The intermediation market for domestic and care services: work, emotions and symbolic boundaries

• Grant number: 20/05176-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2021
• End date: November 17, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Nadya Araujo Guimarães
• Grantee: Anna Bárbara Araujo
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project focuses on the intermediation market for a special type of work, one that provides domestic and care services, analyzing intermediaries enterprises and workers in the context of work recruitment in São Paulo. It is intended to approach the theme from an innovative point of view with regard to the field of studies on labor markets and job intermediaries. On the one hand, focusing on a sector little studied by the literature of the field, but of increasing relevance in society and in this market; on the other hand, taking as an analytical gateway the way in which emotions management and the mobilization of symbolic boundaries are configured as part of the commercialization and dissemination of these services by enterprises. But the project is also innovative in what concerns the field of care studies. On the one hand, it contributes to supplying the lack of research that focuses on the ways of recruitment (notably via intermediaries) in their links with the ways of employment and use of work at home; we assume that the organization and the meanings attributed to work in these enterprises affect the construction and identity negotiations in the workplace, and we hypothesize that the intermediation enterprises are producing new forms of consumption of domestic and care services. On the other hand, the project intends to link domestic and care services, usually analyzed in lines of studies that have little dialogue, because they are referred to different corpus of literature. (AU)