Role-Identity Dynamics in Care and Household Work: Strategies of Polish Workers in Naples, Italy

Anna Kordasiewicz

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.10.4.05

Authors

Anna Kordasiewicz University of Warsaw, Poland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.10.4.05

Keywords:

Household Work, Poland, Italy, Women Migrants, Work Relations, Symbolic Interactionism, Role-Identity

Abstract

Migrant household work is a global phenomenon present across geographical contexts. Employing a household worker, especially a worker coming from another country, is a symbolically complex situation that requires interpretive work and negotiations of role-identities from interactional partners. There has been much debate about how to define the relationship between a domestic and/or care worker and her/his employer. It has been argued that the preferred definition by workers themselves is one that centers on work (Anderson 2000). In contrast, “fictive kinship” appears to be the employers’ almost universal strategy, which is usually portrayed in the literature as an exploitative practice (Romero 1992; Anderson 2000; Parreñas 2001; Constable 2003; Lan 2006; McDowell 2006).

In this paper, I offer a conceptual grid that consists of hierarchy/equality and distance/intimacy dimensions to examine complex relationships between domestic workers and employers, elaborated during the case study of Polish migrant domestic workers in Naples in 2004. Within the investigated site some elements of the traditional model of service culture have persisted. Migrant workers who come from a post-communist country, and who have rather egalitarian attitudes, have been confronted with these elements. The result has been a clash of definitions over the household worker’s role. Polish women developed two contrasting ways of experiencing and coping with it.

The strategies identified in the workers’ narratives are professionalization and personalization, and they refer respectively to emphasizing the professional and the personal dimensions in relations with the employer. They manifest themselves on the levels of action (as narrated by the workers) and narrative construction. The strategies on the level of action aim to shift the situation in a desired direction; the narrative strategies aim at framing the situation in a desired way within a narrative. The text underlines the diversity of migrant response and tentatively assesses the output of different strategies.

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Author Biography

Anna Kordasiewicz, University of Warsaw, Poland

Anna Kordasiewicz is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Migration Research, University of Warsaw, working in the NSC funded project “Unfinished Migration Transition and Ageing Population in Poland. Asynchronous Population Changes and the Transformation of Formal and Informal Care Institutions.” She collaborates with the Institute of Sociology at the University of Lodz within the framework of the NSC funded project “Poles in the World of Late Capitalism: Changes of Biographical Processes in Terms of Professional Careers, Social Relations, and Identity at the Time of System Transformation in Poland,” as well as with the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, where she did her Ph.D., and the Field of Dialogue Foundation, which she co-established. Her research interests pertain to migratory processes, civic participation, paid domestic work, and the transformations of social relationships in contemporary capitalist societies. She specializes in and teaches qualitative research and analysis, including computer assisted qualitative data analysis. She is preparing a book based on her Ph.D. thesis on paid care and domestic work in postwar Poland. She recently co-edited and co-authored a book on youth participation bringing together Polish, British, and German experts on the topic (Edukacja obywatelska w działaniu [Civic Education in Action]).

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