Bringing life's work to market: Frontiers, framings, and frictions in marketised social reproduction

Abstract

The introduction to this theme issue discusses a series of papers examining the increasing marketisation of social reproduction and its effects on systems that sustain human and social life. This is done by examining the frontiers, framings, and frictions that arise when market systems are constructed to enable capital accumulation in the realm of social reproduction. Frontiers identify the expansion of market logic into new areas, framings explore how financial actors attempt to bring the logic of social reproduction within the purview of market competition, and frictions highlight the various tensions that generate resistance to the roll out of market logics. Through establishing these three areas, we argue that both market structures and systems of social reproduction should be understood as geographically variegated and, at times, uncertain. This variegation necessitates an understanding of marketised social reproduction as forged through complex articulations of market and non-market logics. Using cases from surrogacy to smart electricity meters, the papers in this theme issue illustrate that while these articulations may generate benefits for some individuals, households and communities, such processes of marketisation can introduce new layers of inequity and undermine the ethical relations and social commitments that sustain life—in the service of enabling accumulation.

TRANSFORMING SOCIAL HOUSING INTO AN ASSET CLASS: REITs and the Financialization of Supported Housing in England

“…Viewed from this perspective, financial accumulation in supported housing appears not as an inexorable structural tendency, but rather a more contingent reading of financialization as a 'high-risk capitalist strategy' (Hodkinson, 2011: 376) riven by tensions arising from the contradiction between housing's exchange value as an asset and its use value for social reproduction. As the article has shown, while it is possible to displace the risks arising from these tensions, they cannot be altogether eliminated, with ongoing exposures to risk among SSH providers threatening to constrain profitmaking and disrupt the stable returns demanded by investors (see Christophers, 2010;Fields, 2017;Horton, 2022;Rosenman et al, 2023). While REITs have to date weathered these problems, tensions within these processes suggest the need to explore potential avenues for contestation.…”

“…In analysing social reproduction, human geographers have emphasized that social reproduction is variegated, in that it is produced through spatially and socially uneven power relations (Bakker and Gill, 2019), and differentiated, in that responsibilities for social reproduction fall unequally on racialized and gendered subjects (Raghuram et al, 2009). Analysing the case of 'social finance'-investments that mobilize capital to achieve measurable outcomes such as care provision for the vulnerable- Rosenman et al (2023) argue that attempts to financialize social reproduction should be seen as hybrid and uncertain, formed through the complex articulation of market and non-market logics whose frictions and differing trajectories give rise to tension and crisis.…”

“…While analyses of financialization widely view it as contradictory (Aalbers et al, 2017;Ward, 2021), crisis tendencies within the extraction of value from SSH are also driven by tensions between financial logics and the sector's governance as a welfare service (Horton, 2022;Rosenman et al, 2023). Elsewhere in the exempt accommodation sector, serious questions have been raised over 'non-commissioned' housing lying outside the public sector's regulatory frameworks.…”