The COVID pandemic has shaken the material and social foundations of the world more than any event in recent history and has highlighted and exacerbated a longstanding crisis of care. While these challenges may be freshly visible to the public, they are not new. Over the last three decades, a growing body of care scholarship has documented the inadequacy of the social organization of care around the world, and the effect of the devaluation of care on workers, families, and communities. In ...

This book presents an institutional ethnography of budgeting processes of commissioning contracts within welfare, education, and health ministries as case studies. With the historical surge in the power position of economic globalization organizations and their impact on public sectors’ withdrawal from the role of primary women’s employers, a gap between care worker employees and public sector administrators with respect to skill recognition has emerged in Israel. The book examines precise...