Platformization of Care: How Do Care Platforms Transform the Reproductive Sphere in the Netherland and Italy

Social reproductive labor is a site of struggle that can reproduce or challenge how economies are organized, priorities are identified, and policies are shaped (Fraser 2016; Cooper 2017). In 2022, 30% of the women in 27 EU countries do not engage in paid work to care for family members and for other family reasons (Eurostat 2023). While the care deficit remains, care platforms are being proliferated. According to a recent report, care platforms providing home services and domestic work have grown, representing 30% of the digital labor platforms in the EU (European Commission 2021: 40). Despite this emerging phenomenon, social care services are overlooked in the platform economy literature and welfare states literature understudies care platforms as new business models. To fill this gap, we ask the following research question: “How do care platforms trigger institutional change in care regimes?” Bringing together digitalization and social reproduction literature, the paper analyzes care platforms as a new business model introduced to the traditional care mix of national settings. Traditionally, care is provided through public institutions, the (grey) market, or within the family and can be formal/ informal or paid/unpaid. However, emerging care platforms match caregivers and households for tasks ranging from a single instance of housekeeping to long-term elderly care. Drawing on theories of institutional change, we argue that institutional configurations of national care regimes determine whether care platforms complement or substitute for existing forms of care provisions, thereby challenging or reinforcing national care regimes. We compare the Netherlands and Italy as two ideal types representing community-based and family-based organizations of care. We hypothesize that the dynamics of how care platforms interact with existing institutions are distinctly different in these diverse cases. The study triangulates three primary data sources: published European Commission consultations on the European Care Strategy in 2022, quantitative data on care platforms and care policies, and semi-structured interviews with platform managers, traditional care providers, and policymakers. We contribute to the existing literature by studying digital disruption in the reproductive domain, which is at the core of national political economies.