Gendered Perspectives on the Interrelation of Paid Work and Care Work in Peripheral Council Housing. an Intergenerational Biographical Study in Vienna

In my contribution, I aim to analyse the biographical intertwinement of living and working in a peripheral industrial area of Vienna from a gender-specific perspective. I ask how women (and, in case that I acquire the respective interviewees, also men) in the age groups of 65+ and 35+ years, who positively define themselves as “working parents”, perceive the intertwinement of paid work and care work in a peripheral, industrial council estate-area. In this context, I ask if -- apart from gendered differences -- also intergenerational differences can be observed. Furthermore, I am interested in the changing notion of “care” throughout the life-span: from caring for one´s children to caring for one´s parents and caring for one´s husband/wife or being taken care of in older age.

Methodologically, I combine “spatialized” community studies with biographical research, whereby special focus lies on current research in this tradition that addresses the biographical rupture caused by the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist relations of production and its impact on working conditions and care arrangements. Thereby, I triangulate biographical approaches with ethnographic and socio-spatial methodology: I conduct interviews with two generations of “working parents” and focus on individual pathways regarding education, paid work and care work in the specific Viennese setting of social housing. I integrate a socio-spatial view by conducting a “Social Area Analysis” of relevant social infrastructure on-site that determined those pathways.

My approach aims to strengthen a biographical focus on the concrete “spatiality” of caring experiences and care arrangements in traditional social council housing in Vienna throughout the individual life span. Furthermore, I aim to enrich current debates on care work and local (caring) communities and to inform sociological analyses of institutional change and post-binary life spheres (public/domestic, work/life) with regard to the interrelation of so-called productive and reproductive labour .