[Quelles sont les incidences de théoriser le care comme un travail ? C’est la question à laquelle répond Pascale Molinier, professeure de psychologie sociale à l’université Sorbonne-Paris-Nord. Ses recherches se situent pour la plupart à l’intersection entre la psychodynamique du travail, les études de care et la psychothérapie institutionnelle. ]
Some cave art specialists precede categories of images that are uncertain or subject to controversy with an exclamation point (example: “!” vulva”, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, 2022). The initial title of this article “Care =!” Work” (published as is in the book What do we know about work? Presses de Sciences Po/The world2023) is ironically inspired by it to question the relationships between “care” (care, attention) and work.
Care means, as a first approximation, “active responsibility in response to the vital needs of others”. The ethics of care appeared in the field of psychology and philosophy at the end of the 20th centurye century (A different voice. For an ethics of careby Carol Gilligan, new translation Paris, Champs essays, 2009).
Then the studies of care have developed for twenty years at the international level and in an interdisciplinary mode to respond to what has been identified as a “crisis of care » (Work between public, private and intimate. Comparisons and international issues of care, Aurélie Dammame and al., L’Harmattan Social Logics, 2017). In essence, women from the global North have invested in paid work, resulting in a call for a workforce of migrant women from the South to care for vulnerable people (children, the sick, the elderly) at low cost. at home or in an institution.
The perspective of care – as a way of looking at the world based on the needs generated by the vulnerability of living things – is deployed in the registers of ethics, work and politics. In this article, we will ask ourselves what are the implications of theorizing the care like a job. That is to say, to invest in a conceptual framework which has been thought of as masculine-neutral to bring together, under a generic term, masculine activities and give them a value.
Getting out of dualisms
Thought on work is marked by a dualism so widespread in Western thought that it seems self-evident (Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, by Val Plumwood, Routledge, 1993). Labor sciences have opposed work to “non-work”, this dualism being associated with others such as man/woman; public/private; salary/gratuity; contract/donation.
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