Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value

Abstract

Global capitalism affects whatever it touches, and it touches virtually everything, including global care chains a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring. Usually women make up these chains, though it's possible that some chains are made up of both women and men, or, in rare cases, made up of just men. Such care chains may be local, national, or global. Chains also vary in the number of links: some have one, others two or three and each link varies in its connective strength. Some cares chains are based on the object of care others on the subjects of care. Each kind of chain expresses an invisible human ecology of care, one kind of care depending on another and so on. Globalization separates the worlds of the actors in this care chain.