Bernhard Weicht

Migrant care work and care, migration and employment regimes: A fuzzy-set analysis

Migrant care work has emerged as an increasingly important solution to the challenges of growing eldercare needs in both the private and the public sphere. Migrant workers are employed in domestic services in Southern European and in some continental European countries, and they are a significant part of the work force in the formal care sector in many national contexts. The article provides an exploratory cross-country analysis of the phenomenon. After assessing the extent of migrant care work based on individually contracted workers in the domestic sector vs. organization-based care workers in nine European welfare states, it investigates which conditions sustain specific national patterns. Using fuzzy-set analysis the article demonstrates how the intersection of care, migration and employment regimes shapes different patterns of migrant care work.

The making of ‘the elderly’: Constructing the subject of care

The provision and arrangement of care for elderly people is one of the main challenges for the future of European welfare states. In both political and public discourses elderly people feature as the subjects who are associated with particular needs, wishes and desires and for whom care needs to be guaranteed and organised. Underlying the cultural construction of the care regime and culture is an ideal type model of the elderly person. This paper analyses the discursive construction of elderly people in the discourses on care in Austria. An understanding of how elderly people as subjects, their wishes and needs and their position within society are constructed enables us to analyse, question and challenge the current dominant care arrangements and its cultural embeddings. The paper demonstrates the processes of silencing, categorisation and passivation of elderly people and it is argued that the socio-discursive processes lead to a particular image of the elderly person which consequently serves as the basis on which the care regime is built.

Embracing Dependency: Rethinking (in)Dependence in the Discourse of Care

This article analyses and challenges the categories of dependency and independence as they feature in discourses on care for older people in two countries, Austria and the UK. Using critical discourse analysis of newspaper extracts and transcripts of focus group discussions, I demonstrate how independence and self-sufficiency are constructed as ideals for human existence. Being dependent, on the other hand, is seen as the expression of an inferior state of life. Three possible challenges to the ideal of independence in the literature on care are then discussed. The paper shows how, through their focus on empowerment, mutuality and reciprocity, they each reproduce aspects of dependency as anathema to contemporary ideas of personhood, to fall short of a fruitful critical intervention into orthodox discourses on older people and care. In contrast, this article argues for embracing a notion of dependency built upon new conceptualizations of the body, of relating and of the conditions of a good life.

Narrative collisions, sociocultural pressures and dementia: the relational basis of personhood reconsidered

The concept of personhood developed by Tom Kitwood highlights that the experience of dementia has relational dimensions that transcend the neurodegenerative impacts of the condition. This relational focus, however, has been narrowly conceptualised, with the impact of broader sociocultural factors on experience underplayed. The empirical exploration of interaction also requires reinforcement: a tendency for dyadic studies to portray findings in an individualised format hinders the interrogation of interpersonal negotiations. This article draws upon qualitative research that employed a joint interview approach, interviewing men with dementia and their spousal carers together. The focus on a dyadic case study from this research enables methodical exploration of the experience of living with dementia. This is realised by considering the socially-framed perspective of each person, and then how their perspectives are interwoven within interactional exchanges. This provides a platform for the evaluation of the current decontextualised notion of personhood and its implications. It is concluded that a sociologically-informed perspective can help to reinforce the academic understanding of personhood.

The Gender Informal Care Gap: A fuzzy-set analysis of cross-country variations

ABSTRACT This article investigates the relationship between the ‘gender informal care gap’ – the relative contributions of women to informal care for non-co-resident relatives and other members of social networks, compared to men – and public care policies, level of care needs, labour market position and gendered care attitudes. Since the literature suggests that none of these factors alone can explain the gender informal care gap, we develop a model based on fuzzy-set/qualitative comparative analysis in order to identify patterns in the relationship between the factors. The analysis conducted at the macro-national level in 13 European countries, suggests that at the macro-level, the availability of public care services is crucial to understanding the gender informal care gap, while womens labour market position, the presence or absence of gendered care attitudes and the level of care needs play no or a relatively minor role.

State, Market, or Back to the Family? Nostalgic Struggles for Proper Elder Care

In this chapter Bernhard Weicht explores the possibilities and limits for commodification processes in the context of personal, affective labour, focusing specifically on recent policy changes to the elderly care systems in four European countries. Basing his discussion in very different political and institutional contexts, he identifies the moral and social challenges to marketization of inherently human activities. The chapter emphasises the characteristics and specificities of moral economies within the Polanyian concept of fictitious commodities.

Is living well with dementia a credible aspiration for spousal carers

ABSTRACT In England there has been substantial policy development and an academic drive to promote the goal of ‘living well’ for people with dementia and their family members. This article critically evaluates the feasibility of this intention, with reference to the experience of those caring for people with the condition. Qualitative data are utilised from a study which explored how couples negotiate relationships and care. The focus of this paper is the perspectives of spousal carers and the challenges they encounter within their caring role. Views were obtained via semi-structured joint interviews where the carer participated alongside the person with dementia. The extent to which living well with dementia is a credible aspiration for carers is examined via three themes: identity subsumed under care responsibilities; the couple as an isolated family unit; and barriers to professional support. The findings highlight that experience of caring is highly complex and fraught with multiple practical, emotional and moral pressures. It is asserted that research into dementia and care relationships must avoid a zero sum situation, prompted by living well discourses, where attempts to bolster the position of people with dementia compound the marginalisation and stigmatisation of informal carers.

A place to transform: creating caring spaces by challenging normativity and identity

Abstract Like all spaces, concrete caring places both shape and are shaped by understandings and constructions of normativity and identity. The traditional understanding of care for older people, imagining clearly demarcated dyadic roles, is firmly embedded in heterosexual logics of relationships within families, the own (family) home and institutional support. Social and residential places for older people thus both assume particular gender and sexual identities and contribute to a (re)production of the very normativity. But how can this interlinkage between the construction of caring spaces and the normativity of identities be understood and, possibly, challenged? In this article we discuss the transformative potential of the social (and partly residential) space of La Fundación 26 de Diciembre, in Madrid, Spain, which opened up to specifically support older LGBT people. Drawing on an in-depth case study we explore a space that allows visibility of different forms of living and caring practices of people with different genders, sexual preferences, origins, classes or political backgrounds. Through the daily life narratives of the people who work, volunteer or simply use the centre we discuss the potential of challenging the restricted notions, assumptions and constructions through which particular places gain both social and political meaning. The article highlights the transformative power of the active and collective making of caring spaces through which narratives of care, collective sexual and gender recognition and practices of caring relationships can replace both traditional/informal forms of living together and institutional spaces that provide professional care.

Markets, “Communities” and Nostalgia

The introduction provides a conceptual framework for this edited collection by locating it in the interfaces between three distinctive bodies of scholarship: on marketization and the social ‘disembedding’, in Karl Polanyi’s seminal terminology, of the economy; on the commodification of ever-widening terrains of life and the (re)construction and (re)assertion of various ‘communities’ in response to such far-reaching social dislocations; and on the various roles played by different forms of nostalgia in moments and periods of social crises. This introduction thus develops a theoretical synthesis to provide the conceptual spine and necessary coherence for the volume in its entirety.