Between profession and family, which frameworks for elderly care work ? – PROFAM

The PROFAM collaborative research project analyzes the transformations of the care work for elderly losing their autonomy, in a context of demographic ageing, but also a context of restricting the budgets allocated to social policies. This care and domestic work takes varied forms and is carried by a set of actors with contrasting social visibility: the most visible, salaried or self-employed, perform paid work; the most invisible, close relatives, neighbors, friends, voluntary associations or informal, provide mostly unpaid care and domestic work. Whatever its form, paid or not, this work is mainly carried out by women. Public policies are a major determinant of these forms of elderly care. Indeed, for 30 years in France and elsewhere in Europe, this work has been considered as a "source of employment" and measures to increase the demand for paid care work have profoundly changed the conditions of employment of caregivers and domestic workers. But the unpaid care of loved people persists and remains an inescapable condition of the maintenance of the elderly at home. Thus many intermediate situations, in which care work goes beyond the wage-earning frameworks, are now observable.
The objective of PROFAM is to analyze all these forms of care and domestic work together, considering that, transgressing the borders of public and private spheres, carried out mainly by women, it is one of the places where, new hybrid forms of employment are invented, borrowing from both the normative frameworks of wage labor and those of the private sphere. While informal care for elderly losing their autonomy is often analyzed in terms of family relations and mutual assistance, PROFAM's bias, using the theoretical frameworks of gender sociology, is to consider it as a work. This involves understanding both the development of new normative frameworks for this work and how these transformations affect the quality of the jobs of those who support them. PROFAM seeks to trace the modalities of the social division of this work between private and public spheres, in order to measure the effects of the different forms of care work, especially in terms of employment, on gender equality.
To this end, the PROFAM project seeks to identify the characteristics of these ambiguous intermediate situations: their protagonists, their motivations, the types of work regulation, the resulting employment modalities and their consequences for the persons concerned, in terms of equality and social integration. PROFAM uses available quantitative surveys, both national and European, both as framing elements and as a secondary analysis object. However, its objective is to explore the frontier areas between paid and unpaid work, difficult to grasp by statistics, and its methodology makes a large part of field surveys, qualitative surveys, case studies and Documentary analysis. The project is structured in two axes articulating several parts of investigations. From a macro-social perspective, the first axis focuses on the development of frameworks for care work at European, national and local levels and describes their use and determinants quantitatively. The second, at a micro-local level, outlines the distribution of care and domestic work for elderly people. PROFAM will try to measure how gender norms, actors' sets, the use of different rights, and territorial resources, by determining the frameworks of care and domestic work, affect their practices and the quality of their employment.