The commodification of informal care: joining and resisting marketization processes

Informal care gaps and widespread resistance to institutional care settings have fostered a system in Austria in which live-in migrant care workers substitute the idealized family carer in people’s households. As a consequence, an ever-increasing market has been established on which predominantly women from other countries seek and find employment opportunities. Drawing on Fraser’s utilization of Polanyi’s concept of the double (triple) movement, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that due to different national systemic conditions both increasing marketization (in the care workers’ countries of origin) and resistance to market and state logics in care (in Austria) meet in generating a unique transnational market of care. In this, moral resistance to both an increasing marketization and an extension of the state, as well as moral longing for informal care need to be seen as part of the process that has generated and boosted the development of self-marketization of Eastern European care workers.