SOC352H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Informal Sector, Occupational Hazard, Devaluation
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Lecture 10
Expanding on Care
• Care = emotional investment in another person’s well-being + a desire to take action to improve
someone’s well-being
o Unpaid care work is an important impact for families
o And they also help to contribute economically to a country’s GDP and health
• Care work “provides a face-to-face service that develops human capabilities of the recipient”
(England, Budig, and Folbre)
o It is not enough to say that care work is only emotional labour
o There is other parts of care work such as physical work
o But often care work is both physical and emotional in nature
• Care work as nurturance and reproductive labour (Duffy)
o Identifies two major way care work is organized
o The distinction between the two shows that sometimes care work can be either or both
o Care work is a unique practice, or skill with an emphasis on relationality
o This idea of relationality connects to the face to face service aspect by England et al.
o Reproductive labour- the physical work of care
• Caring about and caring for (Arber and Ginn)
o Caring about is the emotional and relational aspect
o Caring for is the action of actually doing something
Emotional Labour
• Refers to the face to face care work
• Can be formal or informal in nature
• Emotional investment aspect of caring
o Requires the process of emotional management
o Managing feelings in order to follow the emotional requirements of the job
• Surface acting vs. deep acting
o Ways of emotional management
• Emotional labour “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward
countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild, pg. 7).
o Workers can feel estranged from their own feelings
o Which is why it is also important to think of it as an occupational hazard
o It is often invisible
Invisible labour in the workforce
• Care work can be classified as formal or informal
o Formal receives a wage
o Informal does not, eg. Elder care or child care
o Informal work is often invisible because there is no wage associated with this type of
work
• Devaluation of care work linked to invisible labour
• Symbolic association of care work with mothering
o Seen as an extension women’s natural role
o And thus do not believe that it requires any skills
• “Wages of virtue” (Baines)
o suggests care work should not be done for financial motivation but rather for helping
someone
o this contributes to the gendered wage gap as women often do care work
o wages are often low because it is not seen as requiring any skills
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