From all sides we hear that Americans are becoming increasingly self-absorbed and disconnected, and that our interest in social and civic responsibility is on the decline. A more encouraging profile emerges in this study of Americans at work, at home with their families, and in their communities. The book is based on a national, representative survey of more than 3,000 Americans aged 25 to 74—plus in-depth interviews with adults drawn from the survey—to find out what Americans mean by social responsibility.

The book explores the extent to which adults contribute time to caregiving, social support, and financial assistance to family members; the time given to volunteer work and financial contributions to various causes, charities, and organizations; and how these contributions are affected by job obligations. A major focus is on age and gender differences, which shows midlife to be a transitional time when civic activities increase as family obligations decline. All told, the study adds a hopeful new voice to the overwhelmingly negative debate about the current state of our civic and social lives.

Caring on the Clock is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research on a wide range of paid care occupations, and to place the various fields within a comprehensive and comparative framework across occupational boundaries. The book includes twenty-two original essays by leading researchers across a range of disciplines—including sociology, psychology, social work, and public health. They examine the history of the paid care sector in America, reveal why paid-care work can be both personally fulfilling but also make workers vulnerable to burnout, emotional fatigue, physical injuries, and wage exploitation. Finally, the editors outline many innovative ideas for reform, including top-down and grassroots efforts to improve recognition, remuneration, and mobility for care workers. 

As America faces a series of challenges to providing care for its citizens, including the many aging baby boomers, this volume offers a wealth of information and insight for policymakers, scholars, advocates, and the general public.

Until now, ethicists have said little about the body, limiting their comments on it to remarks made in passing or, at best, devoting a chapter to the subject. Embodied Care is the first work to argue for the body's centrality to care ethics, doing so by analyzing our corporeality at the phenomenological level. It develops the idea that our bodies are central to our morality, paying particular attention to the ways we come to care for one another.
 
Hamington's argues that human bodies are "built to care"; as a result, embodiment must be recognized as a central factor in moral consideration. He takes the reader on an exciting journey from modern care ethics to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body and then to Jane Addams's social activism and philosophy. The ideas in Embodied Care do not lead to yet another competing theory of morality; rather, they progress through theory and case studies to suggest that no theory of morality can be complete without a full consideration of the body.
 

In The Ethics of Care, Fiona Robinson demonstrates how the responsibilities of sustaining life are central to the struggle for basic human security. She takes a unique approach, using a feminist lens to challenge gender biases in rights-based, individualist approaches.Robinson's thorough and impassioned consideration of care in both ethical and practical terms provides a starting point for understanding and addressing the material, emotional and psychological conditions that create insecurity for people. The Ethics of Careexamines “care ethics” and “security” at the theoretical level and explores the practical implications of care relations for security in a variety of contexts: women's labor in the global economy, humanitarian intervention and peace building, healthcare, and childcare.

Theoretically-innovative and policy-relevant, this critical analysis demonstrates the need to understand the obstacles and inequalities that obstruct the equitable and adequate delivery of care around the world.

Housework—often trivialized or simply overlooked in public discourse—contributes in a complex and essential way to the form that families and societies assume. In this innovative study, Marjorie L. DeVault explores the implications of "feeding the family" from the perspective of those who do that work. Along the way, DeVault offers a new vocabulary for discussing nurturance as a basis of group life and sociability.

Drawing from interviews conducted in 1982-83 in a diverse group of American households, DeVault reveals the effort and skill behind the "invisible" work of shopping, cooking, and serving meals. She then shows how this work can become oppressive for women, drawing them into social relations that construct and maintain their subordinate position in household life.

To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. 

Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” 

From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.  

In the evolution of the nursing profession, the phrases nursing care, therapeutic care, caring for others, and related expressions are used by nurses to describe their professional service to others. Members of our society have different thoughts and role expectations about these phrases in relation to the kind of care they receive from nurses. Furthermore, these expressions hold different meanings for nurses in their various care-giving roles, such as to individual clients, families, and community groups they serve. Care-giving and care-receiving roles of nurses have different sets of expectations and behaviors. It is well, there, that members of the nursing profession begin systematically to clarify the diverse functions and cultural values related to the concepts of care, caring, and nursing care.

The concept of care is probably one of the least understood ideas used by professional and nonprofessional people, yet it is probably one of the most important concepts to be understood by human groups. It is a word with multiple social usages in the American culture, and has other meanings in other world cultures. The terms care, caring, and nursing care have both symbolic and functional meanings as they are used by caregivers and care-recipients. Nursing care also has a general, special meaning to nurses, and is often taken for granted in nurses' thoughts and action patterns. It is time that we study the implicit and explicit meanings associated with the concepts of care and caring so that we can reduce their ambiguities. Furthermore, the humanistic, scientific, and linguistic meanings related to nursing care and caring behaviors in any culture remain a most fascinating area of study for nurses.

Jean Watson's first edition of Nursing, now considered a classic, introduced the science of human caring and quickly became one of the most widely used and respected sources of conceptual models for nursing. This completely new edition offers a contemporary update and the most current perspectives on the evolution of the original philosophy and science of caring from the field's founding scholar.
A core concept for nurses and the professional and non-professional people they interact with, "care" is one of the field's least understood terms, enshrouded in conflicting expectations and meanings. Although its usages vary among cultures, caring is universal and timeless at the human level, transcending societies, religions, belief systems, and geographic boundaries, moving from Self to Other to community and beyond, affecting all of life.
This new edition reflects on the universal effects of caring and connects caring with love as the primordial moral basis both for the philosophy and science of caring practices and for healing itself. It introduces Caritas Processes, offers centering and mediation exercises on an included audio CD, and provides other energetic and reflective models to assist students and practitioners in cultivating a new level of Caritas Nursing in their work and world.

Unitary Caring Science: The Philosophy and Praxis of Nursing takes a profound look at conscious, intentional, reverential caring-healing as sacred practice/praxis and as a necessary turn for survival. Jean Watson posits Unitary Caring Science for the evolved Caritas-conscious practitioner and scholar. A detailed historical discussion of the evolution from Caring Science toward Unitary Caring Science reflects the maturing of the discipline, locating the nursing phenomena of wholeness within the unitary field paradigm. An exploration of praxis as informed moral practice results in an expanded development of the ten Caritas processes, resulting in a comprehensive value-guide to critical Caritas literacy and ontological Caritas praxis.
 
Watson writes for the Caritas Conscious Nurse™ or the Caritas Conscious Scholar/Practitioner/Educator on the journey toward the deeper caring-healing dimensions of life. Unitary Caring Science offers a personal-professional path of authenticity, bringing universals of Love, Energy, Spirit, Infinity of Purpose, and Meaning back into nurses lives and their life’s work. Unitary Caring Science serves as a continuing, evolving message to the next generation of nurse scholars and healing-health practitioners committed to a praxis informed by mature disciplinary consciousness.
 
Each book comes with a set of Caritas cards, and individual customers will also receive a secure link to select copyrighted teaching videos and meditations on www.watsoncaringscience.org.