ABSTRACT
That literature has been extremely important in delineating the similarities of unpaid work and paid work (Graham 1991; Thomas 1993; Ungerson 1990), and in
outlining the way in which the demands and exigencies of unpaid work affect opportunities for and status within paid work, particularly for women (Joshi 1992). Nevertheless, I argue in this chapter that the dualism of paid and unpaid work is dissolving, and that we are moving into a period where the boundaries within public and private domains, so well laid down in the nineteenth century and continued into the second half of the twentieth century, are beginning to crumble away (Ungerson 1994, 1995). Nowhere is this more obvious than in the policy area of care for people with disabilities. There is evidence from both Europe and North America that welfare states are searching for ways to underwrite the provision of care within households and kin networks through cash subven-tion both to caregivers and to care recipients. The consequence is the marketization of intimacy and the commodification of care.
