SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
This chapter demonstrates how ailment mobilises concrete, embodied and emotional responses in immediate social encounters and care work, along with discussing the gendered, racialised and classed divisions of care labour that extend to a global scale. The relatedness and variance inherent in ailment – and care as a key response to it – mean that there is a large degree of unpredictability in the chain reactions that ailment creates. Moreover, as responses to ailment may include neglect, violence and humiliation, a variety of ethical and political identities and structures can ensue. Societal structures and the organisation of care work specifically affect and ail those who have less power, influence and money: typically, working-class women, racialised minorities and international migrants. The varying responses to ailment in the world may be imagined as an emergent and constantly changing network of relatedness and affects that organise societies. Within these local and global networks, those caring for others are also affected by their care relationships and may suffer various kinds of distress, which are discussed in terms of caregiver ailment. Political and institutional actors who ignore the relationality of care and often disregard the needs of the caregiver play a major role in engendering and perpetuating caregiver ailment.
This chapter introduces the concept of ailment, which is about generalised care needs, including the need for self-care. Ailment does not indicate an immediate dependency on others. Rather, it is a human condition and force that mobilises emotions, actions and relations. Responses to ailment extend from concrete encounters between human beings in the immediate environment to political and institutional responses in societies across the world. The political relatedness that ailment enacts in the world and the different kinds of social orders that emerge through different personal and collective responses to the needs of ailing subjects are discussed.
Deficiencies in old age care are some of the most pressing human rights concerns in mature welfare states.
This book radically challenges the ethics of viewing care as a tradeable commodity and introduces a novel framework for understanding and analysing social care through the concept of ailment. Providing examples from the British and Finnish welfare states, it demonstrates how ailment shapes societies from the micro to the macro level. Addressing the marketisation and financialisation of care, the authors bring to light increasing inequalities in care.
This book argues that ailment is part of human life and society, and therefore the politics of care should begin with a politics of ailment.
This chapter concludes the book by focusing on today’s circumstances, with ailing bodies having become sources of profit making and the ailments of their caregivers largely unacknowledged or misrecognised. It is time to change how humans are perceived. The notion of homo aegrotus – the ailing human – recognises ailment as a permanent and all-encompassing feature of societies. It generates a variety of responses and creates webs of connections between individuals, families, communities, regions and countries. When approaching the field of care with the concept of ailment, a new political regime becomes imaginable. The new political regime derives from ailment in its two senses: the existential state of human ailing, and the affective or responsive state of being bothered by it. The ailing earth is also implicated here, emphasising human interdependency with biodiversity and ecosystems and thus opening possibilities for research into and the development of sustainable, caring policies. From this perspective, large portions of modern societies appear to be built around ailment.
This chapter examines how the marketisation and financialisation of care are transforming and challenging the social and care policies developed during the heyday of the welfare state. Marketisation and financialisation significantly affect these politics of ailment by introducing the mechanisms of profit making, competition and choice as solutions to human ailment and by replacing the ailing subject with a market actor as the target of social policies. Nevertheless, ailment continues to be a mobilising force that simultaneously generates both social and care relations and market and financial activities. The problem with these trends and the neoliberal vision on which they rely is that the logic of the market is different from – and largely incompatible with – responses to ailment that are based on a logic of care. While businesses perceive ailment as producing unlimited market opportunities, they fail as to the more profound recognition of ailment as an existential human condition warranting ethically sound responses such as affordable care.
This chapter’s sections – ‘Sanctioning the ailing’, ‘Protecting the ailing workforce’, ‘Acknowledging ailment’ and ‘Failing the ailing’ – trace how ailment as a social force has historically manifested itself in social and care policies in western societies. In pre-modern Europe, workhouses and other disciplinary institutions were used to control and sanction ailing individuals. Later, social policies began to recognise the need to protect the ailing workforce to secure the demands of an industrialising world. After the Second World War, social and care policies began addressing ailment throughout the life course, and collective and public responses to the needs of ailing individuals expanded to several areas of life as part of the modern welfare state. The transformation of the welfare state and the austerity politics of recent decades have undermined the acknowledgement of ailment in social and care policies. Through this exploration, it is demonstrated how ailment creates various relations and responses and how these responses combine elements of care, control and profit making to different degrees, depending on the historical, political and social context.
In this insightful collection, academic experts consider the impact of neoliberal policies and ideology on the status of care work in Nordic countries. With new research perspectives and empirical analyses, it assesses challenges for care work including technologies, management and policy-making.
Arguing that there is a care crisis even in the supposedly feminist Nordic ‘nirvana’, this book explores understandings of the care crisis, the serious consequences for gender equality and the hitherto neglected effects on the long-term sustainability of the Nordic welfare states.
This astute take on the Nordic welfare model provides insights into what the Nordic experience can tell us about wider international issues in care.
The Nordic welfare regimes are often referred to as ‘caring states’ (Vabø and Szebehely, 2012), care-work-friendly (Wrede et al, 2008), social-democratic welfare regimes characterised by universalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and as potentially women-friendly welfare states (Hernes, 1987). However, major changes have taken place within these welfare regimes prompted by policies promoting neoliberalism and austerity. Neoliberalising1 has involved a wave of change with marketisation (contracting out) of elder care, self-responsibilising the elderly with concepts of ‘self-care’ and ‘re-ablement’ as well as the increasing amount of documentation, performance measurement and quality control in institutions providing care (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Meagher and Szebehely, 2013; Dahl et al, 2015; Dahl, 2017). Simultaneously, there are recurring recruitment problems with training and retaining sufficient numbers of professional carers for the elderly and for pre-school children (Wrede et al, 2008; Danmarks Radio, 2018). Given these profound changes, the question arises as to how to describe these changes and their effects upon care.
A convenient term that has emerged to describe these trends is ‘care crisis’. The ‘care crisis’ concept was first introduced two decades ago by US sociologists (Phillips and Benner, 1994; Hochschild, 1995). The use of the term ‘crisis’ signals a derangement of matters, which can be thought of as relating to arrangements, decisions and beliefs (Wolin, 1969: 1080). While ‘care crisis’ can be seen as a useful shorthand for a wide gamut of trends, there are also risks in simply using a general, aggregate term and transferring an Anglo-American framing of care crisis into a different context.
This book began by asking whether it is justified to talk about the existence of a care crisis in the Nordic welfare states that have implemented neoliberal reforms and, if so, what are the characteristics of this crisis and the major areas of concern in terms of gender equality and welfare state sustainability? The book concludes that it is possible to talk about a care crisis in the Nordic welfare states, and that there are issues of concern regarding both gender equality and welfare state sustainability. It is an uneven crisis, which takes different forms in the various fields of care and in the different Nordic states. Although the care crisis might not be fully visible yet, it produces insufficient and inadequate care, sometimes poor working conditions and too little time for the care workers to care for themselves, their families and communities. However, the Nordic welfare states have also made a difference to the depth of the crisis: regulations and institutions have prevented the development of a full crisis. Moreover, care workers, care-givers and care-receivers and their organisations are taking part in social struggles against the consequences of neoliberalism and financialisation. Yet, the outcome has – so far – been less caring and less gender-equal Nordic states.
In the introduction, we argued in favour of rethinking the notion of a care crisis. We defined a care crisis as characterised by inadequate resources for care and the absence of ‘good-enough care’, applying the theorisations of Hochschild (1995) and Fraser (2016) and combining them with the insights of Phillips (1994) considering the industries of care. In this book, the contributors have directed their attention to what happens inside the Nordic welfare state(s).
The question of care, and how to organise it, is globally pertinent and touches not only gendered care and dependencies, but also ethics of care, reflected in the ways in which care is governed and what becomes emphasised in the analyses. Societal discourses on the governance of care revolve around the issues of quality (ethics), costs (economy) and remedies (technology). The three discourses hold separate realms in research but enmesh in everyday life, visible for example in the reactions, actions and repercussions in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, the COVID-19 crisis societal discourses seem to constitute three differing logics: the costs to economies due to lockdowns and restrictions; the costs to citizens’ health and lives due to loosening restrictions; and the restoration of ‘normality’ by vaccination as remedy. Ethics cut through these discourses by questioning, for example, the values in the political decisions and the politically set national priorities and reactions.
Seeing care as an ‘informal’ or ‘formal’, or ‘market’ or ‘non-market’ activity aligns with other societal contracts and arrangements that are part of societally accepted patterns, cultures, policies and gendered social contracts (Kovalainen, 2004), but also vehicles for transferring embedded discriminatory and/or unequal practices and processes. With the emergence of market governance mechanisms, the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’, and formal and informal, are blurred and fluid. The bending of boundaries in the organisational and institutional arrangements is reality (for example Kovalainen and Sundin, 2012; Sandberg and Elliott, 2019). The creation of quasi-markets (for example Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993) intensified ‘marketisation’, that is, the adoption of market as a governance form in the public sphere.
