Care Loops, Mobilities and the Neoliberalization of Care in Transforming Welfare States

Abstract

This is a book about gender, care, and mobility in rural and urban settings in Nordic, Central, and Eastern European countries. It is about daily care loops and everyday life in multi-generational families and among local and transnational migrant care workers and au pairs. With the concept of ‘care loops’, we attempt to capture the routines, daily practices, and micro-mobilities of care that create loops between the home, the workplace, places of child or elder care, schools, and leisure activities. These loops and micro-mobilities of care are not haphazard—they are structured by welfare services, labour market policies and gender ideologies, norms, and policies. Our particular focus is to examine how neoliberal policies cause gendered socio-economic inequalities and how they are expressed in various kinds of mobilities within the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Poland. This focus allows us to rethink the ways in which mobility practices are shifting care towards stretched care relations.

We are interested in the daily organization of care in societies with a strong egalitarian tradition of women’s high labour market participation that have in recent years been curtailed in the name of economic austerity or re-traditionalization. An interesting and significant change in post-socialist and post-social democratic societies is the return to the essentialist idea of women as part of a ‘caregiver pool’. This can take many forms, either by enhancing grandmothers’ or other relatives’ roles as informal caregivers for children and older adults or in the form of migrant care workers who were born, raised, and educated in less affluent countries. Today, caregiver pools are local, national, transnational, and racialized. We perceive these welfare state transformations to be part of neoliberal processes of normalization. Increasingly, care relations seem stretched and elastic—new mixes of gender-essentialist, racialized, egalitarian norms, and policies in both post-socialist and post-social democratic societies are emerging. The neoliberalization of care and the accompanying austerity policies have led to increased informalization and marketization of care as well as responsibilization of individuals and families for care provision. It has also led to precarization of care labour, i.e., an increased reliance on low-paid and unskilled labour force. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how fragile national care regimes are and the limits of the neoliberalization of care.