Bringing life's work to market: Frontiers,framings,and frictions in marketised social reproduction

Abstract

The introduction to this theme issue discusses a series of papers examining the increasing marketisation of social reproduction and its effects on systems that sustain human and social life. This is done by examining the frontiers, framings, and frictions that arise when market systems are constructed to enable capital accumulation in the realm of social reproduction. Frontiers identify the expansion of market logic into new areas, framings explore how financial actors attempt to bring the logic of social reproduction within the purview of market competition, and frictions highlight the various tensions that generate resistance to the roll out of market logics. Through establishing these three areas, we argue that both market structures and systems of social reproduction should be understood as geographically variegated and, at times, uncertain. This variegation necessitates an understanding of marketised social reproduction as forged through complex articulations of market and non-market logics. Using cases from surrogacy to smart electricity meters, the papers in this theme issue illustrate that while these articulations may generate benefits for some individuals, households and communities, such processes of marketisation can introduce new layers of inequity and undermine the ethical relations and social commitments that sustain life—in the service of enabling accumulation.

Finance is being reimagined. The future of capital is anti-racist, intersectional, digital, global, decolonized, feminist, planet-first, and place-based (Future of Good, personal communication, 2022)

With the financial sector expanding its influence across many areas of twenty-first century life, the lines between production and social reproduction, and between market and home, have become increasingly blurred. As highlighted in the announcement above from Future of Good, convener of the 2023 Canadian Social Finance ¹ Forum, this has married an unfettered roll out of new financial systems with complex articulations of non-market and market logics in the service of building new sites of capital accumulation. While its utopian vision for social finance went further than most, the conference's announcement speaks to a widely held confidence in the ability, necessity and virtue of markets to dissolve barriers between profit and social life. Through such efforts, processes of social reproduction across the globe—namely “the activities necessary to maintain and reproduce life daily and intergenerationally at both the individual and social scale” (Winders and Smith, 2019: 872)—are increasingly shaped by marketised forms of profit-making and conduct.

Indeed, as care, education, and social programmes—activities that characterise scholarly definitions of social reproduction under twenty-first-century capitalism—have been reframed from an entitlement of citizenry to a market relation in the global North, various authors have tracked an emerging crisis of social reproduction (Adkins, 2019; Strauss and Meehan, 2015; Winders and Smith, 2019). From the destruction of social housing to the erosion of public healthcare, individuals, households, and kinship networks are under an increasing burden to provide the fundamental elements for sustaining everyday life and generational reproduction without the support of state institutions. This neoliberal reallocation of responsibility from the state to the household has been characterised by austerity measures, devolved responsibility, and increasingly privatised forms of social provisioning (Bakker, 2007). At the same time, the decline in real wages and workplace benefits have left populations without the resources to meet these burdens and resulted in new types of debt relationships (Adkins, 2019; Roberts, 2016). This removal of what Bakker and Gill (2019) call the social commons has led to an explosion of new market and financial systems that have sought to turn the provision of social services and relations of care into sites of direct profit making (Henry and Loomis, 2023), including the proliferation and uptake of a range of financial products and services, such as student loans, micro-credit and private retirement plans (Federici, 2014; Pollard, 2013; Soederberg, 2013). To endure in this conjuncture, systems of social reproduction under financial capitalism are expected to both reproduce life and provide sources of profit for capital (Karaagac, 2020).

In the Global South, microfinance, development finance, and other finance-based livelihood strategies are another iteration of systems of life-making under stress and increasingly governed by markets. Here, marketised social reproduction functions through myriad colonial dynamics such as state and market control of international remittance flows (Cirolia et al., 2022; Mullings, 2022), debt-contingent ‘financial inclusion’ of agrarian workers (Bernards, 2021), retail consumers (Langley and Leyshon, 2022) and welfare recipients (Torkelson, 2021, 2022), and the ongoing conversion of subsistence farming into a global financial asset class (Ouma, 2020). As Mullings (2022) illustrates, these forms of marketised social reproduction depend on and reproduce transnational relationships and global power hierarchies (see also Ebner and Johnson, 2020).

In sum, under processes of both colonial development and neoliberal state restructuring, state support (and often direct provision) of services in areas like health and education has often been replaced by the marketisation and privatisation of the social commons (Mitchell et al., 2003; Roberts, 2016; Strauss and Meehan, 2015) or new financial relationships that have targeted social commons that were rarely protected anyhow (Mullings, 2021). This has meant not only the deconstruction of welfare state institutions but the roll out of markets that individualise the work of social reproduction and unlock profit-making opportunities. As Winders and Smith (2019: 879) argue: ‘In an era when the state retreats, when capital is no longer beholden to a “family” wage, when many households have at least two workers, and when civil society cannot substitute for state provisioning, responsibility for social reproduction becomes privatized and individualized’.

Within this headline trend, however, there remain substantial variations both across geographies and within the different systems of care that scholars have grouped under the rubric of social reproduction. For this reason, Bakker and Gill (2019: 516) suggest it is necessary to think of ‘variegated social reproduction’ based on the mutability of systems of social reproduction and the varieties they take under global capitalism. This fits with Mitchell et al.'s (2003) assertion that it is necessary to go beyond generalisations of social reproduction and into the specifics of ‘how subjects are hailed in multiple ways through the institutions of society—institutions structured and maintained within relations of dominance that simultaneously contain their own internal logics and trajectories’ (417–418). More recently, Strauss and Meehan (2015: 15) call for a focus on ‘diversities and particularities’ alongside attention to patterns in accounts of social reproduction. While on one level, it is true that neoliberal state retrenchment and processes of marketisation and financialisation have remade processes of social reproduction, what this means in particular for the ‘internal logics and trajectories’ of different aspects of social reproduction and across different geographies requires an understanding of the tensions, contradictions, and potentials that emerge through different case studies. This special issue attends to such a task but also goes a step further.

Although scholars insist on variegated conceptualisations of social reproduction in times of market hegemony, it is less common to extend that attention to variegation to understandings of markets themselves in relation to social reproduction. This special issue asks what might be gained from focusing more intently on market dynamics within the realm of social reproduction. Influenced by ‘social studies of economisation and marketisation’, it operates on the conceptual premise that the markets and market dynamics implicated in social reproduction are as variegated and diverse as social reproduction itself (Cohen, 2018). Doing otherwise would risk reverting to monolithic or talismanic conceptions of ‘the market’ and efface the many, and innately social, processes, practices, contingencies and contests involved in efforts to bring ‘life's work’ (Mitchell et al., 2003) to market.

Conversely, over the past decade, economic geographers and other critical social scientists have paid increasing attention to markets as dynamic social institutions that not only facilitate the exchange of goods but shape the nature of those goods based on ‘more than economic’ factors. This has meant studying the precise networks, institutions, and technologies used to organise exchange and the effects of such systems on what is being sold, as well as on those who depend on goods received through market exchange (Cohen, 2018). Despite this attention to social relations beyond the formal economy, however, studies of marketisation have largely focused on sectors well within the traditional purview of the ‘economic’, investigating how attempts to frame economies through calculative devices (market algorithms, valuation of the non-economic, etc.) often exceed market actors’ attempts to make the world technical (Berndt and Boeckler, 2011; Birch and Siemiatycki, 2016; Hall, 2018; Hébert, 2014). In doing so, this scholarship has largely elided the dynamics that scholarship in social reproduction highlights: most centrally, axes of social difference such as gender, race, and ability (among others). Indeed, when such differences are mentioned in critical scholarship on markets, they are often constructed as a static category (what markets act on) rather than as constitutive elements that shape struggles over how market institutions are formatted (Cohen, 2018) and how value is created and imagined.

It is at these interstices that this special issue makes its intervention, bringing together papers that highlight how a variegated understanding of markets can enrich our understanding of the changing context of social reproduction—and how attention to difference and social struggle in the marketisation of social reproduction can expand understandings of the dynamics that shape markets. As Berndt et al. (2020: 16), argue, studying marketisation requires an appreciation of the way “non-market logics, values and practices”—such as intimate relations of care or rights of citizenship within the social-reproductive realm—influence the shape and extent of marketisation. The papers in this issue span studies of how crowdfunding platforms shape the performance of illness (Neuwelt-Kearns et al., this issue) to how state regulation of markets for surrogacy, disrupted by struggles against such markets, shape the lives of women (Bhattacharjee, this issue). Here, the social struggles and ‘more than economic’ dynamics inherent to social reproduction disrupt conceptualisations of market-making projects as a technical sphere of intervention and instead place them alongside and within other social world-making projects.

In this light, marketisation and social reproduction are co-constitutive and this special issue pays attention to the interplay of such influences; or, ‘how markets always encompass more-than-economic registers of value, and how the lines between profit seeking and societal improvement are never easily drawn’ (Berndt et al., 2020: 20). The papers in this special issue suggest that social reproduction has been ‘brought to market’ in a variety of ways that infuse market institutions and process of marketisation. Collectively, the papers speak to the frontiers, framings and frictions associated with the marketisation of social reproduction along different registers. Frontiers identifies the expansion of market logics into new areas, framings explores how financial actors attempt to bring the logics of social reproduction within the purview of market competition, and frictions highlights the various tensions that generate resistance to the roll out of market logics, with market institutions themselves becoming a site of struggle. In the remainder of this introduction, we speak to each in turn.

Frontiers

A focus on social reproduction shifts our analytical gaze to the places where the ongoing crisis of overaccumulation seeks refuge—or a ‘fix’—in aspects of life that are often characterised by adaptation, resilience, absorption, and making do. Relations of social reproduction are often ‘out of sight’, described as ‘invisible’ or ‘natural’ and under processes of neoliberalisation, decidedly individualised. Centring social reproduction as an economic object of inquiry takes seriously how the so-called ‘productive’ elements of the economy are contingent upon a whole host of capacities and relations out of view and often unaccounted for. As a shock absorption mechanism in times of economic change, a seemingly endless capacity to fill the gaps while other systems crumble makes the realm of social reproduction a durable and malleable site for accumulation. Thus, a ‘frontiers’ focus reveals the historically and geographically specific ways that contemporary capitalism is making demands on reproductive realms, from bodies to communities and across everyday life-making.

The papers in this special issue offer novel engagements with social reproduction as a market frontier. This is not to say these means and methods are completely new—certainly, capitalist accumulation has long relied on and sought profit via modes of dispossession that are racialised, gendered and inflected with settler logics. As Scobie et al. (this issue) discuss in the context of settler-colonisation, ‘the marketization of Indigenous social reproduction is not a new frontier of accumulation by dispossession but is a next mutation of primitive accumulation that secures and sustains the conditions that enable capitalism to flourish’. Similarly, as Collard and Dempsey (2018) note, thinking about the relations of things that are central to, but also abstracted from profit or accumulation, have long been the project of feminist approaches that highlight processes of social subjugation that undergird profit-making. Indeed, processes of social differentiation and de/valuation highlighted by both areas of scholarship are key to understanding the ways that spaces, actors, and processes of social reproduction are unevenly targeted and exposed to marketisation, but are often neglected in existing literatures on marketisation. In particular, the contributions in this special issue offer useful examples of the ways that difference may be central to and conditions of possibility for capitalist exploitation and oppression. As Rosenman (this issue) shows in an analysis of financial products that are marketed as anti-racist, identity-based legacies of oppression can become an animating force for capital, with social reproductive capacities both undermined and made ever more important as they become sites of profit making.

As another example, Chandrashekeran and Keele's work (this issue) on the deployment of smart meters for energy use monitoring illustrates the market-making of essential service provisioning. Here, everyday practices within the home become newly legible to external actors as they connect to existing telecommunications and banking systems to generate profit. Similar processes are evident in Sadowski et al.'s work (this issue) where information on domestic activities—seemingly ‘unproductive’ labour (in the home)—is rendered valuable and delivers profit beyond the home via techniques of surveillance, new forms of automation and the digitalisation of data.

Papers in this special issue also show how forms of differentiation become important to processes of market-making. In their typology of four market subjects, for example, Chandrashekeran and Keele explore how the adoption of smart meter technology is premised on sorting and segregating consumers. This boundary work constitutes the market for smart technology as different market subjects are identified and targeted via tailored market responses. In research examining the experiences of women who work as reproductive labourers in the Indian market for surrogacy, Bhattacharjee shows how the labour and livelihoods of commercial surrogates shapes and is shaped by precarity. She argues that ‘[t]he material and social conditions of these women's lives are entangled with interwoven subjugations (gender, caste, and class) that have both discursively and corporeally marked their labor as natural’. And in work that highlights how these processes do not always have simple or inevitably regressive results, Bryant and Spies-Butcher (this issue) and Scobie et al. show how tools of marketisation can be creatively reworked against settler-colonial and carceral logics of the state to claim fiscal resources, develop bureaucratic capacity, and institute territorial governance. Within the shifting ‘frontier region’ of market experimentation, the papers in this special issue illustrate how such a region, as Mitchell (2007: 247) puts it, ‘is the scene of political battles, in which new moral claims, arguments about justice, and forms of entitlement are forged’.

Framings

Nothing comes easily on the marketising frontier of social reproduction. The extension of market logic and organisation in various social-reproductive domains involves active and often fraught efforts to frame and legitimise more-than-economic activities and motivations—from household behaviour (see Sadowski et al. and Chandrashekeran & Keele) to caring for sick relatives (see Neuwelt-Kearns et al.)—as compatible with market imperatives and norms. Scholars of marketisation refer to the process of framing the erstwhile outsides of market relations as ‘performation’: the calculation and definition of phenomena so as to be legible and amenable to market discipline and exchange (Cohen, 2018). The framing work, which Berndt et al. (2020) suggest entails ‘ordering’ and ‘bordering’, associated with bringing life's work to market is displayed in a range of ways across the papers in this special issue.

The first is in their identification of diverse technologies employed to frame more-than-economic life for the making of markets. Calculative technologies are on display in several papers, demonstrating how the conditions surrounding the extension of calculative reason—how, when, why—into ‘the social’ become important factors for framing how the benefits and burdens of marketisation are distributed. In a critical analysis of how corporate financial actors join notions of antiracism to familiar financial products like mortgages, Rosenman illustrates how the financial sector attempts to align itself with public discourse on racial inequality in an effort to avoid being called out as a perpetrator. This involves the quantification of the ‘racial wealth gap’ as an ahistorical measure of ‘injustice’ that will be solved with targeted investments rather than fundamental restructuring of financial systems. Bryant & Spies-Butcher show how increasing government interest in quantifying the costs and benefits of public services created institutional space for 24 tribal groups in Bourke, Australia to advocate for an Indigenous-controlled justice reinvestment programme in New South Wales. While abstractions of calculative reason are often tied up with epistemic and material oppression of Indigenous peoples’ ‘life worlds’ (see Scobie et al.), the necessity of quantification for market-making can also create strategic openings for the assertion of Indigenous authority and demands for resources.

Other papers in the special issue attend to the role of digital technologies, pointing to the ways that the digitalisation of life is enabling the marketisation of social reproduction. In the context of the United States, Cohen (this issue) shows how the advancement of digital technology in schools has been spurred by previous rounds of market-based reform, but also functions as a beachhead for further marketisation. Through the roll-out of proprietary digital platforms and tools, and severing place-based links between schools and local communities, schooling is formatted to suit the economies of scale desired by education technology (EdTech) firms. Shifting from the school to the home, Chandrashekeran and Keele and Sadowski et al. examine how the integration of digital technology into the domestic context has entailed the formatting of domestic life in ways that enable the making of markets. As Sadowski et al. show, ‘the integration of data-driven, networked and automated systems into homes is […] linked to new forms of managing, monitoring and marketising “life's work”’. The effects of which have already begun to shape quotidian practices and longer-term trajectories of household-level social reproduction: from the smart fridge that watches your food choices, or a smart energy meter alerting you to moderate your energy use at peak periods, to the possibilities of personalised insurance premiums based on your household's continually monitored behaviour. Yet, as Chandrashekeran and Keele demonstrate, there is much latent and speculative about the profit-making potential afforded by the digitalisation of domestic life. Their focus on Australia's roll-out of a Consumer Data Right—a legal instrument to enable the use of consumers’ and households’ digital data by third parties—demonstrates the grand, but as yet unrealised, possibilities envisaged by governments and businesses keen to render formerly unproductive domestic activities economically valuable by deducing patterns from digital data and selling services based on those insights.

Whether the particular technologies are calculative, digital or otherwise, papers within the special issue speak to the way such technologies create conditions within which social-reproductive labour is framed to be compatible with market logics and market exchange. Efforts to abstract, standardise, automate, and platformise more-than-economic conduct are featured across the papers as ways that social reproduction is subject to the formatting or framing of markets. But these efforts are not without tensions and contestation.

Frictions

Market-making is not a once-and-for-all endeavour. As ‘unstable hybrids’ incorporating the more-than-economic, markets and market-making must continually adapt, lest they be undone ‘in the face of the contradictions and “overflows” between different logics, values and practices’ (Berndt et al., 2020: 16). Just as markets can actively be created through new frontiers and frames of social reproduction, so too can the marketisation of social reproduction be unmade and destabilised through frictions. Sources of friction come in many forms and the papers in this special issue highlight at least two key areas of tension in contexts of marketised social reproduction: state/market and value/values.

Part of the ideological triumph of ‘the Market’ has rested on the fiction of a separation of state and market. Under neoclassical economic doctrine, markets without (or with minimal) state ‘interference’ will tend towards optimal outcomes. Scholars of marketisation and heterodox economics have shown the impossibility of such a separation in theory and in practice, reframing understandings from zero-sum relativities of state-or-market and towards a qualitative and varied appreciation of state–market articulations in different contexts. Indeed, in the context of social reproduction, where the state tends to have a significant role (e.g., schooling and healthcare, to name two areas), any effort to marketise aspects of social reproduction will involve negotiating frictions in the relationship between state and market. In Bryant and Spies-Butcher's paper, the incorporation of market logics within the state, rather than creating uniformly hostile conditions for disempowered communities and populations, led to the emergence of a strategic opportunity for an Indigenous group to enact their self-determination aspirations. In other papers, the underfunding of public institutions set the stage for marketised forms of provision. In Neuwelt-Kearns et al.'s account of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, they show how inadequacies in the public healthcare system mean that care-givers are compelled to market the stories and personal qualities of their ill relatives to capture the attention of the crowdfunding public. Cohen's paper on EdTech interventions into US schooling demonstrates a less passive and more active role of the state in engineering the conditions for technology companies to penetrate under-exploited markets for public education expenditure.

The other recurring area of friction among papers in the special issue related to the status of more-than-economic value(s) in contexts where marketisation processes privilege monetary value. Markets always incorporate ‘more-than-economic registers of value’ (Berndt et al., 2020), but do so with varying degrees of contestation. As Scobie et al. remind us, the incorporation of Indigenous systems of value were fundamental to the expansion of colonial-capitalism and, in contemporary times, the reinstatement of such systems of value are central to Indigenous peoples’ participation in capitalist and more-than-capitalist economies. This can function at the individual level as well, as Bhattacharjee demonstrates through the ways surrogates resist attempts to sever the connections they feel for the children they carry. At a larger scale, in the context of efforts to redress the racial wealth gap, Rosenman highlights the contradictions and limits of the US state's refusal to enact reparations and instead look to the private financial system as a mechanism of racial repair.

Conclusion

As conversations about social reproduction are being reinvigorated across the social sciences, the frontiers, framings, and frictions of marketisation described above highlight how the marketisation of systems of social reproduction unfold in variegated, uncertain, and, at times, haphazard ways. Together, the papers in this special issue advance interest in social reproduction by showing how myriad forms and ways of life are newly captured by market logics and transmuted into new streams of profit. While the impetus of capital accumulation drives the creation of new market systems, the networks, institutions, and technologies that bring markets into being are shaped by the variegated relations of social reproduction and the contradictions illustrated by the technologically connected homes, the crowdfunding of care, and the new forms which, despite efforts, cannot frame social life without producing new frictions. The papers in this issue explore this unfolding dynamic in ways that enrich our understanding of both new forms of marketised social reproduction and the market structures which are shaped by struggles over their emergence.

The papers in this issue also suggest the need to take seriously the short- and long-term consequences of the marketisation of social reproduction. Indeed, while market-making may indicate an investment in the vital necessities of life, the papers in this issue raise concerns about how processes of marketisation may undermine the ethical relations and social commitments that have sustained life at myriad scales. Accounting for the duplicity of dis/investment in this realm, and attending to the uneven and unequal consequences of this form of marketisation, will be crucial as accumulation strategies have the potential to erode the very institutions, infrastructures and collective practices that are the foundation of life's work.