Our 7th Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor!

announcement:
Attila melegh is our 7th vienna karl polanyi visiting professor

January 29th, 2024

We are happy to announce Professor Attila Melegh as our seventh Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor for the summer term 2024! 

In the course of his visit to Vienna, he will hold a PhD-seminar, an Internal Workshop at Central European University and an open lecture traditional to our visiting professorship.

Public lecture - MAY 22 - SAVE THE DATE!

Sociologist, economist and historian Attila Melegh is a professor at Corvinus University, Budapest and a senior researcher at the Demographic Research Institute. His research focuses on the global social change in the 20th century, the care crisis and international migration. Professor Melegh is also an expert on the works of Karl Polanyi and was founding director of the Karl Polányi Research Center at Corvinus University. He is the author of over a hundred scientific publications, the renowned book ‘On the East/West Slope, Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe’ published at CEU Press and a new 2023 book ‘Migration Turn and Eastern Europe’ at Palgrave Macmillan.
 
To learn more about our visiting professorship which is a unique university cooperation of the University of Vienna, the Central European University (CEU) and the Vienna University of Business and Economics (WU Wien), also follow the links below.
You can find our previous professors’ Public Lecture recordings on the respective professor’s page or on our YouTube Channel.
Our Public Lectures are open to anyone interested in connecting with research conducted at these universities and our visiting professors works. You are cordially invited to the public lecture on May 22nd at 6:30 pm which we are organiszing together with the Public Learning Centres Vienna (Wiener Volkshochschulen VHS). This important Viennese institution offers adult education on diverse topics and in the 1920s Karl Polanyi has also taught at the Public Learning Centres Vienna (Wiener Volkshochschulen VHS).

phd seminar - application phase open now!

We are looking forward to students joining Prof. Melegh’s research Seminar on Global social change and the migration turn. Students can apply with a 1-page motivational letter and CV by February 21st 2024! Find out more here or by clicking on the button below.

workshop @ CEU

You can read more about his Visiting Professorship, the PhD Seminar and all the related events by clicking on the links below. 
We will inform you about details about the CEU Workshop soon.

CONFERENCE & CALL FOR PAPERS

Imaginaries and Strategies for Good Care and Good Housing in Times of Transformation

December 22nd, 2023

CALL FOR PAPERS

Care and housing are key provisioning systems, intertwined and coconstitutive.
They contribute to sustaining livelihoods and are foundational for human
flourishing. Care, on the one hand, is not restricted to one’s own place of living, but
shapes and is shaped by spatial relations in specific localities or transnational
networks. Care and Care work is provided in a specific built environment with different
configurations of housing, depending on appropriate infrastructures, including
buildings, retail, green and leisure facilities. Housing, on the other hand, is always
entangled with care – not only for others, but also for one’s own habitation, the
residential environment, and local communities. As it offers the material place for
diverse reproductive activities, the care (work) taking place in the respective spaces
is disarrayed when housing becomes unaffordable or precarious. In addition, how
neighbourhoods are developed, and how other key provisioning systems (mobility,
health, food, energy, etc.) are organised, decisively influences the capabilities of
residents to give and receive care and to shape the respective environment by ‘doing
housing’. Last but not least, the provision of care and housing, are both closely
entangled with specific society-nature relations that enable more or less reciprocal,
just, and sustainable practices of doing care and housing.
In the ongoing social-ecological, geopolitical, and digital transformations care and
housing are decisive but contested terrains for shaping new arrangements of
organizing livelihoods. As multiple crises escalate, it becomes increasingly harder
to ensure human flourishing without exacerbating mechanisms of exclusion or
transgressing planetary boundaries. Currently, diverse struggles unfold about
reinforcing or changing existing forms of provisioning, (dis-)empowering actors – be it
as residents, workers, care-receivers and givers, family members or migrants. It is,
thus, urgent to identify pathways to develop and shape ongoing transformations in an
inclusive and sustainable way. While profound change is unavoidable, collective actors
in the 21st century have to explore new imaginaries as well as strategies to actualize
such visions. This includes struggles over private and public spaces, about
transforming private practices as well as forms of collective agency.

Why a conference on imaginaries and strategies for good care and good
housing?
The conference aims at discussing these contested developments in the fields of care
and housing and envisioning future perspectives. Imaginaries are necessary to
identify desirable futures of how societies can re-organise the foundations of our social,
economic, and ecological systems. Aiming at a good life for all within planetary
boundaries, including good care and good housing, is a widespread, but ambitious
objective for ongoing transformations. The community shift and tendencies toward
communitisation, within care regimes, aims at prefigurative forms of such
provisioning. Community-oriented arrangements can be based on reciprocity and
redistribution, that facilitate human flourishing, even under adverse framework
conditions of financialization and austerity. However, these community initiatives are
strongly interrelated with the welfare state and different modes of care and housing
provision, with professional, and lay work etc. They facilitate desirable practices of
doing care and housing in niches of the given provisioning of social services and beyond
and are more or less able to change “the rules of the game”. Multiple strategies are
necessary to identify the potential for actors to change these framework conditions,
be it institutions (e.g., social infrastructures, legal and fiscal systems) or structures
(e.g., gender relations) to transform contemporary financialised capitalism. Currently,
economic and social policies are still subordinating the reproductive sphere to the
sphere of production, commodification and finance, and short-term consumer wishes
to long-term needs of sustaining the social and ecological background conditions of
our civilisation. Actualizing visions of a care-ful future will, therefore, only be possible
if the always-contested relations between the productive and the reproductive sphere
are re-organised – at the expense of the former. Such re-organisations will be conflictprone,
often negotiated in uneven relations and on multiple levels simultaneously –
from the home and the neighbourhood to the region, the nation, and the EU.
Against this background, the conference “Imaginaries and Strategies to Transform
Care and Housing in Times of Transformations” seeks to problematise these
transformations and their diverse manifestations to envision imaginaries and
strategies that foster socially just and ecologically sustainable ways of living together.
Of particular interest is research that relates transformations in the provisioning of
care and housing to other provisioning systems, for example mobility or health
services, as well as to society-nature relations that facilitate remaining within planetary
boundaries.


The conference is organized in three tracks:

1.) transformative imaginaries for good
care and good housing;

2.) transformative strategies for a good life within planetary
boundaries;

3.) a transdisciplinary track on ‘Wirtschaft neu denken [Re-thinking the
economy]’ (in German).

Academic contributions are invited to all tracks, practitioners to the third track.


Track A: Transformative imaginaries for good care and good housing:
o Imaginaries for Caring Futures in Careless Times: What does good
care and good housing mean in socioeconomic systems of the 21st
century? How can a socioeconomic system beyond growth promote wellbeing?
How can we ensure that care and care work become visible and
socially recognised? How can we imagine caring/care-ful neighbourhoods
or even societies in the future?
o Hybrid Economic Models: How can we imagine alternative mixed
economies bridging the gap between centralised planning and freemarket
coordination? How can we better integrate hybrid forms of
provisioning (market, reciprocity, redistribution, household)? How can
socioeconomic systems be democratised to empower citizens and
workers to shape the framework conditions for living and working, caring
and dwelling in a just and sustainable way?
o Balancing Productive and Reproductive Capacities: How can we
reorganise the economy to better secure its reproductive foundations?
How can this contribute to creating a more equitable society?


Track B: Transformative strategies for good care and good housing:
How can desirable alternatives become feasible futures?
o Strategies for Caring Futures in Careless Times: How can public
policies prioritise foundational goods, services, and infrastructures?
Which structures facilitate and which structures hinder the provision of
good care and good housing while maintaining decent working
conditions? Which actors promote, and which actors hinder its
provisioning?
o Multi-level Transformations: How can diverse actors at multiple levels
contribute to just and sustainable transformations? What is the potential
of bottom-linked niche alternatives (e.g., caring communities, cohousing)
and of top-linked changes of framework conditions (e.g.,
comprehensive decentralised care services, rent regulation)? How can
we avoid becoming trapped in societal niches and what forms of multiscalar
economic reorganisation are necessary?
o Finding Common Ground: How can we build broad societal alliances
and reconcile social and ecological politics? How can we bolster
participation in decision-making processes? What are the limitations of
consensus-based policy proposals? Which innovative policies exist? How
can reproductive activities be fostered and reproductive workers
empowered?


• Track C: ‘Wirtschaft Neu Denken [Re-thinking the Economy]’:
transdisciplinary dialogue on imaginaries and strategies to embed the market
into society-nature relations that strengthen reproductive systems and
foundational goods, services, and infrastructures to enable a good life for all
within planetary boundaries.
o Transversal theory-practice dialogue during all decentral sessions
o Diversity of practitioners and activists
o Workshop design

Abstract submission:

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit an abstract (250-300 words and full affiliation of the
author/s) by February 17th 2024 and will inform you about the acceptance of your paper by by 1st March 2024. Please send your submissions to contestedcareandhousing@wu.ac.at. 

Conference Tracks A and B will be in English,

Track C will be in German. 

Travel and accommodation costs will not be covered by
the organisers; there are no conference fees.

“Imaginaries and Strategies for Good Care and Good Housing in Times of Transformation”

The conference aims at discussing these contested developments in the fields of care and housing and envisioning future perspectives. Imaginaries are necessary to
identify desirable futures of how societies can re-organise the foundations of our social, economic, and ecological systems. Aiming at a good life for all within planetary
boundaries, including good care and good housing, is a widespread, but ambitious
objective for ongoing transformations. 

17th FEBRUARY, 2024

Submission Deadline

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit an abstract (250-300 words and full affiliation of the
author/s) by February 17th 2024 and will inform you about the acceptance of your paper by by 1st March 2024. Please send your submissions to contestedcareandhousing@wu.ac.at. 
Conference Tracks A and B will be in English, Track C will be in German. 

Organised by:

Johannes Kepler University Linz, 
WU Vienna,
Austrian Academy of Sciences – ÖAW,
University of Graz,
Competence Centre for Infrastructure Economics, Public Servies and Social Provisioning,
Sorgenetz

Organizers and chairs:
Brigitte Aulenbacher
Andreas Novy
Valentin Fröhlich
Benjamin Baumgartner
Florian Pimminger
Hans Volmary
Administration:
Julia Fankhauser

 

Register for Lane Kenworthy’s Workshop @CEU

Guest professor LANE Kenworthy's WORKSHOP @CEU:
'Is Inequality harmful?'

November 30th, 2023

Join the workshop!

The Department of Political Science at Central European University & the Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professorship Team invites you to a Workshop with Lane Kenworthy, Yankelovich Endowed Chair Professor (UC San Diego) and Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor.

Is Income Inequality Harmful?

13:30-18:30 CET / January 12, 2024  

COMMENTATORS / 

  • Despina Alexiadou, University of Strathclyde
  • Jürgen Essletzbichler, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien
  • Judith Derndorfer, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien
  • Alice Kügler, Central European University
  • Björn Bremer, Central European University

MODERATORS / 

  • Carsten Schneider, Central European University
  • Anıl Duman, Central European University

Please register here by January 10.

In the meantime you can find out more about the CEU Workshop, Lane Kenworthy, his Public Lecture and our Visiting Professorship below.

Public Lecture by 6th Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor Lane Kenworthy!

PUBLIC LECTURE BY LANE KENWORTHY
"The good city in the good society"

November 21st, 2023

Public lecture by Lane kenworthy"

On January 11th, 2024 the Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professorship will be awarded for the sixth time. This semester’s Visiting Professor Lane Kenworthy will hold his Public Lecture in the Dachsaal at the Vienna Urania. 

Kenyote: The Good City in the Good Society

“Many people like living in or close to cities, and in nearly all parts of the world more are heading there. This is a good thing, because density has significant benefits, including economic productivity, economies of scale in the provision of public goods and services, tolerance, and environmental sustainability.

There are a number of challenges we — citizens, researchers, policymakers — will need to meet: in capability development, provision and maintenance of infrastructure, safety, economic security and prosperity, housing, transportation, health, political decisionmaking, and financing.

The good news is that we know a lot about how to meet these challenges. There are feasible, affordable policies and institutions that can allow and encourage more people to live in or near cities and thereby facilitate better lives for themselves and for others. This isn’t just theoretical: these policies and institutions are already in use in actually-existing cities, and there is substantial evidence that they work.”

We are looking forward to seeing many of you there and kindly ask you to register! 

In the meantime you can find out more about Prof. Kenworthy, our Visiting Professorship and view our other upcoming activities!

Invitation to Register

Invitation to register for the conference in linz dec 4th-6th

November 14th, 2023

INVITATION TO Register to participate by Nov 30th

Care and housing are foundational for human well-being. Both deal with organising and
sustaining livelihoods: while care as a human activity reacts to the ever-given contingency
of life, housing arranges a place for undertaking everyday need-satisfying activities. In both
fields, crises have exacerbated over the last decades, manifesting in care gaps, labour
and care migration, and precarious working conditions of care workers, respectively in
overburdening costs due to the transformation of homes into assets, leading to
gentrification and segregation. Despite being seldomly investigated together, care and
housing as well as their related crises are co-constitutive.
From the 1990s onwards, two simultaneous tendencies can be observed in European care
regimes and housing systems. On the one hand, neoliberal reforms have aimed at
privatisation, commodification, marketisation, and financialisaton. This has rearranged
welfare states, promoting variegated forms of capitalism. Allegedly singular events like the
global financial crisis, subsequent austerity measures, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the
current cost of living crisis have furthermore deepened structural problems of access and
affordability. This has led to increasing socioeconomic and spatial polarisations as well as
social inequalities in the relations of gender, race, and class. On the other hand, these
developments have transformed the provision of care and housing into a contested terrain
leading to labour disputes and struggles, such as care protests, or initiatives for
expropriating institutional investors. The wide range of community-based or infrastructural
projects has to be seen against the backdrop of the increasing search for alternative care
and housing provision. On top of that, rapid technological developments and climate
change further accelerate the reorganisation of care and housing arrangements and
practices built up by all parties involved in both contested fields.

Given these multiple transformations, the conference “Transformative Change in the Contested Fields of Care and Housing in Europe” seeks to analyse the contemporary developments in care regimes and housing systems and respective configurations of care
and housing. 

If you wish to participate, you can do so under the Link below by November 30th.
The Conference will take place in Linz from December 4th to December 6th, 2023.

We welcome 6th Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor Lane Kenworthy

lane kenworthy is our 6th visiting professor

October 1st, 2023

we warmly welcome lane kenworthy!

It is our pleasure to introduce to you our 6th Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor Lane Kenworthy. 

He is Professor of Sociology & Political Science and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California-San Diego. As a sociologist and political scientist, he is examining the economic effects of income and wealth distribution and works on the welfare-state, transformation towards increased social and economic security and equal opportunity. We are very much looking forward to his teaching in the Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professorship Research Seminar and the Public Lecture he will hold on January 11th in Vienna.

We will soon inform you about his stay in Vienna, his Public Lecture in January and the CEU Workshop!

In the meantime you can find out more about Professor Lane kenworthy and our previosu visiting Professors by clicking the links below and watch their public lectures on our YouTube Channel!

Domestic work and home care brokerage in Sri Lanka and Austria

Debate on The Contested Provisioning of Care and Housing

Domestic work and home care brokerage in Sri Lanka and Austria: on ‘fictitious commodities’, dis/embedded markets, ‘institutional logics’ and social inequalities

30th of August, 2023

Brigitte Aulenbacher and Wasana Handapangoda

Since the 1990s, in the era of neoliberal globalization, a new migration industry has taken shape: the brokerage of domestic services by recruiting mostly female workers from the poorer parts of the world or of the population and placing them as domestic or care workers in middle- and upper-class households around the globe. The article draws on two projects and compares the transnational brokerage of domestic work in Sri Lanka and home care in Austria[1]. It aims at analysing this migration industry through Polanyian, neo-institutionalist and intersectional lenses.

 

Labour and care brokerage as paradigmatic case of the ‘commodity fiction’ and its limits

 

In the Sri Lankan and Austrian case, brokerage agencies are intermediators, and the core element of their activity is, in a Polanyian sense, the transformation of labour and care into ‘fictitious commodities’ which are sold like ‘genuine commodities’ but neither have been ‘produced for sale’ nor can ‘be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized’ (Polanyi 2001, p.75; see Aulenbacher and Leiblfinger 2019). In both cases, these inherent limits of the ‘commodity fiction’ (Polanyi 2001, p. 75) become visible when it comes to the so called ‘matching’ of the households (employers or care recipients and relatives) and the domestic and care workers in the live-in work arrangement: on the one hand, brokerage agencies as marketeers consider domestic and care workers as a more or less readily workforce in competitive labour markets and therefore offer to exchange them if the arrangement does not work as expected by the households (Aulenbacher et al. 2020; Handapangoda 2023); on the other hand and far away from the idea of workforce ‘detached from the rest of life’ (Polanyi 2001, p.75), households as well as brokerage agencies often expect that domestic and care workers subordinate their whole life to the demands and needs of employers or care recipients during the period they are hired for (Handapangoda 2023; Lutz and Benazha 2024), transforming live-in work as a specific case of ‘unfree labour’ (Parreñas 2021).

Although the ideology of the ‘free market’ is most significant in the field of domestic work and home care brokerage, the consumer as well as the labour market can be considered as dis/embedded markets in a Polanyian sense: while pretended to be ‘self-regulating’ (Polanyi 2001, 157) by supply and demand, they are obviously embedded in the normative and   institutional order of the society. This means they are politically shaped and regulated by the state (laws, politics, and policies) and influenced by further “institutional logics” (Thornton et al, 2012, pp. 3ff., 65ff.) – besides those of the market and state also by religious, familial, professional, communitarian etc., orientations which are inherent to the respective care, employment, welfare, and migration regimes of the countries involved. This normative and institutional order also shapes and is shaped by social inequalities, e.g., in terms of the division and recognition of labour, care etc., in the relations of gender, race/ethnicity and class. In this normative and institutional order hybrid and stratified live-in work and care arrangements take shape (Dammayr 2019, p. 51ff.; Aulenbacher et al. 2018), which are formalized and informally organized. In this setting, the commodification of labour and care is interwoven with imageries of the ‘ideal’ migrant and female worker defined along criteria, such as education, nationality, colour of skin, religion, emotions etc., who is expected to fulfill the professional as well as familial demands of the household and to provide the services promised by the brokerage agencies. Thereby the legal status of labour and care brokerage legitimizes the live-in arrangement despite the extremely exploitative working conditions workers are often subject to (Aulenbacher and Prieler 2024; Handapangoda 2023; Parreñas 2021; Prieler 2021; Steiner et al. 2020). 

 

The Sri Lankan kafala and the Austrian self-employment model of brokerage

In Polanyi’s perspective (2001), brokerage typifies how state and non-state actors interact and at times compete to limit exposure to the market (Goodwin 2022). Dealing with the ‘fictitious commodity’ labour, in Sri Lanka brokers act as ‘bureaucratic interpreters’ (Wee et al. 2020, p. 994). They translate policy texts into tacit and explicit advice as well as private contracts (Wee et al. 2020) and aim at professionalizing domestic services by certifications, education etc. Kafala, a private sponsorship system by the employer, characterizes unarguably the most significant rule of law governing the recruitment of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) from Sri Lanka to the Middle East (e.g., Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia). It defines the employer – employee  relationship, giving employers absolute control over MDWs’ work and residency status in the Middle East. This means that their entry, stay/work, and exit from the country of destination are subject to employer’s express consent. Importantly, kafala as a sponsorship scheme is connected to an excessive brokerage borne by the employer. This is particularly the case of Sri Lanka where employers have to pay around $5,500–6,500 for hiring one domestic worker. Brokerage therefore creates a form of debt slavery, whereas it is recovered by the employer through exploitation, overwork and non-payment or withholding of salary to MDWs. The whole commerce behind this employer – employee relationship coalesces around the exploitation of labour power through market capitalism. Migration brokers are thus powerful players in the dis/embedded consumer and labour markets. They exercise a greater degree of latitude in determining the relation of market and non-market institutions, thus wavering between self-regulation of the market at one end and absence of the market at the other, combining the logics of the state, market and profession with a system of personal debt, thereby promoting extremely exploitative working conditions in the frame of ‘unfree labour’ (Parreñas 2021).   

 Austria’s strongly neoliberal self-employment model of senior home care brokerage is considered to be forerunner of legal and affordable care provision (Steiner et al. 2020) embedded in a care regime in which the logics of the welfare state, family, profession and market converge (Shire 2015): cash-for-care policies – uncommitted care allowances and additional federal allowances to support the live-in care arrangement –, legalization of live-in work and its professional acceptance as personal care by the Home Care Act as well as the separation between brokerage of personal care and personal care as free trades, have created the conditions for a flourishing consumer market in which brokerage agencies offer their services by recruiting self-employed care workers, mostly women from Eastern Europe  (Aulenbacher et al. 2020; Leiblfinger and Prieler 2018; Leiber and Österle 2022). Brokerage agencies deal with the ‘fictitious commodities’ of care and labour by offering householding, companion, everyday life and medical assistance as services, intermediating the ‘ideal’ care worker, drafting the contracts for all parties involved, thereby indirectly influencing many caring and working conditions of the live-in arrangement, such as fees, honorarium, transport, demands, etc. Furthermore, brokerage agencies act as stakeholders and lobbyists to influence the (self-)regulation and business conditions of this migration industry by themselves or by addressing the state (to increase the federal allowances, to indirectly regulate the market by a national quality seal, etc.) (Aulenbacher et al. 2020; Leiber and Österle 2022). Thereby brokerage agencies as the most powerful players of all the parties involved, formalize more and more their own business conditions striving to improve the domestic services while the negotiation of the live-in arrangement in private households remains in a zone of informality due to the reason that self-employment is not covered and protected by the labour law and rights (Aulenbacher and Prieler 2024).

 

Comparison and conclusion

 

In the Sri Lankan and the Austrian case of live-in work and care, blurring boundaries between work and leisure time, sexual harassment, extended demands and duties, ethnic or racist stereotypes and division of labour, and lack of respect for workers are part of the everyday practice (Aulenbacher and Leiblfinger 2019; Prieler 2021; Handapangoda 2024). Brokers are aware of the exploitability and vulnerability of poor female migrant workers and of the social inequality – workers pushed to migrate, employers or care recipients able to pay for the services – as constitutive element of their business. They often consider themselves as mediators between all parties involved. However, they provide their services primarily in favour of the employers or the care recipients and their relatives because most of the payment comes from them while many decisions concerning everyday life and work in the live-in arrangement are made in the informality of the private households and this means: between unequal parties and beyond the given contracts.

The Sri Lankan kafala and the Austrian self-employment-model of brokerage evidence how different the commodification of labour and care are embedded in socio-spatial and historical settings in the Global North and South and the normative and institutional order of the countries involved. Nevertheless, such extremely different models of the ‘commodification’, ‘marketization’ and ‘corporatization’ (Farris and Marchetti 2017) of labour and care in the global brokerage industry – kafala as a system of personal debt and self-employment as a system of neoliberal self-responsibility – have in common that labour rights fail. On highly competitive dis/embedded consumer and labour markets, the formalization, professionalization and regulation of domestic services by brokers can be combined with extremely poor working and living conditions of the domestic and care workers. However, struggles and protests of domestic and care workers – as a Polanyian ‘countermovement’ (Polanyi 2001, see Aulenbacher et al. 2020) – around the globe (Blofield & Jokela 2018; Marchetti 2022; Schilliger 2024) indicate the limits of this new ‘commodity fiction’ (Polanyi 2001) in domestic service provision.

[1]Austrian country study of the D-A-CH-project „Decent Care Work? Transnational Home Care Arrangements“ funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (project I 3145 G 29) and conducted by Brigitte Aulenbacher (applicant/chair), Michael Leiblfinger, Veronika Prieler, Johannes Kepler University Linz/Austria; duration 06/2017-11/2021 (http://decent-care-work.net/) and Lise-Meitner-Grant „‘Ideal’ Migrant Subjects: Domestic Service in Globalization“ (project M 2724-G) funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and conducted by Wasana Handapangoda (applicant/chair) and Brigitte Aulenbacher (co-applicant/mentor), Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, duration 11/2019-04/2023.

 

References

Aulenbacher, Brigitte and Michael Leiblfinger. 2019. ‘The “Fictitious Commodity” Care and the Reciprocity of Caring: A Polanyian and neo-institutionalist perspective on the brokering of 24-hour-care’”, in Capitalism in Transformation, Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century, ed. Roland. Atzmüller, Brigitte Aulenbacher, Ulrich Brand, Fabienne Décieux, Karin Fischer and Birgit Sauer, (eds.), Capitalism in Transformation, Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar:147–171.

Aulenbacher, Brigitte, Fabienne Décieux and Birgit Riegraf. 2018. “The economic shift and beyond: Care as a contested terrain in contemporary capitalism”. Current Sociology 66(4): 517-530. 

Aulenbacher, Brigitte, Michael Leiblfinger and Veronika Prieler. 2020. “The promise of decent care and the problem of poor working conditions: Double movements around live-in care in AustriaJournal of the Division of Sociology, Social Policy, Social Work 2(5):1-21. 

Aulenbacher, Brigitte and Veronika Prieler. 2024. “The ‘good agency’? On the interplay of formalization and informality in the contested marketization of live-in care in Austria”. In: Brigitte Aulenbacher, Helma Lutz, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck and Karin Schwiter (eds.), Home Care for Sale, The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington: SAGE (forthcoming).  

Blofield, Merike, and Jokela, Merita. 2018. “Paid Domestic Work and the Struggles of Care Workers in Latin America”. Current Sociology Monograph 66(2): 531-546.

Dammayr, Maria. 2019. Legitime Leistungspolitiken? Leistung, Gerechtigkeit und Kritik in der Altenpflege. Weinheim und Basel: Beltz Juventa. 

Farris, Sara R., and Sabrina Marchetti. 2017. “From the Commodification to the Corporatization of Care: European Perspectives and Debates.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 24(2): 109–131. 

Goodwin, Geoff. 2022. “Double Movements and Disembedded Economies: A Response to Richard Sandbrook”, Development and Change 53(3): 676:702.

Handapangoda, Wasana. 2023. “A Regime Analysis: Evidence from Sri Lankan Migrant Domestic Workers’ Voyage to Saudi Arabia”. Global Labour Journal 14(2):148-164. 

Handapangoda, Wasana. 2024. “Reproducing ‘self’ and ‘other’ in the micropolitics of paid domestic labour: Sri Lankan migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia”. In: Annelisa Carstensen, Peter Birke, Lisa Riedner and Nikolai Huke (eds.), Anthology of Migration and Work. Beltz Juventa (forthcoming). 

Leiblfinger, Michael and Veronika Prieler. 2018. “Elf Jahre 24-Stunden-Betreuung in Österreich: Eine Policy- und Regime-Analyse“ (Linzer Beiträge zu Wirtschaft – Ethik – Gesellschaft 9). Linz: Katholische Privat-Universität Linz.

Leiber, Simone and August Österle. 2022. “Formalisierung des Informellen. Die Regulierung der „24-Stunden-Betreuung“ in Österreich und Deutschland”’, WSI-Mitteilungen, 75(5): 380–385.

Lutz, Helma and Aranka Vanessa Benazha. 2024. “At home with the employer? — Contradictory notions of the care client’s home as a workplace and living space”. In: Brigitte Aulenbacher, Helma Lutz, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck and Karin Schwiter (eds.), Home Care for Sale, The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington: SAGE (forthcoming).

Marchetti, Sabrina. 2022. Migration and Domestic Work. Cham: Springer. 

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2021. Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States. California: Stanford University Press.

Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. 

Prieler, Veronika. 2021. “‘The Good Live-in Care Worker’: Subject Formation and Ethnicisation in Austrian Live-in Care”. Sociológia, 53(6): 483-501.

Schilliger, Sarah.2024. “Breaking out of the ‘prisoner of love’ dilemma: infrastructures of solidarity for live-in care workers in Switzerland”. In: Brigitte Aulenbacher, Helma Lutz, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck and Karin Schwiter (eds.), Home Care for Sale, The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington: SAGE (forthcoming).  

Shire, Karen. 2015. Family supports and insecure work: The politics of household service employment in Conservative Welfare Regimes, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 22 (2): 193–219.

Steiner, Jennifer, Veronika Prieler, Michael Leiblfinger and Aranka Vanessa Benazha. 2020. „Truly legal!? Legal framing and legality narratives in live-in care in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. In: Noémi Katona and Attila Melegh (eds.), Towards a scarcity of care? Tensions and contradictions in transnational elderly care systems in central and eastern Europe. Budapest: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung: 69–91.

Thornton, Patricia H., William Ocasio and Michael Lounsbury. 2012. The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wee, Kellynn, Charmian Goh and Brenda A. A. Yeoh. 2020. Translating People and Policy: The Role of Maid Agents in Brokering between Employers and Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore’s Migration Industry. International Migration Review 54(4):992-1015.

Brigitte Aulenbacher

Prof. Dr. Brigitte Aulenbacher is Head of the Department for the Theory of Society, Institute of Sociology, at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and Vice-President of the International Karl Polanyi Sociey.

Wasana Handapangoda

Dr. Wasana Handapangoda is currently a Visiting Scholar (Lise Meitner-Grant/FWF) at the Department for the Theory of Society, Institute of Sociology, at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (2019-2023)

Read the other essays on the Contested Provisioning of Care and Housing here: 

 

This year’s Webinar Series on “Decent Care”

THIS YEAR’S WEBINAR SERIES ON “DECENT CARE”

Shaping provisioning systems for social-ecological transformation: DECENT CARE FOR ALL WITHIN PLANETARY BOUNDARIES

Fall 2023 Webinar Series

15th August, 2023

Shaping Provisioning Systems for Social-Ecological Transformation: DECENT CARE FOR ALL Webinar Series

The Fall 2023 Webinar Series puts the inclusive, resilient and sustainable provisioning of care for all within planetary boundaries into focus. It takes stock of pioneering work and recent approaches at the intersection of feminist and ecological research and foregrounds the relevance of care in addressing the ecological crisis. Taking lessons from the pandemic, the continued care crisis, and the aggravating climate crisis, the basic provision of care has to be given priority over other economic activities, for example economic activities in the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) and, more generally, over ecologically detrimental sectors. An increasing awareness of human interdependence with the environment raises new questions about how care can be defined, who is included in a caring society, and how good care for all within planetary boundaries can actualise. 

 

Over the course of four webinars we will debate how to shape provisioning systems for a social-ecological transformation of the care sector with experts of the respective fields.  

Dates
September 13th 2023, 6 pm (CET)

Towards a caring economy: Netzwerk Vorsorgendes Wirtschaften meets Foundational Economy

October 11th 2023, 6 pm (CET)
Transition towards a Caring Society

November 8th 2023, 6 pm (CET)
Decent care for all within Planetary Limits

November 22nd 2023, 6 pm (CET)
Transformative Change and changing Societies – Deindustrialization, Digitization, Planetary Boundaries and Care

Facilitators: Corinna Dengler, Fabienne Décieux, Julia Fankhauser, Andreas Novy.

Organized by:

Institute for Multilevel-Governance and Development (WU Vienna);
Institute for Ecological Economics (WU Vienna);
International Karl Polanyi Society
Kompetenzzentrum Alltagsökonomie

In cooperation with Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Brussels 

coming soon

Meeting-ID: 627 8549 7388
Zoom Code: 202203

Meeting-ID: 683 1103 4190
Zoom Code: 154630

Meeting-ID: 693 9613 3775
Zoom Code: 834729

Happy 100th Birthday Kari Polanyi-Levitt!

KARI POLAYNYI-LEVITT's 100th BIRTHDAY

June 14th, 2023

what a reason to celebrate!

You will find all the material from today’s celebatory conference hosted by our Board Member Margie Mendell, longtime collaborator and friend of Kari Polanyi-Levitt at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia university in Montéal here.

In the meantime you can find out more about Kari and her inspiring family all over our website and especially in our new podcast series. Enjoy!

Polanyi Family Podcasts

Polanyi family podcasts

In celebration of Kari Polanyi-Levitt’s 100th birthday on June 14, 2023 the International Karl Polanyi Society is releasing a podcast series on multiple members of the Polanyi family. Find out more about the lives and work of Karl Polanyi, Ilona Duczyńska Polanyi, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, Michael Polanyi, Laura Polanyi Stricker and Eva Zeisel – from the personal to the political, the academic to the activist.

  • How did Karl Polanyi’s political views change over the years?
  • How did the upheavals of the 20th century shape lona Duczyńska Polanyi’s political activism?
  • What did Kari Polanyi-Levitt research in the Carribean?
  • How did Michael Polanyi’s contribute to the Philosophy of Science?
  • What was it like for Eva Zeisel to become a ceramicist in 1920s Hungary?
Find the answers to these questions and much more in the podcasts!