CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEORIES OF AND RESEARCH ON CARE

Women’s advancements in the world of work were the focus of extensive research in the 1980s. In the wake of these changes, scholars at the Center for Working Families set out to learn about "advancements" in the realm of care. In her initial application for Sloan funding, Arlie Hochschild highlighted "cultures of care" as a conceptual lens for examining the daily lives and challenges faced by U.S. dual-earner, middle-class working families. Hochschild observed that a "care deficit" has emerged in the U.S. as a result of women’s entry into the labor force (with men, by and large, failing to do their share of the "second shift" at home), and with the decline of neighborhoods and civic ties, as well as cutbacks in the already thin infrastructure of state services for families and children. Hochschild also called attention to the plurality of and tensions among various beliefs, discourses, and practices relating to care.

CWF scholars explored the care deficit, and responses to it, from varied perspectives. Some studied strategies developed by U.S. dual-earner parents, of varied class and cultural backgrounds, as they negotiate and seek to provide care for their children (see Working Papers and publications by Karen Hansen, Barrie Thorne, Terry Arendell, Rivka Polatnick, Elaine Bell Kaplan, Anastasia Prokos, Sheba George, Carolyn Chen, Blanche Grosswald, Allison Pugh, Christopher Davidson, and Annette Lareau). Others examined care arrangements for the elderly (Pei-Chia Lan, Christopher Wellin; Cinzia Solari), and strategies used by the physically disabled to provide for their own needs, including the wish to feel independent (Lynn Rivas).

CWF research projects examined not only households and sites of paid work but also the care-related dynamics of other institutions, including schools (Barrie Thorne; Sally Woodhouse), after-school programs (Anita Garey), synagogues and immigrant churches (Christopher Davidson; Carolyn Chen; Sheba George); charitable public institutions (historical work by Marta Gutman), and care-providing-and-receiving relationships among friends (Kay Trimberger; Karen Hansen, Alesia Montgomery) and neighbors and co-workers (Thorne; Hansen).

Our holistic and contextual approach illuminated varied "ecologies of care," that is, relationships and transfers of care that extend beyond families, kin, and paid caregivers, to encompass a range of institutional sites, informal ties, and even migration streams. Over the last three decades California has received more immigrants than any other state, which makes it a fruitful site for researching the dynamics of global "care drains" (a term coined by Arlie Hochschild; her forthcoming book, Global Woman, co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich, includes many studies of care transfers and labor processes that cross national boundaries, including papers by four other CWF scholars). This line of research, alert to the families migrant careworkers leave behind as well as their relation to families who employ them, was pioneered by Rhacel Salazar Parrenas who was in residence at our Center as she completed her 2001 book, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Arlie Hochschild’s American Prospect cover article on "nanny chains" drew upon Parrenas’s research and writing. Global care chains and transfers of and tensions around labor transfers have also been studied by CWF post-doc Pei-Chia Lan (who interviewed elderly immigrants from Taiwan who lived with their dual earner and affluent sons and daughters-in-law in the Bay Area and were cared for by home health care workers from China) and sociology graduate student, Cinzia Solari (studying a similar three-way situation in research on immigrants from Russia who are cared for by home careworkers from the former Soviet Union). In other research on immigration and U.S. cultures of care, a sociolinguist on the faculty in the School of Education, Patricia Baquedano-López, examined the daily practices of immigrant women from Mexico and Central America who work as nannies for affluent families in Los Angeles; Julio Commarota studied "cultures of concern" in Latino immigrant families; Sheba George wrote a dissertation on labor negotiations between nurses and their husbands who are immigrants to Chicago from Karela, Iindia; Johanna Shih wrote a Working Paper on the ways in which immigrants from Asia, who work as high tech professionals, tap into immigrant networks in the search for paid careworkers; and Carolyn Chen studied shifting child-rearing beliefs and practices of Chinese immigrants who have converted to Christianity and find support in immigrant churches.

How do patterns of racial-ethnicity, and social class intersect in the framing and distribution of care? Many CWF projects have examined ways in which various lines of social difference and inequality enter into the contours and dynamics of care and relations between work and family life. Post-doc Marta Gutman’s historical research on public caregiving institutions in Oakland, which were created by women’s charity organizations in the Progressive Era, gives perspective on the changing discursive, organizational, and architectural landscapes of public care. Her 2002 Working Paper provides a nuanced analysis of the shift from racially mixed to segregated institutions in the Jim Crow era (also a time of increased migration of African Americans to the Bay Area), and, in the late 1950s, some movement to racial integration, along with white flight to the suburbs. Gutman's attention to the changing dynamics of racialized social class connects with Barrie Thorne’s ethnographic research on class and racial ethnicity and orbits of care in a mixed-income, ethnically diverse area of contemporary Oakland. During a semester's visit at CWF, sociologist Annette Lareau worked on a book that compares the child-rearing beliefs and practices of middle-class and working class parents (with African American and white families in both groups). Anita Garey traced the dynamics of social class cleavages in the use of after-school programs.

CWF scholars have developed new conceptual and methodological tools in the course of mapping the contours of particular ecologies of care. For example, Karen Hansen used in-depth interviews to map networks of care, and patterns of reciprocity, mobilized by highly affluent, middle-income, and low-income families. Johanna Shih examined networks of Bay Area immigrants from various Asian countries as a resource used by dual-earner immigrant parents organizing care for their children. Working with a multilingual group of graduate and undergraduate fieldworkers, Barrie Thorne has analyzed varied "orbits of care" created by parents as they link up with other, similarly positioned families in the process of mobilizing resources and maneuvering through the institutional landscape of contemporary Oakland. Alesia Montgomery has highlighted the relatively invisible forms of "job help": from family and friends that high tech professionals draw upon in completing projects.. Each of these studies points to varied mixes of paid and unpaid, and visible and less visible labor, and to varied ways in which families negotiate the spheres of kith and kin, the state, and the market.

In other conceptual contributions, CWF researchers have analyzed varied "social logics" of care (Hochschild defines a social logic as a way of thinking about and acting toward specific issues within the context of cultural categories). Karen Hansen highlights the social logics embedded in patterns of kin reciprocity, including care as a diffuse obligation, a favor, a gift, and a matter of tit-for-tat. In a recent book, which he worked on during a semester at CWF, anthropologist Nicholas Townsend examines the social logics of contemporary fatherhood framed as a "package deal" of employment, home ownership, and marriage. Tensions arise when parts of the "package deal," such as employment, are missing. Anita Garey has also illuminated cultural logics, organized around notions of self-reliance and meritocracy, that undermine equity in the provisioning of care.

What sort of difference does it make -- in the quality of care, constructions of need, and in the dynamics of personal relationships -- when care is provided by kin, by friends or neighbors, by paid caregivers (the "cash nexus"), or when care is paid for by the state? This question animated many CWF discussions and research projects. In her recent research on "the commodity frontier," Arlie Hochschild has observed that the market is creating ever more niches (such as household "organizers" and birthday party planners) in the "mommy industry," with U.S. families outsourcing a growing array of activities. At the same time, "insourced functions" associated with the condensed symbol of the wife/mother are increasingly fetishized. The historian, Gary Cross, who was in residence at CWF during spring 2002, has written in a similar vein about the condensed symbolism of the "wondrous child," which motivates adults to buy toys and other child-pleasing objects. Allison Pugh, who studied mothers’ consumption strategies, found that they bought goods to forge connections with their children.. Are commodified forms of care all bad? Paid care may, in some cases, be more effective than kin-care, especially from the vantage point of adult receivers, as Lynn Rivas found for disabled adults, who gained a sense of control from being able to hire and fire their caregivers, and Chris Wellin discovered in research on paid, and personalized, care for patients with Alzheimer's. Pei-Chia Lan and Cinzia Solari have each studied the dynamics of in-home elder care, paid for by the state, sorting out the complexities and tensions bound up in care arrangements paid for by a third party.

SYLLABUS FOR SEMINAR ON CULTURES OF CARE

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