Decent Care Work? Transnational Home Care Arrangements

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Helma Lutz
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Human Geography ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 323459972

The project is a study of the transnational recruitment by home care agencies of, usually female, migrant carers for employment as live-ins in private households. On the level of the global cities of Frankfurt am Main, Vienna and Zurich it examines 24-hour care in the destination countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where a trend exists towards formalisation of the commodification and transnationalisation of care and care work. 24-hour care is developing within welfare state systems into an accepted way to bridge gaps in care where demographic change poses new challenges while former arrangements for care and work, for example within the family, between the generations and between the genders, are eroding. The thesis is that under the given working and employment conditions, requirements and expectations of good care and good work are in latent or manifest contradiction to each other, and that the way in which those involved deal with these contradictions influence the organisation of transnational home care arrangements in the three welfare states.In line with the mobile ethnography approach, the project tracks worker recruitment by home care agencies in the sending countries and follows the migrant 24-hour carers into the households. It explores by means of expert interviews, episodic interviews and participatory observation how transnational home care agencies, care receivers, their relatives, and the care-giving migrants deal with expectations of good care and good work; how care and work requirements as well as the work to be performed are negotiated between the groups of actors; which contradictions and conflicts occur; and how the care and work arrangements are justified, legitimised and critically questioned.Here for the first time internationally established findings from Gender, Migration and Care research on nursing/care work in the private household are combined with research approaches from the Institutional Logics perspective, French Pragmatic Sociology and justice and legitimacy research from the Sociology of Work. This is also the first research investigating which negotiation processes take place between the participating groups of actors in the mobile field of transnational home care arrangements, between the country of origin and the destination country, between care agencies and private households. The aim is to shed light on transnational home care arrangements, to understand their embedding within the welfare statehood of the three destination countries, to compare their commonalities and differences, and to analyse which requirements and expectations of good care work come to bear, are breached, or cast doubt on this arrangement altogether.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF); Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Brigitte Aulenbacher; Privatdozentin Karin Schwiter, Ph.D.