About this Research Topic
For several years now, western countries have been involved in a progressive externalization of care work in response to population ageing and women’s increased participation in salaried work. This shift has fostered new actors in the care system and new forms of care to meet the needs previously relegated entirely to unpaid female labour. In this process, the “outsourcing of domestic work” both the state and families have increased their reliance on private markets to carry out both care and non-care domestic work. Service provision has become increasingly varied and managed by a plurality of actors (public; semi public; non-profit; profit) in closer dependency on the care and migration regimes of the various countries. Within this context, in more recent years, the care sector has become increasingly 'platformised', as both local and international digital platforms have entered the market, providing better and more efficient matching between supply and demand of care and domestic labour.
In analysing the challenges brought about by these changes in care and domestic work, scholarly research has dealt both with how the relationship between state, marketized care services and family is being reorganised, and how gender and ethnic divisions of labour are produced, consolidated, or changed.
However, less attention has been paid to the analysis of different working conditions not only in relation to different policy contexts but also in relation to different providers. To capture the huge fragmentation of working conditions can provide a greater insight into both the mechanisms of governance of domestic and care services and the different conditions in which domestic and care work is performed.
From this perspective, the proliferation of platforms dedicated to domestic and care work opens up new questions, still little explored, on how these platforms respond in a flexible way to the “care gaps”, and how and whether these platforms are helpful in the emergence of undeclared work and whether and to what extent they reproduce, change and reduce ethnic and gender inequalities.
This Research Topic also encourages the adoption of an intersectional perspective, both to better understand how overlapping identities, roles, and experiences shape different possibilities to obtain better working conditions, and second to analyse the situated nature of inequalities to highlight how different contexts shape and influence access to resources. We want to explore how different intersectional aspects, including gender, sexuality, race and asylum status come together to impact an individual’s experience of domestic and care work in unique and specific ways.
We welcome different types of manuscripts – theoretical, methodological, empirical, qualitative and quantitative – from a micro, meso or macro approaches as well as country-specific research also in comparative perspectives.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- the intersections of gender, ethnicity, age, and professionalism to highlight in different contexts new mechanisms of empowerment or disempowerment;
- analyse the extent to which, or how, care platforms direct and control worker tasks, employment conditions and social relations of workers;
- how different business models affect the work process and working conditions;
- the relationship between domestic work and welfare and migration regimes;
- understand how platform work offers certain opportunities and challenges to migrants with a variety of backgrounds and skill levels;
- analyse whether and how ethnicity affects the platform-side choice of domestic and care workers and how ethnic background affects working conditions;
- the intersection between platform work and informal/undeclared work;
- the role of industrial relations in addressing the huge fragmentations of care and domestic work.
In analysing the challenges brought about by these changes in care and domestic work, scholarly research has dealt both with how the relationship between state, marketized care services and family is being reorganised, and how gender and ethnic divisions of labour are produced, consolidated, or changed.
However, less attention has been paid to the analysis of different working conditions not only in relation to different policy contexts but also in relation to different providers. To capture the huge fragmentation of working conditions can provide a greater insight into both the mechanisms of governance of domestic and care services and the different conditions in which domestic and care work is performed.
From this perspective, the proliferation of platforms dedicated to domestic and care work opens up new questions, still little explored, on how these platforms respond in a flexible way to the “care gaps”, and how and whether these platforms are helpful in the emergence of undeclared work and whether and to what extent they reproduce, change and reduce ethnic and gender inequalities.
This Research Topic also encourages the adoption of an intersectional perspective, both to better understand how overlapping identities, roles, and experiences shape different possibilities to obtain better working conditions, and second to analyse the situated nature of inequalities to highlight how different contexts shape and influence access to resources. We want to explore how different intersectional aspects, including gender, sexuality, race and asylum status come together to impact an individual’s experience of domestic and care work in unique and specific ways.
We welcome different types of manuscripts – theoretical, methodological, empirical, qualitative and quantitative – from a micro, meso or macro approaches as well as country-specific research also in comparative perspectives.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- the intersections of gender, ethnicity, age, and professionalism to highlight in different contexts new mechanisms of empowerment or disempowerment;
- analyse the extent to which, or how, care platforms direct and control worker tasks, employment conditions and social relations of workers;
- how different business models affect the work process and working conditions;
- the relationship between domestic work and welfare and migration regimes;
- understand how platform work offers certain opportunities and challenges to migrants with a variety of backgrounds and skill levels;
- analyse whether and how ethnicity affects the platform-side choice of domestic and care workers and how ethnic background affects working conditions;
- the intersection between platform work and informal/undeclared work;
- the role of industrial relations in addressing the huge fragmentations of care and domestic work.
Keywords: care workers, domestic labour, care platform, regulation, inequalities, gender inequality, racial inequality
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
