral development model?

Well, that’s right. I think that Carol Gilligan was certainly right in her critiques of Kohlberg. And Kohlberg, to his credit, in the couple years and months before he died, was seriously trying to answer the question, What does moral reasoning have to do with conduct? He was struggling with that because he knew there was a difference. Some people who are excellent at reasoning nevertheless do the wrong thing. Another question he asked was, What motivates people to use their reasoning to do the right thing? It’s an excellent question.

You don’t state that caring is universal, right? Instead, you state that the desire to be cared for is universal. Can you please discuss this?

That’s right. I don’t claim that caring is universal. We have to recognize that. As you’re probably well aware, anthropologists have identified a couple groups where caring is significantly missing. These are actually miserable societies. What I do claim is [that] the desire to be cared for is universal. It’s important to [see the difference]. Sometimes someone in an audience, usually a man, will say, “I don’t want to be cared for, I just want respect!” I’ll say to him, “Well, that’s your way of wanting to be cared for”. Some people want a hug. Some people simply want respect. But the desire to be cared for is universal.

Does the desire to be cared for always come from the early experience of the mother-child bond, or can people tap into it from some other experiences? Can other people tap into it differently?

I think [the desire] is built into humanity. It’s a primal thing. It takes a variety of forms, from individual to individual and from life stage to life stage, of course. Infants couldn’t survive if they weren’t cared for, in the sense that they need the basics for survival.

Care has often been associated with women and the “feminine”. And because of this, care is still often devalued, right?

It’s correct to say that care has been associated with women. It’s also correct to say that people usually identify care with care-giving. Here again, though, you have to be careful, because I do not equate care and care-giving. This is wrong, because care-giving as an occupation can be done without care. So that’s another distinction that we have to make.

Some years ago, I was influenced by an article by a Norwegian sociologist. In Norway, the typical economic requirements for care and for care-giving are supplied. No one has to worry about not receiving what they have to receive. And yet, in a lot of places, a lot of institutions, people’s sole complaint is that “nobody cares”. That’s the distinction. You can go through the motions of care-giving without really caring and without [the person cared for] receiving the care.

Yet I think that because care and care-giving have been conflated, there’s been a lack of value ascribed to care. Like the man you described who said he doesn’t want care, he wants respect

That’s right. I’m not arguing against the statement that care has been associated with the feminine. Care has been associated with women and the feminine. It has been mistakenly equated with care-giving.

If care has been devalued through its association with women and the feminine, how do we value care more? What needs to change in people, in systems, and in thought processes? What specific actions do you recommend?

Whether we’re talking about caring in organizations, at the global level, or by the cross-cultural management community, these questions are very closely related. I often use a simple answer to this. First, we need to emphasize dialogue. That means listening as well as talking. Not just telling people what to do, but listening to find out what they need, what they want, how they see things.

When we’re talking about communicating with the community of scholars and practitioners in cross-cultural management, it means a shift in emphasis from competition to cooperation. It doesn’t mean to give up competition entirely, because some forms of competition are needed.

A lot of the work in global education today, all over the world now, makes tremendous emphasis on cooperation. [However], if you look at what is actually going on in the schools in these countries, you see that competition is still dominant.

In our country [the US], especially, we place a tremendous emphasis on accountability. I think that’s a mistake. Our emphasis should be on responsibility. There are a lot of variations here. Think about teaching, for an example. When the teacher is confronted with the [demand to respect someone higher up] that goes with accountability, she naturally wants to protect herself. We have that need to protect ourselves. When we’re accountable to someone higher up instead of ourselves, then we feel, or should feel as teachers, responsibility for the kids under us. Administrators are responsible for the people working under us. I think we’d make tremendous strides in organizations if we worked on changing that language. If we emphasized cooperation over competition and responsibility over accountability, we wouldn’t bring out the desire to protect and defend oneself. Instead, we’d bring out the desire to protect those for whom we are responsible.

I’ve identified three criteria for healthy competition, as competition is both healthy and necessary, but it’s a matter of emphasis.

What are your three criteria for healthy competition?

The first thing we can ask ourselves is, “Am I still enjoying the activity?” Because sometimes, and this happens quite often in academics, people work so hard at it that they are no longer enjoying it. The second is, “Is the competition contributing to my doing better?” Competition often does. When we watch someone else, we get better at the activity that we’re performing. And the third one is probably the hardest: “Can I take any pleasure from the success of my competitors?”

How do you manage this last one?

I suppose it’s like being holistically immersed in an enterprise. You feel like you love it yourself. You feel like you’re getting better at it because you are competitors. And you can admire and appreciate the performance of your competitor.

We do have competition. It’s part of who we are – that desire to excel

Yes, and that’s why I emphasized right from the start cooperation over competition, but it doesn’t mean you throw competition out entirely. You just can’t do it, you know.

This topic is related to something that you’ve written, that care is not only about caring about a person, but also that it’s caring for what we’re doing, for the subject itself

Sure.

How do we help managers really incorporate these principles of competition and think of the long term when they have to deliver quarterly numbers?

This, I think, is one of the hardest questions. I’ve been asked to do a chapter on the care ethic in organizations, including care on a global level. We make a big mistake when we talk about this. Let me give an example, now, because it exemplifies it best. There are people that are attracted to care ethics that talk about caring schools and then say something about what they look like. I would raise a finger of caution there. A school can’t care. An organization can’t care. A nation can’t care. What these organizations can do is to work to establish structures and social arrangements under which caring can flourish. That’s very different. You don’t say, “Here’s what a caring school does, and here are the six steps”. No. You ask yourself, “What do I need to do to establish an environment in which caring can flourish?” And right after that, you need to talk to people. You need to listen to them. You need to find out what it is they seek, what it is they see, their ideas, and all the rest. It’s a slower process, but it’s one that never ends. Once you get it going, you really have something wonderful going there.

Can you elaborate on this, Nel? Other than the talking and listening, what are some of the other things that are really needed to create caring environments?

I think you have to give people the opportunity to practice the kinds of things you want to see done. Think about this on the global level. We, I mean, the US, so often go into other parts of the world claiming that we’re going to establish justice – blah, blah, blah – that we don’t stop and ask people what they mean by justice. We have a preconception of what they need. We do this so doggone often. We go in and tell people what they need instead of asking them what they need. And that doesn’t mean when they ask the question, “What do you need?” or “What do you think you need?” that you will accept anything they say uncritically. It’s the beginning of a conversation.

Why do people think they need this? Why is it in organizations, for example, that everyone seems to want to be cared for, and the people who are running it insist that they want to care for people, and then, no one feels cared for?

There was a wonderful study done by the Claremont Graduate University that I’ve cited a number of times over the years, where researchers went into the Los Angeles schools after the Rodney King riots. They started out with all the conventional topics. But then they very quickly realized that there was something basically wrong with the whole environment. They talked to the high school kids, and the kids said, “Nobody cares”. And they said, “Wow, we’ve got it! There’s something really wrong with the teachers!” So then they talked with the teachers, and they found out that in many ways, the teachers cared very deeply. They were desperately desirous of doing something good for their kids. So then you have a situation in which people want to be cared for, there are others who want to care for them, and there’s no caring! See, that requires discussion.

There’s something wrong in the environment when you don’t have caring relations, even though everyone seems to want them. [Understanding] the situation requires more than just talking, though talking’s fundamental. It requires real investigation. What do we need to change to satisfy both the desire to be cared for and the desire to care? What do we need to change? And then, when asking this question, you have to resist this idea of one wonderful, sweeping thing that will do it all. Take your time, and if you find something, then you say, “Alright, we’ve learned something. Let’s do that, but that won’t solve the whole problem.” We’re going to have to continue this conversation and see what else we have to do.

How does this relate to the reward system, where certain kinds of behavior are rewarded? There are some structural elements here

Oh, for sure, for sure. In business, where profit is so important, I think it’s extremely difficult. I have been corresponding with people in business schools who are trying to use the ethics of care and who feel that taking this point of view will diminish profits. Then they really get on to a track that they really want to prove that that caring isn’t going to hurt profits. While I understand that, I think that when you begin to think that way, keep pulling yourself back a little bit, otherwise you’re likely to make some pretty bad mistakes. Profits are not the only thing we’re looking at.

How can managers and leaders help people in organizations maintain, sustain, and enhance their caring attitudes and make caring decisions in the moral dilemmas they face in their jobs?

The very first criterion I would say is, model it [care]. Some years ago, I talked to a school superintendent in Florida who said, “I’m hard on my teachers because I care about the kids”. And I said to him, “If you care about the kids, it would be a good idea to care about your teachers. Because the way you treat your teachers is likely to be the way the teachers will teach your kids.”

How did this person respond?

He was sort of dumbfounded. He just stood there. But I hope he thought about it. That’s the thing. You can’t go in and say to an organizational manager, “Now, you’re going to get your people to care”. If you did that, then you are going to draw on accountability again – and you’re just on the wrong track.

So we’re back with distinction between responsibility and accountability?

Yeah […] yeah.

There are many stories of people who model care. Managers, for example, who seek work – life balance and spend time with their children, make it possible for employees to do the same. Can you think of some other examples?

I think another example is to show what you do when you have to fire someone. And you do have to do this. A principal has to fire a teacher when they’re not doing a good job. There’s a difference between saying, “You haven’t measured up, and you’re out”, and with sitting down with the person, and saying, “It doesn’t seem to me that you’re very well cut out for this. What would you like to do?”

There are people who are very interested in education who are not good teachers. They don’t make eye connections and they fail to see the kid in the corner of the room. They don’t notice that people aren’t hearing them, and so on. There are a whole lot of things that really disqualify a person from teaching. But, there is a big difference when the administrator sits down with them, actually takes an interest in the person, and says, “I’d like it to be in your best interest as well as our best interest”. That takes a little more time, doesn’t it?

You talk about care being modeled. Do you think that care can be taught or developed in people? How might we do that?

I think it can be. It’s easier to do with some people than others. By and large, it seems easier to do with women than with men, just because of their different experiences. There is a close relationship between care-giving and caring. People who have experience in care-giving, who have had to provide care for others, seem to better understand care. But you see, it’s not perfect, because you can go on doing these things in uncaring ways. They [care and care-giving] are not synonymous.

There have been a couple studies that have shown that when men are put in the position of actually having to physically care for others, they get a deeper sense of what we mean by caring. So I think that care-giving is a sort of incubator for caring, but it’s not perfect. It doesn’t always work. And yet in schools and organizations, [developing care] is a possibility. If you want caring in your organization, give people some responsibility for caring and some credit for doing it. Separate this from profits.

Can you give an example of how this could be implemented?

I don’t think you’ve got a problem with giving responsibility. For example, in schools we ask good teachers to take on mentoring responsibilities. In other organizations, you would do, roughly, the same thing. You would ask people to take on some responsibility for helping someone do his or her job better. If you get to the reward thing, then you have another ticklish situation. If the reward is going to be monetary, then you risk having people do right things for what might be the wrong reason – and it might not be wrong. If by reward you mean recognizing, crediting, writing up a story, a column, about that person, then I think that’s wonderful. You need to give attention to something that was done that you want more people to do.

Let’s go back to the situation in L.A., where you described a disconnection between those who wanted care and those who wanted to give care. Is the challenge even bigger in a cross-cultural environment, when what it means to be caring and what it is to be cared for may mean different things? Have you seen this addressed in any way?

Occasionally […] one thing you can do in schools is to try to extend the amount of time in which the carers and cared-fors are together. For example, you might have one teacher teach two subjects to one batch of kids, rather than teaching one subject to two different batches of kids. You might extend the homeroom time and say, “Look, you’ll be in the same home situation the whole three or four years in high school”. You’re looking for some kind of continuity. You have to give people enough time together to develop relations of care and trust. They don’t just happen automatically. When you recognize that [relations] take time, then you say, “How can I extend this time?”

You’ve said several times that we need to slow down to do this. In organizations, when things are moving so quickly, this may be hard to do, right?

Continuity is just one example. It’s a very prominent example in education because we know that developing relations of care and trust takes time. So if you can keep kids and teachers together for longer than the 40 minutes of a class session, then you’ve made a structural change that is likely to support caring relations. In a different organization, you’d have to ask yourself, “What can I do in the way of structuring the work day, meetings, etc. that brings these people together more often, where they will actually be able to develop relations of care and trust?” You can’t just say, “Oh, do it”.

How do we do this in the global economy, when so many relationships are not in person but virtual?

I guess that I would emphasize that there are no simple solutions to this, but we need persistent effort at establishing relations of care and trust. And that means communication – and not communication that is a directive, where you say, “Here is something you must do”. But instead you say, “Here’s something to try. And I would like to hear from you on how it’s going. What went right with it? What went wrong with it? Do we need to spend more time on it? Is there something else that we need to do?” You don’t decide too early on what might seem to be a certainty. This is absolutely the plague that we have now – where people are looking for one certain solution to everything. It’s so ridiculous that it makes you want to sit down and cry.

Here, as well, is the difference, again, between accountability and responsibility. You don’t want to [focus] people’s attention on what’s at risk for them in this, but rather what’s at risk for others and for the whole organization.

How do you draw attention to what’s at risk for the organization rather than what’s at risk for the person? Can you give an example?

In the school example I used before, I would put it to people frankly. Here we have a bunch of kids that want to be cared for and a bunch of teachers who want to care. First, you ask an exploratory question, like, “What can we do to make it more likely that these needs will be satisfied?” The second part would be noting what you could try out, rather than saying, “Here’s the solution”. And so often, managers will say, “Here’s what they did in Timbuktu and it worked there, so that’s what we’re going to do here”. They could mention what’s been done in Timbuktu and ask, “What do you think about it, should we try it for six weeks, or six months?” This is a move away from individual decision-making to a more collegial decision-making.

I’d like to ask something about joy. Later on in your book [Caring], you bring out joy as a basic human aspect, when many people think that anxiety and anguish are the primary parts of being a person, that to be human is to be alone and empty at the heart of one’s existence. Can you talk about joy and receptivity more in context of work, and how we could bring that forward?

I’m glad you brought it up. University of California Press is going to be doing a new edition of the Caring book that will be a 30-year celebration of its publication. I was tempted to leave out the chapter on joy, because it’s the one I’ve had the fewest comments on from anyone, anywhere. And then, the way you just spoke of it, reminds me that there is something wonderful about it, you know?

There is real joy in the development of caring relations and what you get from it. It has nothing to do with money, or climbing the ladder, or whatever, and we don’t talk about that. In schools, we don’t even ask kids, “What did you love about this? Is there anything in this homework that really got you, that you really enjoyed?”

So I think maybe I won’t leave this out, but will try to say something a little bit more about joy. What motivated you to ask the question? It was in that chapter on all the existential literature, which is mostly about anxiety and anguish with very little discussion of hope and joy.

It struck me as so important. Forgive me if I get the words wrong, but you said something like, “Joy is beyond being in the magical world. Joy is something you receive as a real quality of the lived world”. If we live from that place, I think care would flow very differently

Well, I think we need to learn so much more about joy – or, we have to get over being afraid to talk about it. We have to be able to introduce into our conversations the joy of accomplishment, that special feeling that you get when you have established relations of care and trust. I have written in the margin here, “Change language”. And that’s, I imagine, what we’ve been talking about in this entire conversation. Change the language to emphasize cooperation over competition, responsibility over accountability, and joy over anxiety and anxiousness. Enjoy your work – don’t just earn money from it. We don’t talk about those things very often. The poets talk about these things. We just sort of ignore them.

And yet so many young people are asking for just that

You’re right.

You also say, “The occurrence of joy is a manifestation of receptive consciousness […] Joy is a sign that we live in a world of relation as well as instrumentality.” Joy seems so essential for how we live our lives. Those are your words! I was so touched by them, and I’m just sharing them back because I think people are hungry for this

(Laughter) Oh dear!

Where would you like to point people so they can start incorporating care into their research?

I think the best overview on care would be Virginia Held’s book, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), because she really covers the territory on who has said what on it. And then, of course, a couple of my books would be useful, I think. There’s also been work on ethics of care being done in nursing, even in library science.

What key questions require further research and study with respect to care? I know you said you’ve been asked to explore the ethics of care in organizations and the global world

Yes, that’s right. In part, [I’m doing this] because I’m reacting to people who talk about caring schools, caring businesses, caring nations. I am warning them that schools, institutions, and nations can’t care directly. What they can do is to work towards the establishment and maintenance of structures and arrangements that allow caring relations to flourish.

Is there anything else that you wish to communicate to the community of scholars and practitioners in Cross Cultural Management?

Here’s something to keep an eye on, and that’s the concept of empathy. This concept still needs a lot of analysis before we go whole hog with it. Psychologists have kind of gone hardwired on it. A couple of good friends whose work I admire in philosophy have almost equated empathy with caring. They go together, but they’re not the same. One question about empathy is, What induces it? Another question is, Where do we act on it? Or, in other words, When do we not do anything? This reminds me of one of my colleagues in philosophy [Michael Slote] who does lovely work. He’s written a book called The Ethics of Care and Empathy (Routledge, 2007) that almost reduces care to empathy. I think it’s a very bad mistake.

I think that the distinction you make between “the capacity to feel”, which would be empathy, and “acting on it”, which is care, is huge

Yes. You can be mistaken in your empathy. The word [empathy] is only a century and a half old. Empathy started out as a positive notion. It really evolved in the art world. The idea was to project one’s self into the work of art, and then you would understand it. With this, you get into the whole notion of empathic accuracy. I may be able to feel something, I feel with the other, which is called sympathy, but I may be mistaken about what the other is going through. I may not have an accurate understanding. And without an accurate understanding, then the other feels hatred and not the desire to care.

Do you see empathy and compassion as the same?

No, I don’t. One would hope that compassion would go with empathy, but I don’t think they always go together. You can be mistaken in your empathy. You think you understand what the other is going through, and you could be dead wrong. It’s another of those topics when you have to back off the certainty thing and spend a little more time.