A global migration industry in local contexts: Home care and domestic work brokerage in Austria and Sri Lanka
Brigitte Aulenbacher & Wasana Sampath Handapangoda
What the paper says
This article investigates the transnational marketization and corporatization of domestic services by brokers. Polanyian, institutional logics, and intersectional perspectives and findings on capitalism and violence provide a theoretical framework to understand brokerage as mode of service provision creating and shaping hybrid and unequal work and care arrangements. The Austrian context is a paradigmatic example for the European mode of senior home care provision by recruiting female migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe and placing them in Austrian middle- and upper-class households. The Sri Lankan context is a paradigmatic example for a labour brokerage state, which exploits (paid) household labour of women that satisfy the needs of upper- and middle-class households in the Middle East. Contextual global sociology offers a critical lens to compare the ways in which brokerage is politically, socially, and culturally embedded and creates similar and different modes of service provision based on social inequalities.
3 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.32 × 0.4 = 0.13 |
| M · momentum | 0.57 × 0.15 = 0.09 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.