About the Project

What is the project about?

CareOrg foregrounds the meso-level of the transnational organization of senior care in Europe, including intermediary agencies, informal and formal platforms and social media, as well as transnationally shared infrastructure. In doing so, the project focuses on the sending region, with particular attention on Central and Eastern Europe. CareOrg will deliver much-needed insights to develop more sustainable and equal long-term senior care in Europe.

How do we work?

We are an international and interdisciplinary research team of experts in the fields of labor, mobility, care, and ageing studies based at the Goethe University, Frankfurt (Germany), Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic), Center for Social Sciences, Budapest (Hungary), Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Institute for Systematic Alternatives, Kyiv (Ukraine) and at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands).

Based on a cross-thematic and cross-country comparative research design, CareOrg will use a mix of methods, including comparative policy analysis and five country-specific and topic-oriented in-depth case studies.

Poland

Transnational intermediaries as agents of change in the regularization and professionalization of migrant live-in care work.

This sub-project investigates the transnational organization of live-in senior care in private homes mainly in Germany, but also in Poland and recently the Netherlands and the role that intermediaries play in defining and codifying what migrant live-in senior care is. The focus will lie on education and professional recognition in the processes of recruitment and work management. For CEE, Poland is a pioneer in the development of migration infrastructure in live-in senior care, as both a receiving country for Ukraine and a steppingstone for recruitment from other CEE and non-EU countries. The sub-project will investigate

education as a business field in the making;
professionalization, formalization and digitalization in recruitment and work;
institutionalization of the sector: the way in which migrant live-in care work is addressed in public, scholarly, and professional discourse, and is channeled into policies and regulations.

Meet Our Team from Poland

Czech Republic and Slovakia

Political mobilization, skills, and knowledge in shared care infrastructures.

This case study will investigate the interconnected cases of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with focus on the emergence of a shared infrastructure for the recruitment of care workers and for matching them with clients, as well as for transportation and training. It will analyze the role that these shared infrastructures play in

the introduction and creation of „new” care work destinations;
the transition to formal care work environment and overall professionalization; and
the political organization of care workers.

It will prioritize the perspectives of care workers and will start with their bottom-up initiatives and social spaces, such as bounded transportation and online fora, which often serve as recruitment spaces for training sessions and political organization by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and unions. The study will pay close attention to new social relations (coalitions, tensions, or competition) emerging among care workers from different countries and ethnic backgrounds.

Meet Our Team from Czech Republic and Slovakia

Hungary

Platforms, agencies, and the ethnic mobility of care workers

This sub-project focuses on the market-based care provision in Hungary, and particularly on different market players active in the Hungarian home care and residential care sectors. The case study thus provides an example where the marketization of senior care has only recently started. The shrinking role of the state in the provision of social care services for the senior population has resulted in the emergence of new actors in eldercare. The home-based care market is poorly regulated in Hungary. While brokerage agencies, matchmaking companies, and digital platforms bring together supply and demand, their operations are rooted in informal practices. The case study will investigate the operational strategies and challenges of brokerage agencies and matchmaking companies, as well as those of players in the formal senior care market, e.g., emerging private nursing homes as an important component of the marketization process. Besides, the case study contributes to the investigation of movements embedded in historical ties and ethnic networks of transnational care workers that shape the local care market.

Meet Our Team from Hungary

Romania

The transnational care drain and marketization of senior care.

This case study explores the institutionalization and marketization of senior care in Romania. As a result of mass migration over the past two decades, the country has experienced a serious care drain that affects several generations. Coupled with the shrinking role of the welfare state, this has resulted in the reorganization of intergenerational care strategies and the emergence of new forms of organized and professionalized care. The sub-project investigates the ways senior care is organized transnationally and the emerging new forms of senior care arrangements that involve outsourcing and monetization, and that remove care from the private family realm.

Meet Our Team from Romania

Ukraine

The transnational care drain and practices of professionalization in senior care

This sub-project investigates the effects of outmigration and the transnational organization of care in the Ukrainian care regime, with a specific focus on (returning migrant) care workers and gaps in the care sector. The chronic care drain that characterizes the Ukrainian context has left behind a fragmented, individualized, and localized senior care landscape that is defined by weak, poor-quality state engagement, combined with individualized family-based care practices and the sporadic informal marketization of care services. The case-study will focus on gaps in the Ukrainian care sector, on care arrangements of Ukrainian care migrants and on how the experience of care migration navigates their choices between the available options.

We are aware of the rapidly and dramatically deteriorating situation due to the war in Ukraine: loss of life; massive damage to livelihoods, infrastructure, and homes; an exodus of the population (especially women with children); and a concomitant change in demography (with men, seniors, and people with disabilities all staying behind). All this will drastically alter the picture surrounding the need for care and its provision. CareOrg has a collective commitment and the scholarly capacity to address the situation as it unfolds.

Meet Our Team from Ukraine

We are committed to engaged research: We will do research participatorily in local workshops to exchange information for policy interventions, capacity building, and knowledge co-production (regional, national, EU level), and make a documentary film to mobilize key participants and to allow them an active part in the production of knowledge.

Background of the project

Research into global care work has identified contradictions between accessible care as a right and a public good, and the commodification of care, which is primarily oriented towards marketability and profitability. CareOrg will use this tension as a starting point but will push the debate by foregrounding the under-researched and under-theorized meso-level of transnational care organization and its processes of commodification, marketization, professionalization, and transnationalization. Specific attention will be paid to how the identified processes relate to decent work in order to identify practical “bottlenecks” in care demand and provision and suggest policy implications based on identified landscapes of care in the region, their transnational care markets, care chains and issues of intersecting inequalities.

CareOrg is funded within the programme “Challenges and Potentials for Europe” by the Volkswagen Foundation.