The commodification of care: Does paying for elder care matter?

Abstract

What are the changes in social life that paid care generates, in a context where kin have been expected to provide elder care? This question opens up key questions about the exploitation of women, who often provide domestic labor and care to their kin without pay; and about the spread of capitalism, in which goods and services required for human survival are exchanged through markets. This paper explores how paid elder care in Ghana is made possible practically and ideologically by the social blurring of the difference between nonkin paid care and kin unpaid care: one, by mistrust between kin that make the exchange of services and labor shorter term and more balanced; and two, by treating paid care between neighbors as a gift. Ultimately, I argue, the commodification of elder care is not a straightforward marker of the expansion of global capitalism, but it has led to increased class differences and tensions between women of different economic means.