Economic Geography

Caring labour 
As well as new work on gender, occupations and organisational cultures, feminist
debates have placed domestic labour, both waged and unwaged, on the research
agenda. Nicky Gregson and Michelle Lowe (1994), for example, wrote a splendid
book, a decade ago, about the commodification of domestic labour looking 
at the class divisions and patterns of regional migration associated with the rise
of what they termed a ‘new servant class’. Placing domestic labour, especially that
part of it that consists of caring for others, at the centre of economic analysis
raises a further interesting set of questions about the nature of goods and 
services in contemporary service economies and about the principles structuring
economic exchanges and how different activities are valued (McDowell 2004b).
The production and maintenance of children and adults combines a number of
different attributes of a service or good that are not usually recognised in the
classic definitions in economics and economic geography. Care, for example,
whether of children or other types of dependants, not only consists of looking
after the cared-for, in the sense of making sure that no harm comes to them, but
it consists of nurturing – of loving and caring for dependants and ensuring 
that as far as possible their well-being is secured and enhanced. Thus care is a
composite good, where it is difficult to place a market value on the different
aspects. Furthermore, caring is bound up with notions of love and duty, with the
ideas of mutual reciprocity and is often a gift relationship outside the bounds of
market exchange. Maternal love, in particular, is assumed to be ‘natural’, part of
the social construction of femininity outlined earlier, and so such love is both
beyond value and under-valued, depending on the locus of the exchange (Folbre
2001; Folbre and Nelson 2000). Typically, caring in the home, at least when the
care is undertaken by a close relation to the cared-for, is unvalued. But even when

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Linda McDowell
the exchange takes place in the market, it is still under-valued, largely because of
its association with the natural attributes of femininity and so the providers of 
care in the market – who are in the main women – are amongst the lowest paid
workers in the labour market.
As well as the association of care with femininity, there is a further attribute of
caring as an economic good that also explains its low rewards in the market. The
provision of care is stubbornly resistant to productivity increases, keeping the cost
of provision high despite the poor pay for employees in this sector. Care by an
individual cannot easily be replaced or substituted by an alternative form of 
provision. It is hard to mechanise caring or to significantly extend the scope of
provision and so there is little potential for economies of scale. As a consequence
most care is provided in what Donath (2000) has termed ‘the other economy’ –
provided by relatives, or through forms of reciprocal exchange, or in informal
relationships – as the purchase of high quality care in the market is beyond the
reach of most families. Feminist economic analysts have thus insisted on an
expansion of the definition of the subject matter of their respective disciplines to
include work both within the home and in the local community or in the infor-
mal sector: types of work that until recently have not loomed large in the stud-
ies of the nature of production, the allocation of labour or the rise of networked
organisations in advanced industrial economies that largely constitute the subject
matter of contemporary economic geography. Furthermore, the masculinist lens
that defines work as waged labour in the formal economy sees only part of 
the question, providing a partial picture of the current transformations in the
space-economy.