Overview

The world of care provision and care work in Europe has undergone huge changes in recent years. This collection draws together the latest research on the factors influencing these changes, from transnational care brokerage to agency business models. It makes the case that the care market has become increasingly commodified and marketised, and explores the different areas of the sector, from care homes to private residences, in which these changes have occurred. The chapters uncover the recent proliferation of agencies brokering international home care services. These services broker home care services and workers to middle or upper-class households, promising affordable and appropriate care for seniors according to individual needs. The brokerage of live-in care work has created transnational care chains and markets that span across Europe. These capitalise on poverty-driven migration and social inequalities between countries. This collection uncovers how these agencies' business models are based on gender and migration regimes, labour and social policies, and regulations within and between countries. Increasingly, agencies have been trying to shape these regulations in their own interest:they have, therefore, become powerful players in many national economies and welfare systems. This volume also explores how agency-brokered senior home care provision has become highly contested, analysing the care struggles and labour disputes around both the quality of care and working conditions. We are shown how care workers' organizations and trade unions have entered the field, raising awareness of the poor working conditions that exist in contrast to the agencies' promise of delivering good care. The four parts in this volume each present a specific focus area in the context of senior home care brokering, including the following: processes of commodification and marketization, the transnationalization of care work, the private household as a workplace and the contestation of the live-in care arrangement. Together, they depict far-reaching changes in care provision and care work and the problems that have emerged in this growing sector.

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9781529680140

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This book is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the political economy of care in the XXI century. It offers a compelling combination of classic and cutting-edge approaches that sheds light on the emergence of brokerage and agency intermediation in Europe and provides an excellent variety of examples from different countries and care settings. -- Sabrina Marchetti When within a capitalist institutional framework accelerating ageing leads to the crisis of social care and to further transnational marketization of household services ′Home Care for Sale′ is an essential reading. The rich empirical and conceptual work points toward an almost encyclopedic outcome, where commodification, marketization, transnationalization, exploitation in care industry is explained in a complex manner within the context of global and local inequalities. This work is performed by a group of amazing critical analysts, who dare to confront some of the key contradictions of our current painful social transformation in European terrains. -- Attila Melegh ‘Home Care for Sale’ provides an encyclopedic account of the commodification and marketization of transnationally-brokered senior home care provision across Europe, including the UK. It pays close attention to the economic and social inequalities, as well as state policies, that underlie this new migration industry, as well as collective efforts to contest and improve conditions of work and care. ‘Home Care for Sale’ documents the geography of care chains within a divided Europe. This is a geography that both complements and disrupts conventional understandings of international care chains between global north and south. Theoretically and empirically rich, this is a must-read collection for those interested in senior home care, social reproduction, migration, border studies, and the workings and repercussions of neo-liberal state policies.    -- Géraldine Pratt

Author Information

Brigitte Aulenbacher is Professor of Sociology at Johannes Kepler University Linz/Austria. She combines studies on science, domestic work, senior care and the digital transformation of work with the analysis of contemporary capitalism. In 2019, she received the Kurt-Rothschild-Award for her works on Karl Polanyi, while also serving as Vice-President of the International Karl Polanyi Society. Co-edited publications include: 2018, Global Sociology of Care and Care Work, Current Sociology Monograph, Vol. 66, No. 4, Monograph 2, SAGE (with H. Lutz, B. Riegraf); 2019, Capitalism in Transformation, Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century, Edward Elgar (with R. Atzmüller, U. Brand, F. Décieux, K. Fischer, B. Sauer); 2020, Karl Polanyi – The Life and Works of an Epochal Thinker, Falter (with M. Marterbauer, A. Novy, K. Polanyi-Levitt, A. Thurnher). As an ISA member, she has served as Vice-Chair of the LOC of the III ISA Forum of Sociology Vienna (2016) and as Editor of Global Dialogue (2018–22). Helma Lutz, a sociologist and Professor of Women and Genderstudies at Goethe University, Germany (2007–21), was the laureate of the Humboldt Award from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden (2012). She has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC (2012/3), and from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (2004/5). Her research is concerned with gender, care, (transnational) migration, ethnicity, nationalism, racism, citizenship and the relationship between post-colonialism/post-socialism. Recent publications include: Gender and Migration: Transnational and Intersectional Prospects (with A. Amelina), Routledge 2019; Routledge Handbook Intersectionality 2023 (edited with K. Davis). As a 32-years-long ISA member, Lutz has served in many ISA functions, currently as president of RC05. Her article, ‘Care migration: The connectivity between care chains, care circulation and transnational social inequality’ (2018), was selected in 2022 for a list of the 10 most important articles in 70 years’ of the publication of Current Sociology. Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology and a member of the Cornelia Goethe Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt; currently Principal Investigator of the international collaborative project ‘Researching the transnational organization of senior care, labor and mobility in Central and Eastern Europe’ (2023–6), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her research focuses on migration and mobility studies, care, gender and social inequalities. She has published widely in leading journals, most recently, in 2022, ‘Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness from a multilevel perspective’, Social Inclusion, 10(1); Co-edited publications include: 2016, Family Life in the Age of Migration and Mobility: Global Perspectives through the Life Course (with M. Kilkey); 2020, German-language volume Postmigrant perspectives: Transnationalism, Gender and Care (with K. Huxel and others). Karin Schwiter is Assistant Professor of Labour Geography at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In 2016, her research group received the Swiss Award for Research on Education for their mixed-methods study on occupational gender segregation. In 2021, she co-edited the Handbook Feminist Geographies (with Budrich publishers, in German). Her research interests include feminist approaches to work and labour with a focus on care, migration and digitalization. Recent publications include: 2020, ‘Geographies of care work: The commodification of care, digital care futures and alternative caring visions’ in Geography Compass (with J. Steiner); 2021, ‘Who shapes migration in open labour markets? Analysing migration infrastructures and brokers of circularly migrating home care workers in Switzerland’ in Mobilities (with H. S. Chau); 2022, ‘Care crises and care fixes under Covid-19: the example of transnational live-in care work’ in Social & Cultural Geography (with S. Schilliger and J. Steiner).

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