Commodification Of Care Research Articles

Being an au pair in London: Young Spanish women’s employment trajectories and strategies in regimes of gender and precariousness

The global economic crisis that began in 2008 led to major cuts to the welfare state in Spain and across Europe (Gambino, 2018), affecting key areas such as health, education, social care and youth employment. This was accompanied by drastic reductions in public spending and welfare benefits, which affected women particularly severely. Through ethnographic fieldwork with a gender and feminist perspective, this paper attempts to cast light on the trajectories of young Spanish women who emigrated to London in the ambiguous ‘au pair’ category. The figure of the au pair is interesting because it is an ad hoc, liminal, ambiguous, transient construction configured in such a way that it is ‘between’ categories, spaces and bounds, responding to the domestic care needs of English families’ offspring as part of a commodification of care brought about by a lack of regulation and resources from the state. The employment trajectories and strategies of young Spanish women are embedded in a context of precarious employment, in which young women with secondary and higher education seek financial and personal autonomy but are compelled to negotiate gender norms in order to overcome structural inequalities that increasingly devalue care work. The naturalisation of care and its attribution to women, as well as the ongoing association of women with the ‘good mother’ model, serves to reinforce gender hierarchies.

The commodification of care: Does paying for elder care matter?

AbstractWhat are the changes in social life that paid care generates, in a context where kin have been expected to provide elder care? This question opens up key questions about the exploitation of women, who often provide domestic labor and care to their kin without pay; and about the spread of capitalism, in which goods and services required for human survival are exchanged through markets. This paper explores how paid elder care in Ghana is made possible practically and ideologically by the social blurring of the difference between nonkin paid care and kin unpaid care: one, by mistrust between kin that make the exchange of services and labor shorter term and more balanced; and two, by treating paid care between neighbors as a gift. Ultimately, I argue, the commodification of elder care is not a straightforward marker of the expansion of global capitalism, but it has led to increased class differences and tensions between women of different economic means.

‘Does the Prime Minister Care?’

Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theorization of care as a “fictitious commodity”, Rashna Darius Nicholson’s article ‘‘Does the Prime Minister Care?’: Spectacular solidarity, infelicitous performatives and the doubly fictitious commodification of care in India during the COVID-19 pandemic’ describes how organised gestures of care in India work to interpellate Indians into soft, palliative forms of populism and authoritarian governmentality. Through an analysis of inter-related state-sanctioned gestures of care such as symbolic acts initiated by the Narendra Modi administration during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the PM Cares fund, and artist-in-aid programs, this article suggests that state-affiliated, spectacular care functions in the contemporary Indian context as a doubly fictitious commodity. Fictionalized first through commodification by the neoliberal marketplace and subsequently by a government seeking to advance a Hindu nationalist project, care as state-affiliated mass spectacle has become an infelicitous performative, that is, a seductive aesthetic mode that facilitates the political choreographing of (extra-)legal political interventions. Through an analysis of the infelicities of institutional care, the article shows how the state’s systematized affirmations of public concern obfuscate the breakdown of civil society-state relations, normalization of Hindu culture and increasing violence in contemporary India.

Migração, Trabalho Doméstico e Políticas Públicas de Cuidados de Longo Prazo na Espanha

Abstract: This article explores the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the labour conditions of migrant workers who provide care to elderly and dependent persons in Spain. Using data from the Active Population Survey, we analyse the effects of the health crisis on the precariousness of this labour sector (measured through unemployment, underemployment and temporary employment). The figures shed light on the degradation of working conditions during the health crisis, the situation of social vulnerability experienced by female workers and the absence of effective policy responses to reverse this inequality during the pandemic. This situation of subordination is structured around the connection between the demand for care workers in private homes and the philosophy behind the public welfare system. Special emphasis is given to the effect of cash transfer programs in the process of the commodification of care.

Multiple crises, multiple sticky plasters: repositioning regimes of truth in ECEC policy to affirmative ethics of interconnection

ABSTRACT In recent times, the role of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), as a public service within Irish society has been illuminated. In the twenty-first century, although crises may unfold on a global scale, the response from society is galvanised at local level. Amongst other functions, ECEC is ideally positioned to form part of a local response to unanticipated public crisis. However, ECEC in Ireland finds itself in a space of converging multiple crises such as high fees for parents, poor working conditions for staff, alongside concerns of how children experience provision. This article analyses the institutional systems from which ECEC has emerged by mapping several discursive ‘regimes of truth’, that have built up through Irish history. Exposure of multiple crises, such as fragmentation and the commodification of care are mapped to a neoliberal discourse set in a history of colonialism and religious doctrine. Pulling off the sticky plasters is painful, whilst facing multiple crises can lead to a state of exhaustion. However, guided by affirmative ethics this article aims to generate possible solutions, thereby proposing mechanisms for creating a more sustainable model of ECEC as a public service, embedded in an interconnective narrative of ethical care.

An anatomy of carewashing: Corporate branding and the commodification of care during Covid-19.

This article defines ‘carewashing’ as commercial branding strategies which commodify care and attempt to increase corporate profit, and provides the first theorisation and historicisation of the term. The first section of the article situates ‘carewashing’ in relation to longer-term strategies of corporate ‘social responsibility’ and cause-related marketing. The second shows how established corporate practices are being reinvented in an era of Covid-19 and amidst profound neoliberal instability. The third section focuses on specific examples of contemporary carewashing, showing their variation and pinpointing three tendencies: ‘opportunistic branding’; ‘community resourcing’; and ‘reputational steamrolling’. The concluding section argues that carewashing also needs to be understood as a political act which is involved in wider social struggles. It argues that, in the Gramscian sense, carewashing is part of a ‘passive revolution’ in that it is attempting to claim and demarcate the realm of care for corporate capitalism and against social democracy.

Person-centred qualifications: vocational education and training for the aged care and disability services sectors in Australia

ABSTRACT In Australia and elsewhere, aged care and disability services are being transformed by the introduction of person-centred approaches. This radical reform to prioritise the dignity and needs of the people receiving care or support is an urgent matter of justice. Person-centred approaches are also transforming the organisation and conditions of employment for direct care workers, which has implications for the vocational education and training (VET) qualifications designed as preparation for their jobs. COVID-19 has highlighted problems with casualised employment and inadequate training, revealing the terrible impact on the elderly and people with disabilities. The broader context is a shift to market-based approaches to service delivery, with the increasing commodification of care, support services and VET. Drawing on a study of Australian VET qualifications for aged care and disability services, this article identifies limitations with dominant transactional forms of VET and the foundational ideas that underpin them. It argues that the introduction of transactional qualifications to prepare workers for poorly designed transactional jobs has a severe human cost.

The feminist and domestic workers’ movements: disconnected practices, discursive convergences

The article explores the relationship between women’s rights and feminist and domestic workers’ movements by drawing on qualitative data gathered in a comparative study on domestic workers’ rights in Italy, Germany, Spain, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador (2016–21). Despite the frequent disconnection between the two movements at the practical level, a possible convergence may be identified in the discursive frames that domestic workers’ rights activists make use of. The analysis focuses on two feminist anti-capitalist frames recurring in mobilisations for domestic workers’ rights, addressing the valorisation of reproductive labour and the transnational commodification of care. Domestic workers’ activism tends to build on these frames beyond their mainstream forms and to expand them in intersectional ways, enlarging their capacity to include racialised, low-class, migrant and other minority groups. This becomes a creative force at the level of discourse, where different alliances may take place in a less visible way.

Gender inequality, the welfare state, disability, and distorted commodification of care in Turkey

AbstractReforming care regimes to cover the care deficit and enhancing the marketization of care to promote individualism and gender equality have been on the European agenda since the 1990s. However, both implementation and results have been path-dependent. This study first underlines some specificities in the Turkish case—namely, the limited welfare state, a large shadow economy, gender roles, patriarchal backlash, Islamization, and neoliberalism, all of which receive little treatment in the welfare state literature. It then analyzes how these specificities interact in the construction of the care regime in Turkey, conceptualizing the outcome as distorted commodification of care—namely, the continuing ambiguity of care services despite these activities producing precarity and positional suffering for caregivers and recipients. Finally, the study provides concrete examples from the less studied topic of long-term disability care. It presents a perspective on Turkey that foregrounds the connections between gendered care imagery and case-specific qualities of the commodification of care shaped by the long-standing shadow economy, the outsourcing of disability services to for-profit private companies, and the introduction of the cash-for-care policy. The study analyzes the outcomes of distorted commodification of care under these conditions in Turkey vis-à-vis visibility, valuation of work, working conditions, and gender inequality.

Geographies of care work: The commodification of care, digital care futures and alternative caring visions

AbstractThis article explores the growing interest in care within geography. Focusing on care as waged work, we trace current transformations through commodification and digitalisation. We discuss how the private household is turning into a precarious and feminised workplace for a growing number of workers, and we show how this development is promoted by the rise of labour agencies that facilitate the transnational recruitment of care workers. The literature on global care chains illustrates how the recruitment of migrant workers fills care deficits in destination countries while opening up care gaps in sending countries. We review this literature from economic geography and beyond and reflect on the continuing feminisation and devaluation of care labour. Based on these critical insights, we examine how processes of digitalisation contribute to reshaping care work. We discuss the ambivalent effects of digital technologies on care and argue that there is an urgent need to intensify our engagement with the processes and effects of digital transformations. In our conclusions, we call for strengthening the budding debate on alternative visions of caring within geography and point to avenues for future engagement.

Globalising the Thai ‘high-touch’ industry: exports of care and body work and gendered mobilities to and from Thailand

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the global trade of Thai tourism and related service industries such as restaurant, spa and hospital – service activities in which the body and bodily emotions of both service consumers and providers are central. I will demonstrate how the Thai state and private sector market Thai services to the world and construct Thailand as a destination for bodily and spiritual fulfilment. Analysing Thailand as an exporter of care and body labour, this article highlights the important role the nation-state and local socioeconomic structures play in shaping global care chains. State policy that promotes tourism and related service industries as a key economic development strategy has shaped current interrelated forms of transnational mobilities between Thailand and more affluent countries – marriage migration, health and medical tourism, and retirement migration. I also explore the interface between Thai state policies on the export of care and lived experiences of Thailand-Europe transnational migrants. Through their occupation choices, marital relocation decisions and care arrangements, Thai migrants in Europe and European migrants in Thailand both resist and reproduce the commodification of care and body work.

Parents’ Expectations of Familial Elder Care under the Neoliberal Hong Kong Society

Previous studies have examined the shifts in traditional familial values among Chinese populations. It was argued that the values have diminished or eroded due to Westernization and modernization. Instead of the collectivist-individualist divide, this study aims to understand the role of neoliberal discourse in Hong Kong Chinese parents’ beliefs in familial values and elder care. Using data from 120 in-depth individual interviews with parents of different generations, this study found four themes: (1) the notion of self-reliance; (2) the intertwinement of neoliberal ideas and filial values; (3) redefinition of filial behaviors; and (4) commodification of care. Results suggest that the changes in parents’ filial beliefs have shifted senior care responsibilities from families to individuals and the private market. It creates a disjuncture between care arrangement and governmental welfare; more comprehensive pension and senior care services are thus needed to respond to societal changes.

O trabalho dos cuidadores de idosos na perspectiva da economia do care

Resumo As características e os desafios do trabalho dos cuidadores de idosos ainda são pouco investigados no Brasil. O presente artigo tem por objetivo explorar as percepções de cuidadores de idosos sobre seu trabalho a partir da perspectiva da Economia do Care. Por meio de uma pesquisa qualitativa, foram realizadas dez entrevistas com cuidadores que atendem no próprio domicílio do idoso. As entrevistas foram realizadas com base em um roteiro semiestruturado e analisadas por meio da técnica de análise de conteúdo. Dessa análise emergiram quatro categorias sobre as características e desafios desse trabalho: a) apresenta-se aos cuidadores como necessidade para complementar a renda; b) é fonte geradora de sofrimento físico e psíquico; c) os cuidadores criticam a mercantilização do cuidado; e, d) apontam dificuldades para ajustar relações de intimidade, envolvimento afetivo e remuneração do trabalho. Os resultados permitem explorar as subjetividades envolvidas nesse trabalho e apontar intervenções para sua qualificação, oferecendo melhores condições aos cuidadores no ato de cuidar.

North-North migration of care workers: “Disposable” au pairs in Australia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the north-north migration of care workers within the industrialised world. While care migration has traditionally been conceptualised as a phenomenon of women moving from the global south to the global north, a growing number of youths are now providing care and domestic services in other industrialised countries as au pairs. Their ambiguous legal status, the rhetoric of being ‘part of the family’ and limited language proficiency compound their vulnerability. We argue that the current Australian government’s policy can be interpreted as a deliberate strategy to increase the supply of care labour and lower the care costs. This policy signifies a shift from commodification of care which involves formal transactions of wage and labour provision to what we call ‘pseudo-familialisation of care’ which pushes care provision back to the family where the actual work is shouldered by ‘pseudo-family members’ who are neither family members nor regular workers. The institutional environment for au pairs from the global north in Australia is more fragile than that for migrant care workers from the global south. The lack of institutional assistance from governments and civil society organisations on both sending and receiving ends as well as their limited co-ethnic community support place them in a vulnerable situation.

Commodification of care and its effects on maternal health in the Noun division (West Region \u2013 Cameroon)

BackgroundSince the mid-1980s, there has been a gradual ethical drift in the provision of maternal care in African health facilities in general, and in Cameroon in particular, despite government efforts. In fact, in Cameroon, an increasing number of caregivers are reportedly not providing compassionate care in maternity services. Consequently, many women, particularly the financially vulnerable, experience numerous difficulties in accessing these health services. In this article, we highlight the unequal access to care in public maternity services in Cameroon in general and the Noun Division in particular.MethodsFor this study, in addition to documentary review, two qualitative data collection techniques were used: direct observation and individual interviews. Following the field work, the observation data were categorized and analyzed to assess their relevance and significance in relation to the topics listed in the observation checklist. Interviews were recorded using a dictaphone; they were subsequently transcribed and the data categorized and coded. After this stage, an analysis grid was constructed for content analysis of the transcripts, to study the frequency of topics addressed during the interviews, as well as divergences and convergences among the respondents.ResultsThe results of this data analysis showed that money has become the driving force in service provision. As such, it is the patient’s economic capital that counts. Considered “clients”, pregnant women without sufficient financial resources wait long hours in corridors; some die in pain under the indifferent gaze of the professionals who are supposed to take care of them. In sharp contrast, the findings revealed that financially privileged patients are able to bribe caregivers to attract their favour and obtain prompt, careful, and effective care.ConclusionThese ethical abuses observed in the Noun public health facilities drive women to use, from the beginning of their pregnancies to the delivery, only healthcare delivered by traditional health attendants.

Uneven development and displaced care in Sri Lanka

Temporary labour migration has become a defining characteristic of Sri Lanka’s economy. The concentration of production and services in and around urban Colombo has produced a lopsided pattern of development that undermines traditional rural livelihoods and necessitates practices of ‘survival migration’. Such migration has been starkly gendered: export production has been explicitly feminised through the creation of garment factories operating in export processing zones, and through the displacement of care in the form of internal and international migrant domestic work. This article examines the displacement and commodification of care through the lens of domestic worker migration. It situates this at the intersection of gender, ethnicity and class, both geographically and historically, and analyses the Interrelationship between internal and international migration. This framework is then used to explore the changing dynamics of, and attitudes towards, domestic work. Migrant domestic work is explicitly bound up in uneven development, articulated through a continuum of gendered and ethnic subordination. There are many differentiated outcomes and experiences of constrained agency within this process.

Care migration: The connectivity between care chains, care circulation and transnational social inequality

One of the features of the global commodification of care is the outsourcing of care work to migrants. The aim of this article is to investigate theoretical responses to the incorporation of migrant care workers in transnational care arrangements. After a description of the scope of migrant care labour and the global care economy, the article summarizes the challenges posed by this empirical phenomenon and asks to what extent care migrations on a global scale have common denominators. The author discusses three topical concepts dealing with the impact of care migration for migrant caregivers and for their significant others who stay behind. The first is the Global Care Chain Concept, with its particular importance for transnational parenting; the second is the Care Circulation Concept. In different ways, both of them shed light on the contradictory characteristics of care migration. I then argue that the third concept, the theory of Transnational Social Inequality, is a necessary addition. By focusing on migrant care workers’ contradictory position, this concept aims at understanding the new features of asymmetrical resource distribution in their global manifestation. Taken together, these concepts are considered helpful tools to analyse the commonalities and differences of a large range of specific cases. Many examples used in this article are concerned with care migration in Europe.

Care Wounds: Precarious Vulnerability and the Potential of Exposure.

What does it mean to offer care when the act of caring is wounding to its giver? For peer specialists-individuals with lived experience as patients in the psychiatric system-this question shapes how they use their own histories to provide support for individuals experiencing psychiatric crisis. Peer support is unique in the way it draws on empathetic resonance and depends on carefully deployed vulnerability; where one connects with others through the recognition of shared experience and mutual hurt. For peers, care works when this guidance, reassurance, and "being with"-all of which draw upon their own stories of traumatic history and variegated suffering-mitigate the present crisis being experienced by another. Drawing on twenty-eight months of fieldwork with a peer-staffed crisis respite center in the eastern United States, I argue that the peer specialist becomes the embodiment of a novel intersection of intimacy and compensation; one that poses vulnerability not as a consequence, casualty, or risk factor in the commodification of care, but as its principle vector of resonance and the assumption on which it is based. For peers, care that works-in that it creates a mutual resonance for the recipient-becomes simultaneously care that wounds its giver.

Care economies—feminist contributions and debates in economic theory

This article focuses on feminist analyses and concepts of care, highlighting their potential for the development of a radical reconceptualization of “the economy” as opposed to traditional economic thought. It illustrates how feminist economic concepts of care correspond to feminist sociological and philosophical concepts. We begin by identifying some feminist economic perspectives and their contribution to the assessment, conceptualization and measurement of care as a form of reproductive labor and their critique of neoclassical economics. We then examine some feminist (economic) analyses of capitalist regimes of accumulation and the commodification of care that go beyond traditional economic thought. We conclude by showing how feminist economic conceptualizations of the kind suggested by Ina Praetorius (2015) could be a starting point for rethinking the economy and policy by putting care at their center.

Commodification of domestic labour, the culture of servitude and the making of the Chilean nation

The objective of this article is to analyse the current dynamics of commodification of care and domestic labour in Chile from a feminist perspective. Drawing on interviews with upper-class employers in Santiago and a review of the new domestic labour law and the state programme Chile Cuida (Chile Cares), this article argues that the commodification of domestic labour is intensified today in a neoliberal context, where colonial and modern modes of labour organisation and subjectivities co-exist. With the continuity of a culture of servitude, paid domestic labour enables the Chilean State to portray itself as modern and gender-friendly and upper-class women can become modern women while maintaining patriarchal and racist arrangements within homes and the nation and without disassembling the traditional racial bond between nation and family in modern Chilean democracy.