The Productivity of Care: Contextualizing Care in Situated Interaction and Shedding Light on its Latent Purposes

Abstract

Care work may be connected with emotional and psychological exhaustion but also gratification, reward, and self-empowerment. Caregivers experience both positive and negative emotional states in caring situations, and further studies on the rewarding and energizing aspects of care may help us to broaden our understanding of how we can reduce the degree of burden while increasing the sense of satisfaction. This article shows how the focus on emotion is a necessary step to show the ambivalences and the grey areas connected with the concept of care as well as to challenge the not fully explored assumption that care is often associated with burden and stress and viewed as a result of circumstances. It reports the findings of a micro-situated study of daily care activities among 80 caregivers. Care is seen as a strategic site to grasp deeper insights into the interactional mechanisms through which the emotional dynamics revolving around care produce unanticipated outcomes in terms of symbolic and practical productivity.

Keywords:

• Informal Care
• Emotion
• Inequality
• Productivity of Care

Acknowledgements

This research was funded with a five-year William Penn Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and three summer fellowships (‘Gertrude and Otto Pollak’ summer research fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2005–2007). The author would like to thank Professor Randall Collins, Professor Robin Leidner and Professor Frank Furstenberg for their comments and advice on this research.

Notes

¹The analysis was guided mostly by what Denzin (2001) calls interpretive interactionism and other scholars have called interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith 2004; Smith et al. 1999).

²Broadly definable as belonging to the middle class and upper middle class.

³Research on gay/lesbian parenthood has concerned mainly the different styles of parenting, the different networks of resources, and the different developmental outcomes between children raised by lesbian and gay parents and those raised by heterosexual parents. No studies have considered how and under what conditions the caregiver's sexual orientation can enhance or hinder feelings of well-being, self-confidence, enthusiasm, support, and trust during the care episode or ‘souvenir’, intended here as a form of third-order circulation of symbols in Collins’ terms (2004, p. 99).

⁴Within the continuum which in Collins’ Interaction Ritual model goes from formalized and strongly focused to informal and relatively unfocused interactions, I am referring here mostly to the informal and less focused interactions, which nonetheless define clearly structured individual reputations, increasingly more important than categorical identities (2004, pp. 272, 291, 295).

⁵See Rosanna Hertz (2006); Frank Furstenberg (2002, 2005).

⁶James (1913).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alessandro Pratesi

Alessandro Pratesi is Research Associate at the Research Institute for Health and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK