Book review: care, welfare, and society

Citation

Binner, K. (2018), "Book review: care, welfare, and society", Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 429-432. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2017-0215

Book review: care, welfare, and society

The ongoing economization of the whole of societal life has spread across different fields of society. In this review, I will discuss two books that explore the impact of marketization on the provision of care and welfare. The first book, Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics, edited by Bridget Anderson and Isabel Shutes, emphasizes the transnational dimension and the global context of migrant care labor and asks how it manifests itself in different countries. The contributions in this volume trace back to a conference entitled “Making Connections: Migration, Gender and Care Labour in Transnational Context,” which was held in 2011 at the University of Oxford. The first part of the book offers theoretical approaches for analyzing migration and care labor. In the second part, empirical case studies drawing on different country-contexts are discussed, and the third part focuses on forms of political mobilization.

The first three articles of the book offer new insights into the meaning and interplay of the institutions of state, market, and family concerning migration and care labor. Fiona Williams works out a transnational framework as she considers a crisis of contemporary capitalism on a global scale. Based on a broad definition of “regime” – not only clusters of states, but cultures and practices – she shows that care regimes intersect with migration and employment regimes. In the following two chapters, the authors establish that legal constructions of migrant care workers reflect national immigration and citizenship policies, which are influenced by ideas of nation, family, and work.

Part two of the book contains different case studies. Two of them are located in Austria and Spain, which are so-called incoming/receiving countries of migration. Especially in the case of Austria, unintended effects of the intersection of migration and employment regimes become visible: although the Austrian Government wanted to strengthen the household as employer, migrant care workers suffer still under precarious work conditions. The other two articles draw on so-called sending countries: the Philippines and Ghana. Anna Romina Guevarra’s article explicitly shows how national policies of sending countries are coupled with the needs of a globalized care market. She reveals the racialized construction of migrant workers in the Philippines as she describes how the state and private recruitment agencies aim to position Filipino care workers as the ones who do more and work better than other migrant workers.

Part three is about possible counter movements against the ongoing commodifying tendencies of care labor, and (new) forms of political mobilization are discussed. To tackle racialization in care labor, new alliances between unions and social movements are needed. Further, the characteristics of domestic work (e.g. the intersection of class, race, migration, and gender) make it worth developing a wider global labor governance. The authors highlight the various functions of international norms. To utilize them, they must be “reembedded” into various contexts by regional institutions, bilateral agreements, and local agents of the civil society.

To sum up, the book brings together a broad piece of current research in the field of migration, gender, and care labor stemming from social policy, law, and labor studies, as well as migration and gender research. The editors reach their main goal of offering new insights into the connections across theory, policy, and politics concerning care labor and migration. Beyond that, they succeed in working out a concept of care that reflects it as situated within a broader context of social relations, as a part of the social and cultural reproduction of modern capitalistic societies. In particular, the volume’s conclusion is fruitful for future discussions about care as a constitutive element of society.

The second book I want to discuss is Restructuring Welfare Governance: Marketization, Managerialism and Welfare State Professionalism. This is the outcome of an international research network based on an international conference on the changes in public administration and the welfare state, which was held at the University of Potsdam in December 2012. Discussing the impacts of a marketized and managerialized welfare state, the volume intends to go “beyond recent literature in social policy” (p. 2) by connecting different streams of research and different levels of analysis. Therefore, the volume is divided into two main parts. Part one focuses on the recent transformations of welfare models and their impacts on the meso-level, whereas part two adopts a micro-focused analysis by looking at how professionals cope with the new models of governing welfare organizations.

The first part of the book consists of contributions describing the changing form of welfare governance in five fields: health care, long-term care, higher education, education, and employment policies. The idea of restructuring welfare governance is spread into different fields and countries, shown in each contribution and realized in various forms. After reading the different articles, readers could gain new insights into many aspects of restructuring processes, such as the fact that they vary across fields and countries in timing and intensity, drivers for change are situated in certain policy fields and “general” politics, and some fields and countries are more converging than others, albeit in an “unprecedented convergence” (p. 70). The varying restructuring processes across the countries are worked out very clearly by Bastian Jantz and Tanja Klenk for the field of labor market policy. They show that different forms of activation markets emerge in different national contexts. If a state-driven, a provider-driven, or a consumer-controlled market is being established, then it depends on different welfare regime traditions.

Hildegard Theobald also discusses the role of the welfare state, giving attention to the societal and territorial dimensions of restructuring processes in case of long-term care: “Market-oriented reforms are often embedded in a new-definition of the role of the state – as a warrantor of social rights, regulator, financier and provider” (p. 29). She shows that restructuring processes are a result of a complex interplay between national and international levels of politics.

The articles in the second part ask how professionals are affected by the new public management reforms and how they react. The contributions of this part are located in the fields of higher education, education, labor market, and health care. Many contributions thematize processes of professionalization and deprofessionalization. In particular, Uwe Schimank and Mirko Noordegraaf perceive the different challenges that current processes face within the profession. Whereas Noordegraaf suggests that professionals have to develop organizational capacities (e.g. head teachers have to transform into managers), Schimank worries that professions lose their “occupational control” (p. 194).

The following two empirically oriented articles concerning academics in higher education present evidence for processes of deprofessionalization, and how they depend on the point of time when reforms are implemented. In countries such as the Netherlands and the UK, which are at the forefront of the implementation of restructuring processes, “new challenges” are interiorized in their daily practices. After the installation of reforms, less critical behavior is found among academics in comparison with former times.

It is a great strength of the book that it reaches a double comparative perspective by comparing different fields and different countries to assess the marketization and managerialization processes. The contributions deliver insights into the cross-country character of restructuring processes, as well as similarities between and across the countries, as persistent differences with regards to intensity and institutional design can be identified.

But what can we learn by reading the two books together? Both share a common background, and focus on current and ongoing transformation processes of society across the world. Indeed, after reading the two books, we can observe an overall trend – in different countries and fields – toward the marketization in society. Simultaneously, other institutions like the state/nation or the family are presented as no less important. Various forms of reconfiguring institutions are documented in the two volumes concerning welfare and care. Both books reflect that current changing processes are characterized by an institutional complexity and welfare governance turns to be more hybrid and ambiguous.

Both books wanted to identify the societal and territorial dimensions of economization processes, yet they differ in their methodological and theoretical frameworks. Klenk and Pavolini’s volume primarily follows comparative and analytical welfare state approaches. Although most of the contributions in this book take different scales of politics into account, the approaches mostly focus on the entity of the nation state (the article of Hildegard Theobald is an exception). With the focus on nation states, new and innovative findings become visible and serve to question well-used typologies of welfare states (e.g. Esping Andersen). The finding that conservative regimes like Germany are rather more reluctant concerning marketizing approaches than social democratic countries, which seem to be more on the side of Anglo-Saxon countries, is surprising.

In contrast, Anderson and Shutes’ work on migration and care reflects another viewing direction. The articles in this volume consider political and economic relationships systematically on a global scale. In that way, Williams opens the book by establishing a conceptional framework of a transnational political economy of care. Following such a transnational perspective, the contributions go beyond methodological-nationalistic approaches. Structural, political, and economic interdependencies are taken into account in the articles. One of the great benefits of this book is that readers discover how countries – both home and host countries of migration – are interlocked in a world in which societies in the global North and the global South are structurally connected, in terms of economy, history, politics, and power.

Given this background, reading the two books together is very fruitful because different aspects of the marketization processes become visible. To make this more explicit, both books thematize the “dark sides” of economization processes. Findings are presented that suggest ongoing marketization processes could foster or generate new dimensions of inequality. Klenk and Pavolini problematize the phenomena of inequality within the nation state, for example, concerning clients and staff of social delivery fields. Anderson and Shutes work out several dimensions of inequalities within the framework of intersectionality, which make it possible to articulate inequality between the nation states of the global North and South.

Reading one of the books helps you learn about the other. After reading the work of Anderson and Shutes, you may get a more critical view on welfare governance in the global North and one might ask who (what persons and countries) pays the cost of so-called welfare governance? Would not it be worth thinking about the global dimensions of welfare and questioning whether existing theories and definitions of welfare de-thematize such global dimensions? Could we connect ideas of global justice with ideas of global welfare?

Both books inspire discussions about the connection between care, welfare, and society, insofar as both question the way welfare and care are organized in contemporary capitalistic societies. Therefore, I would recommend the books not only for readers who are interested in social policy, care, and migration, but also for those who are interested in current debates on conditions and endangerments of modern societies. Finally, both books show that dealing with questions of welfare and care challenge society and sociology as a whole, as care and welfare are “basic condition[s] of modern societies” (Aulenbacher et al., 2014, p. 7). Debating about care and welfare means debating and struggling with possible contemporary and future visions of societies.