Book review: care, welfare, and society

• Published date: 21 May 2018
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2017-0215
• Date: 21 May 2018
• Pages: 429-432
• Author: Kristina Binner
• Subject Matter: HR & organizational behaviour,Employment law,Diversity, equality, inclusion

Book reviews

Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics

Edited by Anderson Bridget and Shutes Isabel

Palgrave Macmillan

Basinkstoke

2014

ISBN 978-1-137-31969-2, Paperback

Restructuring Welfare Governance: Marketization, Managerialism and

Welfare State Professionalism

Edited by Klenk Tanja and Pavolini Emmanuele

Edward Elgar Publishing

Cheltenham

2015

ISBN 978-1-78347-576-6, Paperback

Keywords Welfare, Care, Society

Review DOI 10.1108/EDI-10-2017-0215

Book review: care, welfare, and society

The ongoing economization of the whole of societal life has spread across different fields of

society. In this review, I will discuss two books that explore the impact of marketization on

the provision of care and welfare. The first book, Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy

and Politics, edited by Bridget Anderson and Isabel Shutes, emphasizes the transnational

dimension and the global context of migrant care labor and asks how it manifests itself in

different countries. The contributions in this volume trace back to a conference entitled

“Making Connections: Migration, Gender and Care Labour in Transnational Context,”which

was held in 2011 at the University of Oxford. The first part of the book offers theoretical

approaches for analyzing migration and care labor. In the second part, empirical case

studies drawing on different country-contexts are discussed, and the third part focuses on

forms of political mobilization.

The first three articles of the book offer new insights into the meaning and interplay of

the institutions of state, market, and family concerning migration and care labor. Fiona

Williams works out a transnational framework as she considers a crisis of contemporary

capitalism on a global scale. Based on a broad definition of “regime”–not only clusters of

states, but cultures and practices –she shows that care regimes intersect with migration and

employment regimes. In the following two chapters, the authors establish that legal

constructions of migrant care workers reflect national immigration and citizenship policies,

which are influenced by ideas of nation, family, and work.

Part two of the book contains different case studies. Two of them are located in Austria

and Spain, which are so-called incoming/receiving countries of migration. Especially in the

case of Austria, unintended effects of the intersection of migration and employment regimes

become visible: although the Austrian Government wanted to strengthen the household as

employer, migrant care workers suffer still under precarious work conditions. The other two

articles draw on so-called sending countries: the Philippines and Ghana. Anna Romina

Guevarra’s article explicitly shows how national policies of sending countries are coupled

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 37 No. 4, 2018

pp. 429-435

© Emerald PublishingLimited

2040-7149

429

Book reviews