Abstract: This research explores the care practices carried out by personnel in contact with elderly patients, in a hospital context that is increasingly normative and driven by a managerial paradigm that comes into conflict with the personal values and ethics of caregivers. By using a immersion approach in a geriatric hospital department, this research makes it possible to understand the role of the frailty of the elderly in feeding the tensions of norms experienced by the caregivers. It also makes it possible to identify the strategies used for negotiating and circumventing norms, based on tinkering and cunning, which caregivers put in place to resolve these tensions in order to accomplish their mission. If the mobilization of these strategies makes it possible to preserve the well-being of elderly patients, it makes part of the caregivers’ work invisible and is a source of psycho-social risks.
