In and Beyond the Crisis. the Relations of Gender, Race and Class in Care and Care Work Illustrated By the Austrian and German Case

The paper argues that in the contemporary crisis of finance, economy and the welfare state a fundamental problem of modern and especially capitalist societies arises in new forms: By priorising the market economy capitalist societies are not able to care for their members in respect to life as the end of caring instead of caring as a mean of economy. In the first step this connex will be elaborated by a feminist and intersectional discussion of Marxist, Weberian and contemporary analysis of the relations between capitalism and crisis. Main issue will be the fundamental relations of gender, race, class, by which the division of the public and the private sphere, of paid and unpaid work, of different societal sectors are shaped. Second, the contribution focuses on the Austrian and German case and analyzes how care and care work are organized in and between the profit and non-profit sector, the public sector and the private household. Through the lenses of the approach of institutional logics and the concept of intersectionality and empirically the third step shows, how the economic shift is reorganizing the relations of these sectors; this process profiles care work in a wide range between its commodification / decommodification, professionalization / deprofessionalization, formal / informal organization and is underlied by and embedded in gender and migration regimes. It can be shown, how these regimes economically, politically and culturally are regulating the division of labor between women and men, native and migrant people, skilled and unskilled work. By this way the Austrian and German care regimes can be considered as an example for dealing with the crisis by reorganizing the relations of gender, race and class.