Annotated Bibliography
Solange-Renée Puryear Thompson
GLI 450 – 01
Professor P. Spitzer
19 April 2022
Annotated Bibliography
Global Care Chains at the Intersection of Capitalism and Feminism
The sources included in this annotated bibliography represent the multifaceted nature of the issues involved in global care chains. The sources comprise a global perspective, involving books and articles from various scholars across the globe. Some of the countries represented in this annotated bibliography include Belgium, Finland, the United States of America, Canada, the Philippines, Ireland, I will be using them to provide a comprehensive analysis and summary of these issues along with both the positive and negative effects of global care chains. Some of the aspects represented here include: a sociological perspective, a political perspective, the economic aspect, the feminist perspective, and some combine all of these to provide a well-rounded evaluation of global care chains.
Carl, Neal. “Global Care Chains – YouTube.” Youtube, Youtube, 9 Aug. 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkHq_XlzfO0.
In this video, the narrator explains the fundamental concepts involved in global care chains using an anecdotal experience. The situation provided is about two young girls, Paula and Maribel, and their connection to global care chains. These two girls are sisters, living in a small village in the Philippines. They represent one link in a global care chain. Their mother has left them in the care of someone else in order to move to a bigger city, Manila, to care for another woman’s children. The woman whose children their mother is caring for has left her own children to do the same, but unlike Paula and Maribel’s mother, she has left the Philippines entirely to care for the children of a family in Los Angeles. The narrator discusses the reasons why these women have had to migrate, emphasizing that their migration is their solution to their inability to find employment that pays enough for them to sustain themselves and their families. In a village like the one Paula and Maribel live in, the average annual income is $3,600. This has forced these women to find other methods of caring for their families that unfortunately do not provide them with the ability to bring their families with them.
I plan to use this source on my website directly to provide a brief and easily digestible introduction of global care chains. I will also be defining the concept in my own words, but I believe that this video will be good for my website because it provides a combination of anecdotal and statistical experience that allows for my audience to take in the information in a different way than they might be expecting. I also think this will be a valuable source because it provides some examples of solutions to the issues both causing and presented by the existence of global care chains.
Degavre, F and L Merla. “Defamilialization of Whom? Re-Thinking Defamilialization in the Light of Global Care Chains and the Transnational Circulation of Care.” In: M., Palenga-Möllenbeck, E. (eds) Family Life in an Age of Migration and Mobility. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52099-9_13
“Defamilialization of Whom? Re-Thinking Defamilialization in the Light of Global Care Chains and the Transnational Circulation of Care” is a chapter of the book Family Life in an Age of Migration and Mobility. This chapter was written by Florence Degavre, a Belgian socio-economist, and Laura Merla, a Belgian sociologist. In this chapter, the authors discuss the importance of focusing on the risks that these women who migrate for care work are exposed to – specifically defamilialization. Defamilialization can be defined as, “the extent to which the Welfare State enables women to survive as independent workers and decreases the economic importance of family in women’s life.” [1] While defamilialization was initially intended to refer to domestic and European instances of women as independent workers, this article highlights the importance of evaluating it from international and transnational perspectives as care work in Europe has begun to be more and more dependent on the migrant women who participate in global care chains.
This body of work will be useful for my project because it discusses not only the emotional impact of global care chains in relation to these women and their families, but it also discusses the importance of examining the negative economic impact on the families of the women who take part in and make up the links of global care chains.
Haley, Emily (2018) “Sending Love Home: The Effects of Global Care Chains on Economics, Family, and Agency,” Perspectives: Vol. 10, Article 2.
“Sending Love Home” discusses the economic, familial, and agency-related effects of global care chains. Emily Haley uses many resources including “Love and Gold” to first define and explain global care chains and then explore the effects. A global care chain as defined by Arlie Hochschild is “a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring.”[2] Emily Haley explains that global care chains have created connections and intersections among global communities that would not exist otherwise. The main factor and catalyst of these newly created interactions is power.
Haley also emphasizes the novel simplicity of international migration – the digital age that we live in has changed the ways in which people connect and move through the world. As a result of globalization and the global care chains that have sprouted across the globe, commodification has increased. As Haley states in her article, “commodification has become a big player in globalization, which has allowed for the flows of both objects and people across borders.” (Haley, 3) While it is the case that the women who migrate to care for other families’ children are in need of the opportunity and financial compensation created by the opportunity, the families requesting the assistance are also in need and this is a situation created by the need for both parents to enter the workforce to support their families.
The change in family structure prompted by capitalism – from the ideal of needing a village to raise children to the restrictive nuclear family – has resulted in the need for outside actors to step in and care for children who not only are not their own, but also are from completely different countries. Not only has there been a change in family structure as a result of capitalism, but there has also been a shift in economic structure as a result of globalization. The increasing interconnectedness of people and the world around them has led to a lack of boundaries inhibiting the migration of these women and further shifting of the family structure.
I plan to use this source to articulate the economic impact of global care chains while also discussing the economic factors that contribute to the creation of these global care chains. This article is valuable to my project because it presents a perspective of global care chains that emphasizes the power dynamics and commodification that are involved in the cycle of global care chains.
Hochschild, A. R. (2004). Love and gold. In A. R. Hochschild, & B. Ehrenreich (Eds.), Global women: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. New York: Owl Books.
In “Love and Gold”, Arlie Hochschild begins with an anecdote from Vicky Diaz, a woman who migrated from the Philippines to the United States to do housekeeping and care for a Beverly Hills family’s child. In the interview Hochschild references, Diaz discusses the impact of her migration on her children and husband. The impact that Diaz articulates is an emotional one – her children are “saddened” by her departure and continue to attempt to get their mother to come home. While her children cannot fully grasp the economic impact of her departure and separate that from the emotional impact, she says that her husband can. He understands that her departure was for their family, and she states that it was “the only way I could seriously help him raise our children, so that our children could be sent to school.”[3] Hochschild utilizes that information to segue into introducing Servants of Globalization. She tells readers that Rhacel Parreñas, the author of Servants of Globalization, refers to the issue of global care chains as the “globalization of mothering.”[4] While Vicky Diaz is in Beverly Hills receiving $400 per week to care for her employer’s child, she is sending the woman who cares for her children $40 per week.
Hochschild explains that these global care chains reveal “an invisible ecology of care, one care worker depending on another and so on.” (Hochschild, 35) While this is not a completely novel phenomenon, there has been a notable increase in women who migrate. Initially, men were the ones in the family to migrate for a better opportunity to care for the children, but as domestic work began to be the more lucrative option, women began to be the ones to migrate in order to provide for their families. She describes this issue as a “private solution to a public problem.” (Hochschild, 36) Without a solution provided by the systems that create the problem of women being unable to find work that will pay enough for them to sustain themselves and their families, these women are essentially forced to migrate to care for other people’s children in other countries because these jobs pay higher rates than the jobs that exist in their home countries.
I plan to use this source to define global care chains and the factors that contribute to their existence then articulate the emotional impact on the women who migrate, the families they find and work for, and their own families that they are forced to leave behind. This source is valuable to my project because it is one of the main works by sociologist Arlie Hochschild who coined the term global care chains. Her work comprises the foundation of the discourse on the subject. I also believe that the anecdotal experiences in this chapter will provide another important perspective of global care chains.
Isaksen, Lise Widding, et al. “Global Care Crisis: A Problem of Capital, Care Chain, or Commons?” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 52, no. 3, Nov. 2008, pp. 405–425, doi:10.1177/0002764208323513.
“Global Care Crisis: A Problem of Capital, Care Chain, or Commons” discusses global care chains from a perspective that requires the “macro-analytic theory of the effect of such migration.” (Isaksen et al, 405) The authors of the article include American sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who coined the term “global care chain,” Norwegian sociologist Lise Widding Isaksen, and Sambasivan Uma Demi, representing the United Nations and the International Labor Organization. The article begins by listing United Nations statistics of migration – in the 1990s, 180 million people migrated from their home country to another. A large portion of these migrants are women – not seeking family reunification, but to unfortunately leave their families behind in order to properly provide for them. Often when evaluating transnational migration, scholars focus on the brain drain that exists, but the exploration of global care chains requires an evaluation of the care drain as Arlie Hochschild labels it. This article details the migratory streams that exist, “from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, from Mexico, Central America, and South America to the United States; from North Africa to Southern Europe; from South Asia to the oil-rich Persian gulf; and from the Philippines to much of the world…” (Isaksen et al, 406)
While the focus on global care chains is primarily on women, this is because prior to the discovery of global care chains as a phenomenon, the exploration of transnational migration was one that focused on men and their migration for trades and sent remittances to their home countries while their wives cared for their children. Due to changing economic and familial structures, in both sending and receiving countries, both parents are forced to enter the workforce. As a result of the inability of these parents to fully provide for their children in their home countries, the women migrate for more lucrative positions that usually involve caring for other families’ children, but at times are solely cleaning families’ houses. This article focuses on shifting the narrative surrounding women who migrate to provide for their families by placing emphasis on the woman as a “family and economic woman” as opposed to a “family woman or economic woman.” (Isaksen et al, 406) This is important because it allows these women to be seen as multi-faceted as opposed to restricted to one sector of life.
I plan to use this source to articulate the importance of focusing on the family-work balance for these migrant women and how social forces play a role in global care chains, and not solely political and economic forces. This source is also relevant because it focuses on the women as people and not just pawns involved in a global exchange of labor.
Mahon, Rianne. “Transnational Care Chains as seen by the OECD, the World Bank, and the IOM” Shaping Policy Agendas: The Micro-Politics of Economic International Organizations, edited by David Dolowitz, Magdaléna Hadjiisky, and Romauld Normand, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020, pp. 77-94.
In the fifth chapter of Shaping Policy Agendas: The Micro Politics of Economic International Organizations, Rianne Mahon, a Distinguished Research Professor of Public Policy in Canada, discusses the ways in which the World Bank, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) interact with global care chains. Due to the often transnational aspect of these global care chains, there are many different types of policies involved in the creation and facilitation of them. Mahon asserts that even though the three organizations recognize and do their respective parts of the overarching issue, the OECD and World Bank fail to “grasp the connections among them.” (Mahon, 78) Unlike the OECD and the World Bank, the IOM understands the various links of global care chains, but often prioritizes trafficking when evaluating which issue to take action for. According to Mahon, this is because it “fits more comfortably with the IOM’s main discourse of ‘managed migration.’” (Mahon, 78)
Once the organizations have been introduced, the chapter delves into an assessment of the ways in which international organizations “‘see’ (or don’t see) the world around them, for how they see the world is critical to understanding how they tackle policy issues.” (Mahon, 78) This contributes to OECD and the World Bank’s previously mentioned failings to see the entire picture and evaluate the individual policies’ places in the larger issue of global care chains. After this, Mahon begins to dissect the organizations individually.
The OECD specializes in the economic development of its member states and their role in the same for the Global South. While the organization does focus a bit on migration, that focus began as a focus on its European states. This changed as the patterns of migration changed. Mahon states that the catalyst was “the old distinction between ‘guest worker’ migration within Europe and the ‘settler’ countries of North America and the Antipodes became increasingly irrelevant in the 1980s.” (Mahon, 80) The World Bank is more closely involved in development, specializing in the financing and research on development. There has been a large amount of controversy over the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies, and much of this controversy has discussed women and care work.
According to Mahon, “the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development continued to view economic globalization as a source of economic opportunities for women, ignoring the fact that ‘the problem is not just women’s exclusion from labour markets but also exploitative and disabling forms of inclusion’ (Razavi, 2012: 194) — either in the informal economy at home or in low-paid jobs in richer countries.” (Mahon, 84) The IOM has made it its mission to prioritize safe migration for countries “seeking to meet (increasingly temporary) labour needs, to the development of the countries of origin, and to the well-being of migrants themselves.” (Mahon, 88) The organization does not prioritize research as much as the OECD or the World Bank, but it does still publish many works.
This source will be incredibly valuable to my research project as it focuses on international organizations — nongovernmental or otherwise — and their place among the discourse on global care chains. I believe that this is an incredibly important facet of the discussion because these organizations play important roles in the social, political, legal, and economic structures across the globe.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, Second Edition. United States, Stanford University Press, 2015.
In Servants of Globalization, Rhacel Parreñas explores the ways in which globalization has affected women in the Philippines in the 1990s and how and why they have migrated as a result of these effects. She explains that Italy, the United States, Canada, and Spain have become the main destinations that the women who make up the network of global care chains prefer to make their final stop because they have a legacy of leading these women down a path that ends in permanent residency. Globalization and the social and economic consequences of it have created a diaspora – one that does not begin or end in one specific country or set of countries. Parreñas tells readers the definition of domestic work according to the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) – “work performed in or for a household or households.” (Parreñas, 3) While Parreñas focuses primarily on Filipina women, many of the issues she details apply to the larger group of women who migrate and knowingly or otherwise participate in the network of global care chains. According to Parreñas, the outcome of the decision of where to migrate is usually a financial one. The options are generally restricted to the places where the women can make the most money – in this case, doing some sort of domestic work.
Unlike the idea of migration that existed in the past where one or both parents migrated and the children would eventually follow, in the case of global care chains, the children do not follow their parents for various reasons including the women not receiving permanent residency. Among the most desirable locations, Italy and the United States are at the top of the list. Not only do these women have the potential to receive permanent residency, but they also often receive much higher pay and better working conditions than other locations, namely Singapore and Hong Kong. While the reasons these women migrate are primarily a result of economic concerns, Parreñas tells readers that there are also often reasons related to gender inequalities. Throughout history, the burden of reproductive labor – as Parreñas defines it, “the labor needed to sustain the productive labor force” – has and is often relegated to lower income women of color while higher income white women are frequently the purchasers of this labor.
I plan to use this source to explore the effects of globalization on family structures in the Philippines and how that contributes to the creation of new social and economic dynamics across the globe. While this source focuses primarily on the Philippines, for the most part the issues involved can be translated to various countries across the globe. I do not plan on solely focusing on the Philippines, but I do think that Parreñas presents a valuable perspective on transnational migration for care work that is directly applicable to global care chains.
Sachetti, Florencia Caro, et al. Women in Global Care Chains: The Need to Tackle Intersecting Inequalities in G20 Countries. 24 Nov. 2020, https://www.g20-insights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/women-in-global-care-chains-the-need-to-tackle-intersecting-inequalities-in-g20-countries-1606211465.pdf.
This policy brief, “Women in Global Care Chains: The Need to Tackle Intersecting Inequalities in G20 Countries”, was written and published by a task force focused on “social cohesion and the State.” This task force comprised of sociologists, an operations research professor, and a policy advisor, focused on the pressing need for “a comprehensive approach to global care chains.” (Sachetti et al, 3) The brief discusses the importance of focusing on the various aspects of identity that comprise the inequalities faced by the women who make up the care chains that exist across the globe. As stated by the authors, “The relationship between domestic workers and employers is one of gender, race, and class. In Argentina, this bond was part of the constriction of social hierarchies: the middle class … built its identity based on an ethnic opposition to the working class, usually migrants.” (Sachetti et al, 6)
While global care chains are a solution to a set of existing problems, they do not exist without their own issues that negatively affect the women who take part in them and their children. This article also provides a novel perspective — one that includes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on care work and highlights issues that the pandemic has brought to light. Throughout the two years of the pandemic, as everyone knows, the various inequalities faced by groups have been emphasized, and women’s issues are no exception. Being that women bear the burden of the majority of domestic work, whether caring for families or the home, as the numbers of people getting sick increase, so does the risk faced by the women forced to be responsible for caring for the people around them.
This work will be helpful to my project because it directly relates to the emphasis I intend to place on the importance of intersectionality when approaching and analyzing the issues surrounding global care chains. This is relevant because when we are approaching issues from the perspective of all forms of marginalization involved, we can ensure we are evaluating all of the circumstances impacting women who comprise global care chains.
Spanger, M and H M. Dahl. “Rethinking Global Care Chains through the Perspective of Heterogeneous States, Discursive Framings and Multi-Level Governance.” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 7.(2017): 251-259.
Published in the Nordic Journal of Migration Research, “Rethinking Global Care Chains through the Perspective of Heterogeneous States, Discursive Framings and Multi-Level Governance” shifts the discussion around global care chains from a “bottom-up approach” to one focused on the states. According to the authors, Marlene Spanger, Hanne Marlene Dahl, and Elin Peterson, global care chains have primarily been discussed from a feminist and sociological perspective, but in this article, they seek to explore the topic from a different angle. Initially defined by American sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the early 2000s, global care chains have not often been viewed through a framework that explores the role of the states involved in them. In this article, the authors seek to answer the following question, “how can discursive framings of policy problems and tension within the state and across the levels of the state contribute to an understanding of global care chains?” (Spanger et al, 251) This work utilizes three different approaches to answer this question, feminist state theory, discursive policy analysis, and multi-level governance.
The authors begin the article by detailing the problems found in Arlie Hochschild’s initial research and work on the topic – a lack of state presence, Western bias, and the disregard for men and their contributions to care work. The first section begins by asking (and answering) where the state lies in this issue. In work focused on the United States, the state holds a minor role, one it played “by virtue of its silence when it comes to care issue, leaving it to the market and civil society to care for the vulnerable: children, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly.” (Spanger et al, 251) In European states, the position of the state in care work is vastly different.
This source will aid me in discussing the policy-based aspect of global care chains and the various ways in which multi-level governance contributes to the creation of global care chains. I also plan to use this article to emphasize the detrimental nature of Western bias on critical evaluations of transnational issues – specifically global care chains.
Vaittinen, Tiina. ‘Reading global care chains as migrant trajectories: A theoretical framework for the understanding of structural change’. Women’s Studies International Forum 47 (2014): 191–202. Web.
In “Reading global care chains as migrant trajectories: A theoretical framework for the understanding of structural change,” Tiina Vaittinen, a Finnish sociologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow, discusses the context missing in most of the discourse surrounding global care chains. Vaittinen begins by defining the concept of global care chains as, “a predominant analytical framework,” and continues by emphasizing the importance of evaluating the structural change in the global political economy (GPE) prompted by the “movement of care” as she calls it. (Vaittinen, 191) In this article, Vaittinen places the global political economy in a new context, one that evaluates it as what she describes as “an emergent material configuration.” (Vaittinen, 192) This means that the global political economy is to be understood as an ever-changing entity unlike many of the other contexts that approach it as “an insurmountable structure.” (Vaittinen, 192)
As the article progresses, Vaittinen breaks the concept of global care chains down and connects it to the unequal framework of the global political economy by emphasizing that due to the GPE’s inequality, the women, children, and families who comprise the individual links of global care chains do not exist on equal standing with each other. The article also details the unequal nature of the initial discussion of global care chains as a whole, explaining that there is not enough research that focuses on the links of or entire global care chains that exist in and do not stray from the Global South.
This article will be valuable to my project because it provides another context within which to evaluate global care chains and the global political economy. It also provides a critical evaluation of the initial and continuing discussion of global care chains. I will also be using this source to add a perspective of global care chains that remain in the Global South so as to avoid a Western-centric focus on the concept.
Weir, Allison (2008). Global Care Chains: Freedom, Responsibility, and Solidarity. Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (S1):166-175.
Published in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, “Global Care Chains: Freedom, Responsibility, and Solidarity” articulates the importance of approaching global care chains from the perspective of the power dynamics involved in them. These power dynamics are focused on class and race, and the author, British historian Allison Weir, discusses what Arlie Hochschild labels as the “care drain.” The mainstream feminist approach to issues plaguing women is one that prioritizes the liberation of all women, but without understanding the various identities that contribute to the compounded marginalization of certain groups of women, we cannot liberate them and without them, we cannot liberate all women. This directly relates to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s TED talk “The Urgency of Intersectionality”, in which she details the necessity for what she calls “frames” with which to examine certain social issues. She states, “without frames that allow us to see how social problems impact all the members of a targeted group, many will fall through the cracks of our movements, left to suffer in virtual isolation. But it doesn’t have to be this way.” (Crenshaw, 2016) Some of the women currently falling through these cracks are the women forced to migrate and participate in global care chains and until we properly understand the conditions prompting them to leave their families behind to provide for them, nothing can be done to prevent them from falling through these cracks.
This article also demands the reconceptualization of the idea of freedom to one that focuses on collaborative and intersectional freedom. In this body of work, Weir argues that “freedom for women – for all women – requires a social system that prioritizes and values care, both by ensuring that we are all cared for, and by ensuring that all are responsible for care work, and for the carework from which they benefit.” (Weir, 167)
I plan to use this source to further articulate the realities of the power dynamics existing within global care chains and the ways in which an intersectional feminist approach can benefit the understanding and exploration of these chains.
Yeates, Nicola. “A Global Political Economy of Care.” Social Policy and Society, vol. 4, no. 2, 2005, pp. 227–234., doi:10.1017/S1474746404002350.
“A Global Political Economy of Care” was published in the Journal of Social Policy and Society in 2005 by Nicola Yeates, an Irish professor of Social Policy. While the exploration of global care chains has primarily been a sociological concern, Yeates reminds her readers — likely to be students and/or other academics pursuing a scholarly understanding of the topic — that there is another field within which global care chains can be explored. This field is called care studies. As stated by Yeates, care studies can be defined as, “a multi-disciplinary field of enquiry to which political science and economics (particularly feminist perspectives in each) have also made significant contributions.” (Yeates, 227).
In this article Yeates emphasizes the place of social policy in care work and vice versa. She does this by discussing the missing perspectives in pre-existing dialogue on global care chains whether that be from a political/economic perspective, a social perspective, or a feminist perspective. While these are different perspectives, I would like to call attention to the fact that feminist perspectives can exist within both political/economic and social perspectives. Through her analysis, Yeates also brings dimension to Arlie Hochschild’s discussion of global care chains by reminding her readers that while people and families are linked via the processes of global care chains, “they also link economic and welfare systems of different levels of ‘development’ and countries occupying different positions in the international political economy.” (Yeates, 230)
This article is relevant to my project because it focuses on the various facets of global care chains as functions of labor. I plan to use it to provide my project with a multi-dimensional evaluation of global care chains. This article will be helpful because while Yeates explores global care chains from a new position, she uses the already existing discourse to do it, effectively building upon it.
[1] Bambra, C. “Defamilialization and welfare state regimes: A cluster analysis.” International Journal of Social Welfare (2007): 326-338.
[2] Hochschild, A. R. (2004). Love and gold. In A. R. Hochschild, & B. Ehrenreich (Eds.), Global women: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. New York: Owl Books.
[3] Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, Second Edition. United States, Stanford University Press, 2015.
[4] Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, Second Edition. United States, Stanford University Press, 2015.