A new currency for paid care: Circles of reciprocity

Abstract

The article offers a fresh perspective on the social value of paid care, and how we, as a society, can assign its full value. The social importance of paid care is highly reliant on the nonmarket attributes of the care offered. Thus, care is extremely valuable when it is bestowed with loving presence, kindness, and concern. The nonmarket characteristics of care work establish unique types of ties that transform egoistic individuals into a human society. However, the social import of this work is not acknowledged when we rely on the market to reflect care's value. Flattening the value of care solely based on its market dimension may lead to care being emptied of its nonmarket elements over time, transforming the essence of care, the relationships within which care is given as well as the identity and social fabric of the welfare state. To sustain and foster the nonmarket attributes of paid care, the article proposes a theoretical notion of reciprocity-rather than exchange-on the axis between the family, the community, and the state as a way to ascribe nonmonetized value to these attributes.

Doing “gendered exit”: Work, care and the moral practices of disabled persons

“…While biographical and cultural particulars that relate to gender and age frequently structure the individual's opportunities to become a subject of “legitimate dependence” and to assume the care responsibilities it brings (Chattoo & Ahmad, 2008, p. 557), disabled persons may also encounter challenges in fulfilling their carer roles in sync with conventional forms of a meaningful life (Baraitser, 2017). Importantly, neither the market nor the state has provided sufficient reciprocal support for care activities, in terms of the institutionalization of decent pay or citizenship, leading to a continuous devaluation of care that disproportionately affects females (Regev‐Messalem, 2022). Furthermore, the presumed but troubled nexus between care and the female's morality risks confining the ambit of the ethics to the private, familial locus of expression, reinforcing the discourse of traditional gender roles rather than exploring the potential of cosmopolitan values (Tronto, 1993).…”