The Relation between care and technique in the context of management: a Heideggerian perspective

This paper explores the relationship between care and technique in management from the perspective of Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology as elaborated by Benner and Wrubel in their work: The Primacy of Caring: Stress and Coping in Health and Illness (1989). In this work they compare the role of technique and caring in nursing from a Heideggerian perspective claiming that in effective nursing care underpins technique, is the basis for noticing problems and for setting up coping options for responding to problems. Based on the views of Henry Mintzberg this paper shows how the function of care as being the basis for noting and setting up coping options is essential to management and thus that caring needs to underpin technique in developing effective management practices.