Home Care for Sale: The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe - Hardcover

by Brigitte Aulenbacher (Editor), Helma Lutz (Editor), Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck (Editor)

The world of senior care provision and care work is changing rapidly. Across Europe, brokering agencies for live-in care workers have become powerful players in reshaping welfare systems, transnational care chains and working conditions. This volume draws together the latest research on live-in home care for seniors in Europe, exploring processes of commodification and marketisation, the transnationalisation of care work, the private household as a workplace, and workers' contestation of the live-in care arrangement. Together, they depict far-reaching challenges in care provision and care work.


"A must-read for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the political economy of care in the 21st century. A compelling exploration of the emergence of care brokerage and agency intermediation in Europe with a variety of examples from different countries and care settings."
- Professor Sabrina Marchetti, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

"Essential reading. Rich empirical and conceptual work provides an exhaustive account of the commodification, marketisation, transnationalisation and exploitation in the care industry, all in the context of global and local inequalities. This is a group of amazing critical analysts who dare to confront some of the key contradictions of our current painful social transformation in European terrains."
- Professor Attila Melegh, Corvinus University Budapest

"An encyclopaedic account of the commodification and marketisation of transnationally-brokered senior home care provision across Europe. It pays close attention to the economic and social inequalities, as well as state policies, that underlie this new migration industry, and the collective efforts to contest and improve conditions of work and care. Home Care for Sale documents the geography of care chains within a divided Europe - a geography that both complements and disrupts conventional understandings of international care chains between the Global North and South. A must-read for those interested in senior home care, social reproduction, migration, border studies and the workings and repercussions of neoliberal state policies."
- Professor Géraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

Author Biography

Brigitte Aulenbacher is Professor of Sociology at Johannes Kepler University Linz/Austria. She combines studies on science, domestic work, senior care and the digital transformation of work with the analysis of contemporary capitalism. In 2019, she received the Kurt-Rothschild-Award for her works on Karl Polanyi, while also serving as Vice-President of the International Karl Polanyi Society. Co-edited publications include: 2018, Global Sociology of Care and Care Work, Current Sociology Monograph, Vol. 66, No. 4, Monograph 2, SAGE (with H. Lutz, B. Riegraf); 2019, Capitalism in Transformation, Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century, Edward Elgar (with R. Atzmüller, U. Brand, F. Décieux, K. Fischer, B. Sauer); 2020, Karl Polanyi - The Life and Works of an Epochal Thinker, Falter (with M. Marterbauer, A. Novy, K. Polanyi-Levitt, A. Thurnher). As an ISA member, she has served as Vice-Chair of the LOC of the III ISA Forum of Sociology Vienna (2016) and as Editor of Global Dialogue (2018-22).

Helma Lutz, a sociologist and Professor of Women and Genderstudies at Goethe University, Germany (2007-21), was the laureate of the Humboldt Award from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden (2012). She has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC (2012/3), and from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (2004/5). Her research is concerned with gender, care, (transnational) migration, ethnicity, nationalism, racism, citizenship and the relationship between post-colonialism/post-socialism. Recent publications include: Gender and Migration: Transnational and Intersectional Prospects (with A. Amelina), Routledge 2019; Routledge Handbook Intersectionality 2023 (edited with K. Davis). As a 32-years-long ISA member, Lutz has served in many ISA functions, currently as president of RC05. Her article, 'Care migration: The connectivity between care chains, care circulation and transnational social inequality' (2018), was selected in 2022 for a list of the 10 most important articles in 70 years' of the publication of Current Sociology.

Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology and a member of the Cornelia Goethe Center for Women's and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt; currently Principal Investigator of the international collaborative project 'Researching the transnational organization of senior care, labor and mobility in Central and Eastern Europe' (2023-6), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her research focuses on migration and mobility studies, care, gender and social inequalities. She has published widely in leading journals, most recently, in 2022, 'Making Migrants' Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness from a multilevel perspective', Social Inclusion, 10(1); Co-edited publications include: 2016, Family Life in the Age of Migration and Mobility: Global Perspectives through the Life Course (with M. Kilkey); 2020, German-language volume Postmigrant perspectives: Transnationalism, Gender and Care (with K. Huxel and others).

Karin Schwiter is Assistant Professor of Labour Geography at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In 2016, her research group received the Swiss Award for Research on Education for their mixed-methods study on occupational gender segregation. In 2021, she co-edited the Handbook Feminist Geographies (with Budrich publishers, in German). Her research interests include feminist approaches to work and labour with a focus on care, migration and digitalization. Recent publications include: 2020, 'Geographies of care work: The commodification of care, digital care futures and alternative caring visions' in Geography Compass (with J. Steiner); 2021, 'Who shapes migration in open labour markets? Analysing migration infrastructures and brokers of circularly migrating home care workers in Switzerland' in Mobilities (with H. S. Chau); 2022, 'Care crises and care fixes under Covid-19: the example of transnational live-in care work' in Social & Cultural Geography (with S. Schilliger and J. Steiner).