Double stimulation in everyday work: Critical encounters between home care workers and their elderly clients

What are the key characteristics of double stimulation in an everyday work activity facing transformations? We will present and test a conceptual model of the critical encounter as a potential site of double stimulation at work. Our data consist of 26 videotaped home care visits understood as critical encounters. The home care workers and the elderly clients faced the challenge of implementing a new practice called the Mobility Agreement, aimed at integrating regular mobility exercises in the daily routines of the client. Our findings support the assumption that critical encounters are fruitful breeding grounds for double stimulation in work activities. Critical encounters seem to generate special kinds of micro-contexts in which artifacts are actively employed to deal with the challenge at hand. These micro-contexts may be described with the help of two dimensions, namely the dimension of restrictive vs. expansive use of artifacts and the dimension of incidental vs. planned use of artifacts. Our findings call attention to two additional features of double stimulation in mundane work. The first one is the interactional nature of the generation – and inhibition – of double stimulation. The second feature is its longitudinal, multi-phased and iterative nature in work activities.