{"title":"Producing (im)mobilities in home care for the elderly: the role of home care agencies in Switzerland","authors":"Huey Shy Chau","doi":"10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.18396","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The Free Movement of Persons Agreement has fostered the emergence of a new market for live-in care in Switzerland. Private care agencies recruit women from the European Union (EU) accession states and place them as live-in carers for the elderly in private households. This paper focuses on how these agencies organise these live-in care arrangements. Drawing on concepts of the politics of mobility, I analyse the production of (im)mobilities through the placement and recruitment practices of care agencies and the power relations that underlie live-in care arrangements. The findings show that live-in care is constituted both by mobilities, exemplified by care workers’ circular movements and need to be highly mobile, and by care workers’ immobilities once they start working in a household. The care workers’ mobility is in turn enabled by the agencies’ placement practices and by infrastructures specialised in their movements, which serve as moorings.","PeriodicalId":39906,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Ageing and Later Life","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2019-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Ageing and Later Life","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.18396","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
The Free Movement of Persons Agreement has fostered the emergence of a new market for live-in care in Switzerland. Private care agencies recruit women from the European Union (EU) accession states and place them as live-in carers for the elderly in private households. This paper focuses on how these agencies organise these live-in care arrangements. Drawing on concepts of the politics of mobility, I analyse the production of (im)mobilities through the placement and recruitment practices of care agencies and the power relations that underlie live-in care arrangements. The findings show that live-in care is constituted both by mobilities, exemplified by care workers’ circular movements and need to be highly mobile, and by care workers’ immobilities once they start working in a household. The care workers’ mobility is in turn enabled by the agencies’ placement practices and by infrastructures specialised in their movements, which serve as moorings.
期刊介绍：
The International Journal of Ageing and Later Life (IJAL) serves an audience interested in social and cultural aspects of ageing and later life development. As such, the Journal welcomes contributions that aim at advancing the theoretical and conceptual debate on research on ageing and later life. Contributions based on empirical work are also welcome as are methodologically interested discussions of relevance to the study of ageing and later life. Being an international journal, IJAL acknowledges the need to understand the cultural diversity and context dependency of ageing and later life.
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