CARE TALK

Every week, the journal Science complements its published articles with one or more “Perspectives” offering a brief and informal summary of research on an important topic. I was thrilled to be invited to submit one of these recently, and chose to focus on the impact of personal interactions and emotional connections on the economics of care services.

Forced to boil down the soup I have been studying for years to a scant page and a half, I was nonetheless pleased with the resulting concentrate, entitled “When a Commodity is Not a Commodity.”

I particularly liked a phrase that came to me late at night while I was responding to an editor’s query–one that offers a kind of funky analogy to the Heisenberg principle that efforts to measure the location of something can change its location. Care work typically involves a kind of exchange that changes the exchangers.

I did not have the time or space to fully develop links to ongoing research in behavioral or experimental economics, and am hoping that my friends, including UMass Economics graduate students Phil Mellizo and Wesley Pech, might be willing to offer some comments on these…

The graphic here is based on a cheap knockoff of a sign I bought from a tourist kiosk at Covent Garden while at a conference in London last weekend. I added the red letters, which effectively convey the main point of the article. Care work motivated by love as well as money, and the interactions between these two are complicated.

I began work on a manuscript now entitled Economies of Care while visiting at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2005-2006. Slow going, but I’m now up to Chapter 6. I gave a presentation based on this at the GeNet conference I attended in London and will soon post a description of that event along with the bare bones of my powerpoint presentation.

The social democracies of Northwestern Europe offer many varieties of inspiration for the United States. My favorite analysis of progressive family policies remains Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyer’s Families that Work (Russell Sage, 2003). It addresses issues of gender equality as well as child wellbeing and develops a nicely balanced proposal for combining expansion of publicly provided child care with paid family leaves and increases in paternal participation in childrearing. Plus, it actually explains how this could happen and what it would cost.

Sociologist Erik Olin Wright at the University of Wisconsin organized a conference around the Gornick/Meyers proposals as part of a series of projects envisioning “Real Utopias.” The interdisciplinary discussion was terrific (see the conference website), and is leading up to a special issue of the journal Politics and Society and an edited volume to be published by Verso. An essay that I wrote for this project emphasizes the need to go beyond family policy to a broader project of rethinking and restructuring the care economy as a whole. Erik keeps pushing me to get more specific. I’m trying!

Meanwhile, international discussions of family policy provide rich food for thought. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has published a comprehensive report called Babies and Bosses (Europeans seem really worried about below-replacement fertility rates and the need to get more mothers into paid employment). The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has published two terrific reports that provide a model for discussions that should be taking place in more countries: Striking a Balance and It’s About Time: Men, Women, Work, and Family.

Also worth noting are recent changes in family policy in Korea, another country worried about below replacement fertility rates. Since I now have TWO brilliant Korean graduate students working with me, I’m trying to talk them into writing a guest blog on what is going on there. I’m also writing to friends in Taiwan and Japan to see what they have to say….

At a Women’s World conference in Korea two years ago some community artists laid out a large piece of canvas on smooth ground, along with pencils, markers, and paints for passersby to express themselves. The resulting piece of collective art was tapestry-like, with a layered intricacy exceeding that of most renegade graffiti.

My camera framed one particular rectangle within it that featured a heart outlined in red paint, the word “love” printed in red crayon, and the word FREE painted in large pink capitals. Two smaller hearts, in pink and sky blue, are evident, a mysterious letter R, some numbers, patches of dark blue, several yellow swirls, and other background scribbles. Something complicated but compelling is pictured here.

This photograph introduces my comments on Viviana Zelizer’s recent book, The Purchase of Intimacy, a masterpiece of qualitative reasoning about quantitative things. Much of economic sociology bears the imprint of the University of Chicago’s most Rational Economic Man. Viviana cleans the slate and turns the tables, explaining how this man’s picture of exchange oversimplifies our lives. We all use money to buy things. But our uses can have different meanings and, as a result, different consequences.

Standard economics relies heavily on a polarity called “for love OR money.” Individuals are assumed altruistic within families but selfish within markets. “Work” is defined as an activity performed only in return for money. The bright conceptual line creates an illusion of separate territories. Look closer, however, and the boundaries begin to fade.

The Purchase of Intimacy offers important examples of transactions that involve both love and money. It reveals a complex interface between market and non-market activities. Like the new behavioral economics influenced by the work of Dan Kahneman and other psychologists, it demonstrates the impact of contexts and frames on individual decisions.

I value Viviana’s critique of the “hostile worlds” hypothesis. While my research often takes a more quantitative turn, I too argue that many transactions lie somewhere on a continuum characterized by surprising combination of calculation and affection. I emphasize the impact of emotional connection on the quality of paid care services and also develop estimates of the economic value of unpaid care services.

Yet I am less optimistic (or perhaps just less cheerful) than Viviana about the ways in which this continuum, this spectrum, is evolving. As markets expand, so too does our ability to interpret and mediate them. But market expansion often has dislocating effects on those who lack sovereignty within it—not just children, the elderly, the sick or disabled, but all those who lack adequate independent access to human and financial capital.

You can read the full version of this article in Word format. Or you can read a PDF version published in Accounts, the Economic Sociology Newsletter in Spring 2007 (along with comments from other scholars on Viviana Zelizer and a response from her). You can view or download a powerpoint presentation that illustrates this article here.

My all-time favorite popularization of care issues is the comic book Adventures of Carrie Giver, available from T.R. Rose Associates. I like its emphasis on extending the current Child Credit to families providing care for anyone–not necessarily a child.

But I think there’s a serious problem with this proposal as it now stands–a problem that characterizes much of the current advocacy literature. It’s not clear what care is–how it is defined. The focus seems to lie on care for a dependent. Care provided to (or exchanged with) another adult is not “counted.” But its not easy to define “dependency” apart from obvious age ranges or serious health problems.

Sometimes care is defined in terms of assistance with so-called Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). This makes a lot of sense when focusing on individuals with health problems. But measurements of the level and type of assistance often vary. For an illustration of this problem, which also makes the best of the available data, see Mary Jo Gibson and Ari Houser’s report published by the Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons (AARP), entitled Valuing the Invaluable: A New Look at the Economic Value of Family Caregiving.

The most puzzling aspect of this report is its failure to include–or even discuss–issues of child care. As someone who got interested in care via work on the costs of children, I find it strange that the term “family caregiving” is often reserved for care of the elderly.

I think this nomenclature reflects the fractured structure of care advocacy –organizations working on child care and for elder care don’t seem to talk to one another much, and of course they are often pitted against one another in budget battles. Also, advocates for greater public support for family care (whether of children or the elderly) often seem disconnected from efforts to improve wages and working conditions of the employed caregivers that often collaborate with them…such as child care workers and home care aides.

We really need to develop a more unified analysis of the “care sector” as a whole.

Today I decided to call this blog Care Talk and use it as a vehicle for coordinating efforts to build an interdisciplinary network for research on care issues. OK, it’s not a radio show, but National Public Radio’s Car Talk with Click and Clack provides a great model for dialog and problem-solving…

This particular engine has been running for some time, but is getting into gear now with my efforts to write a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation for an Interdisciplinary Graduate Education and Training Grant (IGERT). With the help of the Center for Research on Families (CRF) at UMass Amherst, I have assembled a small group of interested faculty at UMass Amherst and also connected with a larger statewide group of researchers to form a Massachusetts Care Policy Network. Both these specific efforts could build on and contribute to larger national and international efforts.

I’m starting out small here, with just a few good links and some regular posts reacting to what is going on in the world of care research. I will gradually add some audio podcasts and powerpoint shows that could serve as resources. I hope that readers will contribute by adding comments and making suggestions–and perhaps developing their own blogs on this topic. You should be able to subscribe by clicking on the RSS feed, but honestly, I haven’t totally figured this out myself yet.

Let me start with a brief description of two important links that I will enshrine in the blog roll. The International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) holds two annual conferences that are venues for important research on care issues, and also publishes the journal Feminist Economics. Take Care Net is a policy-oriented national network mostly organized and sustained by the amazing Bob Drago at Penn State. The latest greatest post there concerns a survey of all the presidential candidates on work-family issues back in December, and there’s also a blog on that site. In fact, I contributed to it about a year ago using the same title as I gave this blog.

Sometimes its hard to see through that almighty dollar. We need to stop and ask what the economy is FOR, anyway. This question is the focal point of a campaign being organized by filmmakers John de Graaf and Laura Pacheco, an outgrowth of the Forum on Social Wealth, described in my last post. The campaign got off to a big bang last summer with some terrific sessions at the Green Festival in Washington D.C. and is currently fundraising for and developing a video–hopefully one that will be as successful as their last masterpiece, The Motherhood Manifesto. In the meantime, the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement at the University of Washington has posted some very useful powerpoint presentations at www.citizeneconomy.org.

I’ve recently watched two short on-line animations on economic themes. One is a delightful cartoon critique of consumerism cum capitalism called The Story of Stuff that’s recently gone viral. The other is Life and Music, a shorter, more whimsical riff on careerism, with cartoons by Trey Parker of South Park fame illustrating the words of philosopher Alan Watts.

At the other end of the genre spectrum, academic economists are paying more attention to measures of reported happiness, which aren’t as closely associated with wealth and income as they have traditionally assumed. Plus there’s growing interest in the the contribution of family and community work (raising kids, taking care of elderly, volunteering) to our collective standard of living. Now that many countries, including the U.S., collect data on how people use their time, its possible to quantify the relative importance of this work.

I have been toiling away this week on an essay for a forthcoming book called The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality, explaining why measures of inequality based on income or consumer purchases are incomplete. They don’t take the value of family work–or the value of leisure–into account.

Much of my work focuses on the social organization of care. I am especially interested in the parallels between care work and other economic resources that are not privately owned or priced on the market. For more on these parallels– including some videotaped lectures by six great speakers, check out the Forum on Social Wealth.

You can read my short essay “Care and the Commons” here or listen to a podcast here. Here’s the gist: We should pay more attention to the unpaid work provided on behalf of family, friends, and neighbors. Because it is freely given, it is often taken for granted. But its supply is not infinite. Our competitive market economy often penalizes those who devote time and energy to care.

I designed the image above, the “hand of care,” to symbolize three different kinds of commons. The natural environment is represented by the sun, blue waves of water, and green tree fingers with brown bones. The knowledge/technology commons is represented by our decimal counting system, placed on the thumb, the part of our hand that allows us to grip and use tools. The care commons is represented both by the hand itself, which has in a sense been “dipped into” and colored by the other commons…but also by the figure behind the sun, which appears to be pregnant with that yellow orb. OK, it’s slightly over the top, but I like the tattoo effect.

I’d much rather have my hand done this way than get a manicure.