Working Alternatives

American and Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy

John C. Seitz, Christine Firer Hinze, John C. Seitz, Christine Firer Hinze

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823288366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Working Alternatives explores economic life from a humanistic and multidisciplinary perspective, with a particular eye on religions' implications in practices of work, management, supply, production, remuneration, and exchange. Its contributors draw upon historical, ethical, business, and theological conversations considering the sources of economic sustainability and justice.The essays in this book—from scholars of business, religious ethics, and history—offer readers practical understanding and analytical leverage over these pressing issues. Modern Catholic social teaching—a 125-year-old effort to apply Christian thinking about the implications of faith for social, political, and economic circumstances—provides the key springboard for these discussions.Contributors: Gerald J. Beyer, Alison Collis Greene, Kathleen Holscher, Michael Naughton, Michael Pirson, Nicholas Rademacher, Vincent Stanley, Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar, Kirsten Swinth, Sandra Waddock

Part I: Seeing Differently

Alternative Visions of Economy and Work

The Care Economy as Alternative Economy

SANDRA SULLIVAN-DUNBAR

This volume seeks to examine experiments in “alternative economies” and the conceptions of the human person that undergird them. In my contribution here, I will focus on an enormous and pervasive alternative economy that has existed for longer than the market economy: the care economy. By care economy, I mean human activity that is oriented toward sustaining life and promoting basic wellbeing, whether that activity is paid or unpaid, and the material goods that are devoted toward this task, whether or not those goods are mediated through the market. In one sense, it is not appropriate to call the care economy an alternative economy; as I will argue, our contemporary conception of the economic must be broadened to incorporate care. Nevertheless, the care economy can be seen as alternative because it has largely been written out of the discipline of economics and of everyday conceptions of economy. A volume exploring alternative economies cannot be complete without attention to this under-theorized economic activity. When we begin to think of the economy as incorporating care and other work oriented toward sustaining life, we find that many fundamental assumptions about human motives and the human good that underlie contemporary economic theory come into question.

In this essay I explore the care economy. I document its erasure during the development of classical and neoclassical economic theory. I track recent work by feminist economists and development theorists to rein-corporate care into conceptions of the economic, taking account of the proportion of overall economic activity that care represents and the implications of care relations for our understandings of the human person and social relations. To think of care as economic is to disrupt the theorization of economic activity as motivated primarily and predictably by self-interest. Care work is very often unpaid, so establishing caregiving as economic activity signifies that the economy is not coextensive with the market. At the same time, a significant portion of care work is paid, which shows that market activity can incorporate relations involving other-regard and self-gift. Furthermore, paid and unpaid care are deeply interrelated with one another, often coexisting within the same caring practice. These facts have implications for our understanding of the economic as well as for social welfare policies and development policies.

Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (CV), calls for a more integral understanding of development, and for a “further and deeper reflection on the meaning of the economy and its goals.”¹ One of my primary theses is that there exist suggestive parallels between many of Benedict’s concerns in this encyclical, and concerns expressed by feminist economists addressing the care economy. These include challenges to sharp binaries between the market and the state and affirmation of a spectrum of motives driving economic activity. Benedict and feminist economists also share a critique of an anthropology that highlights autonomous choosers and ignores aspects of our existence that come to us as gift, as well as a concern for economic development that addresses the holistic wellbeing of all persons. These parallels, coming from what might be seen as very different perspectives, suggest that contemporary economic theory indeed holds a far too narrow understanding of economic activity. The parallels also suggest that some of Benedict’s own concerns might be addressed via engagement with economists studying caring labor. However, Benedict does not draw on feminist economics at all, nor does he so much as mention the care economy. The practical impact of his ideas is seriously curtailed by this omission. Dialogue with scholarly work on the care economy would provide Catholic economic thinkers with additional, powerful tools to press the central concerns expressed by Benedict but would also challenge these thinkers to accept a more complex and pluralist account of the appropriate social organization of caregiving than Benedict appears to presume. This dialogue would help developers of the Catholic social tradition to embrace more embodied and material dimensions of “the astonishing experience of gift” that is a central theme of CV and to articulate more clearly a role for the state in supporting the care economy.² This chapter begins that dialogue.

The first section of this essay will briefly trace the history of the exclusion of care from conceptions of economy during the evolution of classical and neoclassical economics, as well as of the sharp bifurcation of altruistic and self-interested motives within economic theory. The second section will turn to CV, pointing out some initial parallels between Benedict’s central concerns in this encyclical and concerns raised by feminist economists in their treatments of the care economy. The third section will address efforts by economists and development theorists to reincorporate caregiving into economic analysis, including methods to measure the scope of the care economy, and will discuss the role of the state in supporting the care economy. The fourth section will address concerns about the “commodification” of care and attend to the complexities of motive in the care economy. Throughout, I will place Benedict into conversation with scholarship on the care economy, arguing that we can only make progress toward the vision of development outlined in CV if we take into consideration the pervasive economy of care.

How Care Was Excluded from Economics: A Brief History

Caregiving was not always considered to be outside the scope of economics. Before the Industrial Revolution, the economy (or “oeconomy”) was understood in terms of stewardship of resources to assure subsistence and wellbeing. Writing in 1769, Sir James Steuart connected economy in the household with political economy:

Oeconomy, in general, is the art of providing for all the wants of a family, with prudence and frugality. . . . The object of it, in a private family, is . . . to provide for the nourishment, the other wants, and the employment of every individual. . . . What oeconomy is in a family, political oeconomy is in a state . . . The principle object of this science is to secure a certain fund of subsistence for all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which may render it precarious; to provide every thing necessary for supplying the wants of the society, and to employ the inhabitants . . . in such a manner as naturally to create the reciprocal relations and dependencies between them, so as to make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants.³

Steuart’s vision of “oeconomy” was embedded in a thoroughly hierarchical and patriarchal understanding of both family and government. Still, feminist economists have suggested that we recover this notion of economics as “provisioning,” as an important ingredient alongside economics as the study of market behavior.⁴

How was this notion lost in the first place? Economic historians have traced the erasure of the domestic economy from the scope of the economic, beginning with the work of Adam Smith. Smith’s Wealth of Nations was written in the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution, as production increasingly moved outside of the household into small “manufactories.” Interested in the economic growth that new production processes could generate, Smith distinguished productive from unproductive labor, defining the latter as labor aimed at capital accumulation, which would increase the productivity of future labor.⁵ Unproductive labor was valuable, but only in the sense of maintaining subsistence in the here and now: “A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers. He grows poor, by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.”⁶ Smith did include “the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society” as a form of productive labor, resulting in “a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in (the) person.”⁷ This included the labor of teachers and masters of apprentices. He did not, however, include straightforward caring labor, such as child-rearing, within the scope of productive labor.⁸

Indeed, the analytic tools that Smith developed could not easily be applied to caregiving relations. Much caregiving activity is aimed precisely at subsistence, at the value of living well here and now within embodied limits. Caregiving is not an activity that lends itself to ever-increasing productivity. Unlike Smith’s pin factory workers, increasing production through the division of labor, caregivers must be generalists, engaging a wide and varied range of activities within their caregiving practice. Furthermore, care frequently involves deep attachment and attention to very particular needs and circumstances. Economists presume a certain degree of fungibility in the labor supply, allowing them to predict wages and labor mobility. But for many types of care, if caregivers are treated as fungible, the care recipient cannot thrive. Recognizing this, caregivers do not act according to predictable laws of self-interest in allocating their caregiving labor. And although care for children might be theorized as an investment in later productivity (and it is this, though this is certainly not all that it is), care for the elderly or for persons with severe disabilities is aimed at the present end of living well here and now, not at later productivity.⁹ Care escapes Smith’s frame because it often involves a range of motives: care cannot be good care without some degree of other-regard, of placing the needs of the care recipient over one’s own needs some of the time. Yet care can also be deeply rewarding, and caregivers must find ways to care for themselves in order to continue caring for others.

Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann suggest Smith gave little attention to the domestic economy in part because complex motives undermine predictability. We can predict what fair but self-interested persons will do within exchange relations with strangers. We cannot so easily predict the outcome of economic activity embedded in intensive relations imbued with affection, self-interest, inequality, and power relations.¹⁰ Additionally, Smith could ignore the caregiving economy, because he assumed that care would occur: women were presumed to be naturally suited to it, and their love for care recipients was presumed sufficient and reliable motivation for such labor. In Smith’s work, therefore, self-interest drove economic relations outside the home; affective relations and other-regard were located inside the home.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the industrial economy increasingly became a commercial economy, the discipline of economics evolved further toward an emphasis on market and exchange processes. The “marginalist school,” what is today known as neoclassical economics, defined the value of commodities as the price at which supply meets demand.¹¹ Economic activity that occurred outside the market—including unpaid labor—posed a problem here; without a price, how can the value be determined? Alfred Marshall, author of the classic Principles of Economics that was first published in 1890 and remained the standard introductory textbook for decades, asserted that “(t)he most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings; and of that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the mother.”¹² Still, he argued that “gratuitous” (unpaid) services should be “left to be accounted for separately.”¹³ Marshall argued for the inclusion of salaries for domestic servants in calculations of social income, and noted the “inconsistency in omitting the heavy domestic work which is done by women and other members of the household, where no servants are kept.”¹⁴ However, he did nothing to address this inconsistency. Marshall’s followers quickly enshrined the exclusion of unpaid domestic labor from economic calculations, and failed to pursue the separate accounting that Marshall suggested.¹⁵ Thus, nonmarket labor, production, and exchange simply disappeared from the subject matter of marginalist economics.

In addition, the marginalist school further sharpened the bifurcation of self-interest from other-regard, and the assignment of these motives to sharply separated public and private spheres. Outside the family, “preferences” were theorized as “inscrutable.” In other words, we have no way of determining what and how much a particular person desires except by observing his choices in the marketplace; we cannot access another’s internal experience.¹⁶ However, within the family, preferences are “soluble” and family members hold a joint utility function. That is to say, family members are fully aware of the preferences of all other family members and desire things as a unit.¹⁷ The family is altruistic, noncompetitive, and family members know each other intimately. Thus, the family is the mirror opposite of the self-interested, competitive marketplace. In either case, there is no objective account of the goods to be sought through economic activity. Preferences, either observed through self-interested choices in the marketplace or perceiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Seeing Differently: Alternative Visions of Economy and Work
• Part II. Valuing Differently: Challenging Work and Business as Usual
• Part III. Practicing Differently: Creating Alternative ways of Working
• List of Contributors
• Index