‘Social’ robot and social relations in care settings: Undefined positionality and fixed temporality

Socially assistive robots in eldercare settings, i.e. ‘social’ robots, are currently being promoted and studied, particularly in Japan. Among these studies, clinical evaluation of their effectiveness in experimental research predominates, while studies that critically and analytically describe relations between actors in long-term care settings where robots are present are growing but still scarce. In this paper, we argue that understanding how older adults facing the loss of autonomy and their caregivers interact with robots in relational terms is helpful to explain the usage and non-usage of, and eventual resistance to social robots entering into care settings. This is why, in order to understand human relationships with social robots in elder care homes, this paper combines a ‘script’ approach and a ‘critical care’ one. Based on content analysis of a unique set of reports on trials of a social robot in multiple care facilities in Japan from 2018 to 2020, as well as interviews with stakeholders and ethnographic observations conducted in 2022, we answer two questions: 1) how do social robots shape social relations of care? 2) how do social robots affect social relations between care professionals, care recipients and robots? We proceed to discuss two of the characteristics emphasised in the ethics of care and examine them in depth: the positional and temporal aspects. Our major result is that, while the robot was easily adaptable to care environments because its position in relationships is not defined, embedded clock time flow in the robot was objective and linear, which indicates that some robot-created situations were seen as problematic by actors in care settings.