Nonprofit Care Work as Social Glue: Creating and Sustaining Social Reproduction in the Context of Austerity/Late Neoliberalism

Abstract

This article will bring together the social glue concept of social reproduction and a feminist analysis of civil society to the study of nonprofit care work in order to cast analytic light on the dynamics of care work in the nonprofit sector and contribute to theorizing care work, to identify and theorize aspects of nonprofit care work which reproduce and sustain social glue, and to supplement theory on civil society. Drawing on qualitative interviews with nonprofit care workers in South Africa and Scotland, this article argues that care work, in general, and nonprofit care work, more specifically, are key components of civil society and central to the gendered social glue that holds societies together. We argue that nonprofit care workers are part a distinctive but porous set of social relations and have their own unique way of sustaining social bonds in the context of late neoliberalism. The article looks closely at three dynamics of social glue in nonprofit care work, namely, empowerment, emotional/personal costs, and unpaid work. We argue that nonprofit care workers find micro ways of resisting the erosion of social glue and reweaving the social fabric through care and relationship and further that these forms of resistance may sustain much needed social bonds until larger social transformation is possible.