ABSTRACT
C aring comes from the private world of love, intimacy, families,and friendship, but much of it is now done in the public worldof work, organizations, markets, and governments. Just as farm and craft labor were once wrenched out of the family and brought into a system of work controlled from outside (Polanyi 1944), caring work is increasingly separated from the personal relationships in which it naturally arises and is performed instead in a system of managed and waged labor. Caring work is still overwhelmingly done informally by female relatives, but to a significant degree it is transforming into jobs with formal task descriptions and occupations with formal training and certification requirements. Much caring is now “produced” by organizations that manage workforces, clienteles, and the “delivery” of care. In these organizations, care is measured, allocated, and moni-tored by accounting systems, which fragment it into countable components.
