All posts by IKPS

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!
 

CONFERENCE & CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

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. 

Of particular interest is research which reflects on the connections of the two
fields. We aim at a broad interdisciplinary dialogue of social sciences to grasp different
perspectives of these multidimensional changes. Thus, we welcome scholars from
disciplines like sociology, socioeconomics, political economy, political science, geography,
philosophy, history, and interdisciplinary strands like gender and intersectionality studies
to contribute to the common investigation and discussion of the contested and entangled
fields of care and housing in Europe. We welcome both, theoretical approaches, and
empirical research, to analyse and reflect on the contemporary transformations, its causes,
and effects as well as commonalities and differences between fields and countries,
between city and countryside.

The conference aims at addressing the following questions with the explicit intention of
using multiple theoretical perspectives and to grasp the broad diversity of European
countries, regions, and cities:

• What are the driving forces of transformative change in the fields of care and housing?
Which social, economic, political, cultural, and technological dynamics and which
norms and values, demands and claims shape modes of care and housing provision?
• How do markets, the state, the family and the community reorganise care and
housing? What are other key actors in different institutional contexts at multiple levels
(from local to global)?
• Which disputes take place in “doing care” and “doing housing”? How do these relate
to multi-scalar struggles over working conditions, wages, and affordability as well as
the design of liveable neighbourhoods?
• What are relevant economic and political orders, welfare regimes, and social policies
and how do they structure different forms of care and housing provision?
• How do new modes, forms, and arrangements of care and housing provision promote
a different understanding of life and work? How are they interrelated with the
reorganisation of paid, unpaid and volunteer, professional and lay work and new forms
of work organisation?
• How are modes of care and housing provision and the transformative change in the
configuration of care and housing affected by the development and implementation of
digital technologies? How does technological change influence the meaning and
organisation of care and housing?
• How are modes of care and housing provision and the transformative change in the
configuration of care and housing affected by the climate crisis? How does it contribute
to changes in the governance of communities, neighbourhoods, and the living
environment to reconfigure care and housing provision?
• How do social, economic, gendered, and ethnic inequalities and socio-spatial
polarisations shape the organisation of care and housing? How do they affect
transformative change, social and ecological demands, and digitalisation of care and
housing arrangements?
• What are the commonalities and differences in the provision of care and housing?
How can theoretical and methodological approaches contribute to a better
understanding of care and housing in Europe? What are the potentials and limitations
of approaches that integrate both fields?

Abstract submission:

We invite researchers to submit an abstract (250-300 words and full affiliation of the
author/s) by 31st July 2023 and will inform you about the acceptance of your paper by 31st
August 2023. Please send your submissions to contestedcareandhousing@jku.at. The
conference language is English. Travel and accommodation costs will not be covered by
the organisers; there are no conference fees.

“Transformative Change in the Contested Fields of Care and Housing in Europe “

We invite you to participate in the conference, which aims at addressing diverse questions with the explicit intention of using multiple theoretical perspectives and to grasp the broad diversity of European
countries, regions, and cities.

31st July, 2023

Submission Deadline

We invite researchers to submit an abstract (250-300 words and full affiliation of the
author/s) by 31st July 2023 and will inform you about the acceptance of your paper by 31st
August 2023. Please send your submissions to contestedcareandhousing@jku.at. The
conference language is English. 

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:
Tobias Eder

 

Contested Marketisation and Communitisation of Care

Contested Marketisation and Communitisation of Care: Migrant live-in care and Caring Communities in Austria

15th of May, 2023

Florian Pimminger

As in many other European countries, the Austrian society is faced with challenges to organise care services for the growing share of senior people. Two tendencies can be identified to address occurring care gaps in the face of demographic transition: on the one hand, market-mediated provision of care and, on the other hand, the potential for care within communities.

In this article, we shed light on the ongoing marketisation of care work with respect to agency-mediated live-in care, conducted mostly by women from Eastern European countries, living and working as caregivers in Austrian households. Moreover, we focus on multi-faceted forms of communitisation in terms of caring communities, local and neighbourhood initiatives and alternative living arrangements for seniors. These developments, among others, can be analysed as controversial and ambivalent societal reactions to the ongoing “crisis of care” (Maier 2022).

Persistency and Fragility: Care Gaps within the Welfare State

Within the Austrian society, the ideal of living at home in old age is culturally and institutionally firmly anchored (cf. Bauer et al. 2014; Prieler 2021). At the same time, Austria’s welfare state shows different scopes of responsibility: “while the long-term care allowance [“Pflegegeld”] is a national responsibility, services are the responsibility of the provinces” (Österle 2021: 7). This means a primarily addressing of families, with state investments directed towards this. Idealising family care is supported by a variety of political measures. Despite public expansions of inpatient, day-care and mobile services, senior care provision “has traditionally been embedded in both family structures and state institutions securing and enabling those structures” (Weicht 2019: 264).

Despite equalisations, inequalities are shaping the feminised working environment of the care sector. Regarding the shift from a male-breadwinner to a so-called adult worker model, Austria is described as a “gendered model of explicit familialism, which reiterates the male breadwinner and female caregiver ideology” (Mairhuber/Sardadvar 2018: 66; Leitner 2014). Not only in the area of family-based provision, but also in the service sector administered by provincial authorities and the third sector (non-profit welfare agencies), working pressure is increasing and gaps are emerging.

Live-in-Care and Caring Communities as Reactions to Care Crisis

Especially since the legalisation of the self-employment model in 2007, agency-mediated live-in care has become an important pillar of care provisioning for seniors (Aulenbacher et al 2021; Österle 2021). On a European market for care work, agencies sell care (as a “fictitious commodity” in a Polanyian sense – cf. Aulenbacher et al. 2020) to more affluent societies, responding to growing demands.

Live-in care is organised as a market-oriented self-employment model, in which care in private homes of the cared-for is operated as a business, and caregivers as well as agencies are represented by the Chamber of Commerce. What is known in everyday language as “24-hour care” points discursively to the permanent availability of the caregivers. Mediated by currently around 1000 agencies of different size, these for- and non-profit organisations have become powerful actors, as they have a decisive influence on the conditions under which it is provided (Aulenbacher et al. 2021). This has resulted in a dynamically developing care market – transnationally and within the welfare state.

Live-in care workers are often referred to as virtual or imagined family members. Accordingly, relatives and family caregivers often associate care tasks with qualities that are typically assigned to families, like intimacy, love, or housekeeping (Weicht 2019). Thus, migrant caregivers, who live in the shared household, are often seen as substitute for family care. This relates to gender norms and family logics that are ingrained in the Austrian care regime (Aulenbacher et al. 2018). The arrangement is further consolidated through quality seals and additional financial subsidies (Aulenbacher et al. 2021; Österle 2021). Mostly large – for-profit and non-profit – agencies hold a special quality seal, trying to stand out against other agencies. In this way, agencies are seeking to make live-in care more competitive and sustainable (Aulenbacher et al. 2020).

However, movements have become apparent. Providers at regional levels and welfare agencies are trying find new ways to improve the arrangement through higher degrees of transparency, slightly enhanced working conditions, more integrated cooperation with mobile and medical services. Although the sector is growing steadily, the condition of the arrangement remains controversial. Critics focus on precarious working and living conditions, and coalitions of caregivers are formed (Aulenbacher et al. 2022; Maier 2022). These initiatives and NGOs are revealing problematic conditions of working in a foreign household and the challenges of pendulum migration.

In addition to tendencies towards marketisation, various community initiatives are gaining relevance, aiming at understanding care for senior citizens as a task to be dealt with collaboratively and at establishing more reciprocity-oriented care networks (Dressel et al. 2022; Wegleitner &Schuchter 2018; Wegleitner & Schuchter 2021).

What unites these diverse forms of communitisation, in all their heterogeneity, is to strengthen new cultures of care, cooperation and community-building. They often strive to bring together residents of a municipality or region with local family caregivers in order to raise awareness about issues of vulnerability, dying, death and loss, and how care work is currently allocated. As one project report puts it, it is a matter of “perceiving, organising and maintaining a multifaceted fabric of (caring) relationships” (Wegleitner & Schuchter 2021: 10).

Caring community projects are set up and supported by government institutions, in cooperation with local or confessional services and civil society actors. Currently, projects are promoted using the motto “Towards Good Neighbourhoods” or “Caring Communities for Future”, focusing on interaction between civil society initiatives and professionals. These (pilot) projects aim to improve the quality of life and health of citizens and reduce the burden on the health and care system.  

Community-based forms of care are still a niche phenomenon in Austria, which is gaining in importance. Financial incentives, support programs, the variety of projects as well as political and scientific debates on community-based forms of care indicate their increasing relevance. As societal reactions to insufficient public provision and to “fragmentation, bureaucratisation and commodification of care” (Wegleitner & Schuchter 2019: 5), caring communities can be interpreted as Polanyian counter-movements. At the same time, their organisation and embedding in the welfare state are controversial. The reorganisation of logics of (and through) communitisation may result in altered forms of division of labour. Gender inequalities can potentially be challenged but also de-thematised (Aulenbacher et al. 2018; Reimer & Riegraf 2016; Wegleitner & Schuchter 2018). In this context, questions arise about the extent to which more reciprocal community initiatives can contribute to new family, generational and gender arrangements. Or more generally: whether it could lead to questioning of traditional orientations that have shaped the provision of care so far.

 

 

References

Aulenbacher, Brigitte / Décieux, Fabienne / Riegraf, Birgit (2018): Capitalism goes care. Elder and child care between market, state, profession, and family and questions of justice and inequality. In: Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 37/4, 347–360.

Aulenbacher, Brigitte / Leiblfinger, Michael / Prieler, Veronika (2020): The Promise of Decent Care and the Problem of Poor Working Conditions. Double Movements Around Live-In Care In Austria. In: sozialpolitik.ch 2, 1-21.

Aulenbacher, Brigitte / Lutz, Helma / Schwiter, Karin (Hg.) (2021): Gute Sorge ohne gute Arbeit? Live-in-Care in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Beltz Juventa.

Aulenbacher, Brigitte / Lutz, Helma / Schwiter, Karin (2022): “Live-in-Care” in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Interview mit Prof.in Dr. Brigitte Aulenbacher, Universität Linz, Prof.in Dr. Helma Lutz, Universität Frankfurt und Prof.in Dr. Karin Schwiter, Universität Zürich. In: berufsbildung 76/4.

Bauer, Gudrun / Haidinger, Bettina / Österle, August (2014): Three Domains of Migrant Domestic Care Work: The Interplay of Care, Employment and Migration Policies in Austria. In: Bridget Anderson / Isabel Shutes (Hg.), Migration and care labour. Theory, policy and politics. Macmillan, 67–86.

Leitner, Sigrid (2014): Varieties of Familialism: Developing Care Policies in Conservative Welfare States. In: Philipp Sandermann (Hg.), The End of Welfare as We Know It? Verlag Barbara Budrich, 37–51.

Maier, Carina (2022): Nicht ohne ihre Kämpfe! Arbeits- und Lebensbedingungen der 24-Stunden- Betreuer*innen und vieles zu lernen für feministische Theorie. In: Momentum Quarterly – Zeitschrift für sozialen Fortschritt 11/1, 94–107.

Österle, August (2021): The Long-Term Care System in Austria. Social Policy Country Brief 12. https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/bitstream/elib/5036/4/2021_Country%20Brief_LTC_Austria.pdf

Prieler, Veronika (2021): ‘The Good Live-in Care Worker’: Subject Formation and Ethnicisation in Austrian Live-in Care. In: Sociológia 53/5, 483–501.

Reimer, Romy / Riegraf, Birgit (2016): Geschlechtergerechte Care-Arrangements? Zur Neuverteilung von Pflegeaufgaben in Wohn-Pflege-Gemeinschaften. Beltz Juventa.

Sardadvar, Karin / Mairhuber, Ingrid (2018): Employed family carers in Austria. The interplays of paid and unpaid work—beyond “reconciliation” In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 43, 61–72.

Wegleitner, Klaus / Schuchter, Patrick (2018): Caring communities as collective learning process: findings and lessons learned from a participatory research project in Austria. In: Annals of palliative medicine 7, 84–98.

Wegleitner, Klaus / Schuchter, Patrick (2019): Sorgebeziehungen fördern: Caring Communities als sozial-ethische Prozesse des Voneinander-Lernens. In: Dialog Ethik 140, 4–7.

Wegleitner, Klaus / Schuchter, Patrick (2021): Handbuch Caring Communities – Sorgenetze stärken – Solidarität leben. Eigenverlag Rotes Kreuz.

 

Weicht, Bernhard (2019): The commodification of informal care: joining and resisting marketization processes. In: Roland Atzmüller / Brigitte Aulenbacher / Ulrich Brand / Fabienne Décieux / Karin Fischer / Birgit Sauer (Hg.), Capitalism in Transformation: Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 261–274.

Florian Pimminger

Ph.D. student in Social Sciences, Economics and Business. Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) at the Institute of Sociology (Department for the Theory of Society and Social Analyses) of the Johannes Kepler University Linz. As part of the ÖAW DOC-team 114 “The Contested Provisioning of Care and Housing” (https://www.contestedcareandhousing.com) he is currently conducting a project on the societal organisation of care between marketisation and communitisation in the care regimes of Austria, Hungary, and the Netherlands. The blog post is the result of close cooperation with Brigitte Aulenbacher and Valentin Fröhlich within this project. Contact details: florian.pimminger@jku.at

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

Program & Streaming Link for Public Lecture by 5th visiting professor Julia Steinberger

PUBLIC LECTURE BY julia steinberger

Find our Program and the Streaming Link for the event here:

More Information

“Living Well Within Limits”

For our international community, we provide a streaming of the event.

LINKS

Living Well Within Limits

Visiting Professorship - Julia Steinberger

Living well within limits
public lecture

May 30th, 2023 

Speakers:
Julia Steinberger, professor of Ecological Economics at University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Andreas Novy, WU Vienna, IKPS
Jürgen Essletzbichler, Head of the Department for Socioeconomics, WU Vienna
Ulrich Brand, ÖFSE
Marina Fischer-Kowalski, University of Natural Resources & Life Sciences
Daniel Huppmann, IIASA

On May 30th, 2023 the Viennese Karl Polanyi Visiting Professorship will be awarded for the fifth time. This semester’s Visiting Professor Julia Steinberger will hold her Public Lecture at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien). The event will also be streamed here.

Kenyote: Living Well Within Limits

This talk will report on the multiple research streams resulting from the Living Well Within Limits project. The Living Well Within Limits project investigates the energy requirements of well-being, from quantitative, participatory and provisioning systems perspectives. In this presentation, I will communicate individual and cross-cutting findings from the project, and their implications. In particular, I will share our most recent results on global energy footprint inequality, implications of redistribution, as well as modelling the minimum energy demand that would provide decent living standards for everyone on earth by 2050. I will show that achieving low-carbon well-being, both from the beneficiary (“consumer”) and supply-chain (“producer”) sides, involves strong distributional and political elements. Simply researching this area from a technical, social or economic lens is insufficient to draw out the reasons for poor outcomes and most promising avenues for positive change. I thus argue for the active involvement of the research community.

“Simply researching this area from a technical, social or economic lens is insufficient to draw out the reasons for poor outcomes and most promising avenues for positive change. I thus argue for the active involvement of the research community.”

We are looking forward to seeing many of you there!