Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics, no. 14. London; New York: Routledge, 2017. xiii, 187 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$149.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-22984-6.
Backhaus’s Care Communication is a sociolinguistic analysis of verbal interactions between the residents and care workers of an eldercare institution in Tokyo. The main motivation propelling the analysis is to better understand the nature of communication in a Japanese institutional eldercare setting (24). The book has a double aim: to account for the “basic characteristics of resident-staff interaction during morning care activities” (24); and to contribute to the understanding of “how little things can make a difference in the various ways people care for each other as they try to make a home in an unlikely place” (152). These are worthy goals, particularly in Japan, where institutionalized eldercare has long remained a publicly debated topic. With the proportion of elderly in Japanese society still due to rise, waiting lists to be admitted to care institutions invariably long, continuously high turnover of care staff, and the delegation of eldercare to non-Japanese workers and robots, it is important that we have a clear understanding of how these institutions operate not only on a large managerial level, but also how “micro-level human interactions” (152) and “micro-level orderliness” (24) shape (but also reflect) the experiences of those for whom these institutions are a workplace as well as those for whom they have become new homes.
To achieve his goals, Backhaus analyzes 46 transcripts of 107 voice-recorded interactions that occurred in an institution nicknamed Edogawa Care over 18 working days. He focuses solely on early morning encounters when the elderly residents are woken up and get ready for breakfast assisted by the care workers. The analysis (following a short introduction, a somewhat longer contextualization of his own study within the existing literature on communication and institutionalized care, and a methodological chapter), focuses on four aspects of the verbal exchanges that Backhaus recorded: occurrence of honorifics (a particularly marked element in the Japanese language); openings and closings; task- and non-task-related talk; and the tempo of the exchanges. Four analytical chapters discuss several characteristics of each of these aspects.
We learn, for example, that care workers and the elderly use honorifics not according to grammar-book rules, but according to how they understand a situation on a “turn-by-turn basis” (44–45). By pointing to this dynamism Backhaus questions the direct link between honorifics and politeness. In relation to how and by whom verbal interactions are initiated and how they come to an end, Backhaus shows that these are dominated by care workers. However, the elderly too are able to take it upon themselves to, for example, confirm the end of a task and thus exercise more control over the flow of the situation.
What is of interest in Backhaus’s discussion of task and non-task talk, are not just the subjects raised, but also how the non-task talk is incorporated within the task-focused utterances. Both the elderly and the care workers need to multitask to get their non-task conversations going. While non-task exchanges are an important part of care that extends beyond the physical and attends to the emotional needs of the elderly, allowing for the institutional roles to recede into the background, there is a thin line between “talking while working” and “working while talking” (121). Should one appear as doing the latter, they run the risk of being cast as unprofessional (121). Just how easy it is to move from one form of interaction to the other is illustrated by Backhaus through the words of an elderly person who has to bring a care worker back to the care task at hand when the latter, engrossed in a non-task talk, temporarily delays his actions. How exactly to balance the task and non-task-related conversations and actions is an issue at the heart of the definition of what good care is.
In the penultimate chapter Backhaus directs our attention to the tempo of the exchanges. The main gist we get from the analysis here is that the elderly favour a somewhat slower pace than that at which the care workers operate. This has arguably to do with the drive of the care workers to perform a task quickly. However, Backhaus points out that such “interactional hurriedness” (140) can actually have the opposite effect.
Concluding his book, Backhaus summarizes the main characteristics of the analyzed interactions: care communication during morning exchanges in Edogawa Care is task-focused and asymmetrical, with care givers typically having the upper hand, and done in a hurry. This is indeed what transpires through the examples presented in the book. However, what I was left in want of was Backhaus’s suggestion as for how to make a home in an “unlikely place” (152) such as a care institution. Despite the subtitle suggesting that the reader will learn about how the “making of a home” is enacted in a Japanese eldercare facility, the closest we get to finding out how Backhaus sees it happen is when we read that “institutional asymmetry is no pre-given state, but an interactional product that the participants can refuse to deliver” (144) and that institutions can be “talked into and—at times—out of being” (143). Yes, throughout the book we do see how the elderly are subverting the overall asymmetrical relationship they find themselves in in relation to the care workers, but how exactly is it related to making a care institution a home? To answer this second topic of his book, Backhaus could have offered a more sustained analysis of the two “noisy background topics” (148) that he only marginally attends to throughout the book and then shortly returns to in the conclusion: What constitutes politeness or its opposite and how does gender shape interactions between care workers and the elderly residents? And then, how does this relate to an idea of home. Two sections of the conclusion are devoted to putting together dispersed moments from the book that speak to these questions, but both of these large topics together are covered within just five pages and do not offer an answer.
Overall, the book meets its goal to describe the basic characteristics of staff-resident interaction during morning care activities as they manifest themselves in the Japanese language. The book will therefore be of interest to linguists interested in this area who, for example, may be working on care-related study books for non-Japanese workers and/or designing software to be mounted on robots attending to the Japanese elderly in the future. The other goal of the book, that is, understanding how to make a home in an eldercare institution, however, could perhaps be delegated to a sequel to Care Communication, which I would also read with great interest.
Beata Świtek
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany