Open Access
Gendered and racialised constructions of work in bureaucratised care services in Italy
Loading...
Files
RSCAS_2014_123.pdf (932.44 KB)
Full-text in Open Access
License
Access Rights
Cadmus Permanent Link
Full-text via DOI
ISBN
ISSN
1028-3625
Issue Date
Type of Publication
Keyword(s)
LC Subject Heading
Other Topic(s)
EUI Research Cluster(s)
Initial version
Published version
Succeeding version
Preceding version
Published version part
Earlier different version
Initial format
Author(s)
Citation
EUI RSCAS; 2014/123; Global Governance Programme-147; Cultural Pluralism
Cite
MARCHETTI, Sabrina, SCRINZI, Francesca, Gendered and racialised constructions of work in bureaucratised care services in Italy, EUI RSCAS, 2014/123, Global Governance Programme-147, Cultural Pluralism - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/33879
Abstract
Scholarship on migrant care work argued that we need to broaden our understanding of the international division of reproductive labour by incorporating into the analysis other agents of social reproduction besides the household such as the non-profit sector, the market and the State. In response to these debates, the article focuses on migrant labour within the bureaucratised care sector, by comparing Latin American and Eastern European women employed in social cooperatives proving home-based elderly care services in Italy. Ethnographic data are used to show how both the workers and the cooperatives’ managers negotiate racialised and gendered constructions of care work and skill. We argue that the dominant gendered and racialised perceptions of paid care as non-skilled ‘feminine’ work, which are at play in private employment, are activated in specific ways in the bureaucratised sector too. Bureaucratised care thus comes into sight as being in strong continuity with the traditional forms of care work, as far as the social construction of the job is concerned. However, it does represent a general improvement for migrant workers in so far as it allows them to achieve better living and working conditions if compared to live-in domestic service.