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Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture

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Pub. Date: 2011

Product: Sage Reference
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994248
Keywords: domestic services, unpaid work, households
Disciplines: Sociology, Marketing, General & Applied Psychology, Sociology of Arts & Culture, Sociology of
Consumption, Consumer Culture, Consumer Psychology
Access Date: October 12, 2023
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Online ISBN: 9781412994248

© 2011 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

In recent decades, there has emerged an assumption that in commercial consumer cultures, domestic ser-
vices have become increasingly commodified. Domestic services refers to household work tasks that allow
the social reproduction of members of the household. Routine domestic services range from everyday house-
work tasks (e.g., housecleaning, laundry, ironing, cooking, and washing up) through household administration
and gardening to caring activities (e.g., child care, elder care, and pet care). Nonroutine domestic services,
meanwhile, range from house-maintenance tasks (e.g., outdoor painting, plastering, decorating, and mending
broken windows and appliances) to home improvement activities (e.g., installing double glazing, insulation,
putting in a bathroom suite, building an extension or loft conversion, putting in central heating, and carpentry).

Each and every one of these domestic services can be conducted using various sources of labor. For exam-
ple, it cannot be asserted that cooking is always conducted as unpaid domestic work, and window cleaning
by formal employees. Cooking, for instance, can be conducted as unpaid domestic work (e.g., where one
cooks for oneself or one's family), unpaid community work (e.g., where one cooks for neighbors or friends
on an unpaid basis), paid informal work (e.g., where one cooks in a restaurant on an off-the-books basis for
“informal” payments that are not declared to the government for tax, benefit, or labor-law purposes), or formal
employment (e.g., where one is a formally employed chef either registered self-employed or paid on a pay-
as-you-earn basis). Different domestic services, therefore, do not belong to different types of work. Instead,
all domestic services can be undertaken using each and every form of work.

Four basic types of work, therefore, can be used to provide domestic services. They are

• self-provisioning, which is unpaid work undertaken by household members for themselves and other
members of their household;
• unpaid community work, which is work provided on an unpaid basis by and for the extended family,
social or neighborhood networks, and more formal voluntary and community groups, and ranges
from kinship exchange through friendship/neighborly reciprocal exchanges to one-way volunteering
for voluntary organizations;
• paid informal work, where legal goods and services are exchanged for money, but these exchanges
are unregistered by, or hidden from, the state for tax, social security, or labor-law purposes; and
• paid formal employment, which is paid work that is declared to the state for tax, social security and
labor law purposes.

Domestic Services in Historical Perspective

A widespread belief is that over the long run of history, the provision of domestic services has steadily shifted
from the informal economy (e.g., self-provisioning, paid informal work) into the formal economy. Indeed, this

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is the assumption underpinning the view that households are outsourcing ever-greater amounts of their do-
mestic service provision to the formal economy.

Examining the household in historical perspective, a major historical shift has taken place away from house-
hold production for domestic consumption to a situation in which household members work for employers in
exchange for wages. Household members have increasingly secured the livelihood of themselves and their
codependents by selling their labor as a commodity within the labor market rather than by producing goods
that satisfy their own immediate needs. This development is itself part of the wider separation of people from
the means of production. Unable to produce their own goods for immediate consumption, modern workers
(or their “breadwinners”) must sell their labor in exchange for cash to purchase goods on consumer markets.
Goods, which had been made in the home or by local craftsmen for barter and only occasionally for market
exchange, were gradually replaced by goods production en masse in factories. This led to a separation of
home and production. Those who had previously made goods for their own use started to use their wages to
purchase factory-made items. The transfer of domestic-service provision (rather than goods production) out
of the sphere of self-provisioning and into the formal economy, however, has been rather slower. Indeed, and
unlike goods production, the vast majority of domestic services are perhaps still met through self-provision-
ing. Whether domestic services will follow the same path as goods production from the home to the formal
economy is therefore open to question.

Contemporary Debates regarding Domestic Services

A long-standing belief has been that over the long run of history, there would be a steady formalization of the
domestic services sphere and that an ever-greater proportion of all domestic services would be provided by
those in formal jobs. In recent years, however, this has started to be questioned, not least because there is
little evidence that there has been an outsourcing of domestic services to the formal economy. Most studies of
how people spend their working time based on time-use diaries have revealed that self-provisioning remains
rife in cotemporary societies. Even if self-sufficiency, by which is meant a total reliance on self-provisioning,
is therefore today rare, self-reliance, by which is meant the use of self-provisioning as one of a plurality of
economic practices, remains a ubiquitous strategy throughout the world. It is also a practice that, if anything,
is growing relative to the formal economy. Most time-budget studies reveal no reduction in the time spent on
unpaid work relative to paid work in the advanced economies over the past half century. Instead, quite the
opposite is the case. There has been an informalization, not formalization, of working time in many Western
nations.

There is therefore a growing desire to understand not only the different sources of labor used to provide do-
mestic services and how this varies across populations and temporally but also how this impacts the gender
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divisions of domestic labor. On the latter issue, in particular, it is now widely recognized that when domestic
services are conducted using self-provisioning, women remain responsible for the vast bulk of such work and
that although men might help out to a slightly greater extent than in the past, men largely still do not take
responsibility for organizing such work. In dual-earner heterosexual-couple households, for example, women
remain responsible for producing the shopping lists for the supermarket or remembering that birthday and an-
niversary cards need to be bought. Where such women have managed to reduce their domestic workload, it
is largely not due to men doing more. Rather, it is because women are outsourcing the work to other women.
The outcome has been a debate over the implications of this trend. The widely held view has been that it
is creating low-paid, low-skilled, and exploitative jobs and re-creating the master-servant relationship. This is
currently exemplified in the tendency for relatively affluent women to employ women who are less well off to
conduct their domestic services, rather than forcing men to do a greater share of the domestic workload.

This tendency toward a commodification of domestic services has been further compounded throughout the
Western world by many governments actively encouraging households to outsource their domestic services
to formal service providers. In many European countries, for example, service vouchers have been introduced
that enable households to purchase formal domestic services that are subsidized by the state.

Domestic Services: The Future

In the future, it is likely that the further encroachment of commercial businesses into the realm of domestic
services will be put under greater scrutiny, not least in terms of the quality of jobs being created and the im-
plications of such a trend on gender inequalities. At the same time, nevertheless, how commercial business
can increase their market share of the domestic-services sector will be actively investigated, not least how
the numerous barriers to the further commodification of the domestic services sector can be combated. For
example, households do not outsource simply because of cost constraints or opposition to employing others
to do their “dirty work.” Other reasons relate not so much to household circumstances but to formal services.
Ease of access to formal service providers, the availability of formal enterprises, their reliability, the quality of
their end product, and trust issues are all reasons for not using commercial domestic services and for turning
toward other forms of provision. How these might be tackled will be a fertile area for future research not only
for those seeking to facilitate a commercialization of the domestic services sector but also for those seeking to
understand the blockages to commodification in contemporary societies and therefore cultures of resistance
to commodification.

Whether the quality of jobs in this potentially expanding domestic-services sector can be improved in terms
of both pay and conditions is another issue that will become increasingly important. Until now, it has been
perhaps simply accepted as inevitable and immutable that jobs in the domestic services sphere are low paid
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and of poor quality. How they might be upgraded will be an important issue for the future not just due to the
increasing proportion of workers who might earn a living in this sphere but also for tackling gender inequalities
in the formal labor market.

• domestic services
• unpaid work
• households

Colin C.Williams
See also:

Commodification
Division of Labor
Domestic Division of Labor
Emotional Labor
Informalization
Outsourcing
Self-Service Economy
Service Industry

Further Readings

Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, NicholasFaraclas, and Claudiavon Werlhof, eds. There Is an Alternative: Sub-
sistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization. London: Zed, 2001.

Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, and MarieMiesThe Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Econo-
my. London: Zed, 1999.

Gershuny, JonathanAfter Industrial Society: The Emerging Self-Service Economy. London: Macmillan, 1978.

Gershuny, JonathanChanging Times: Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, PierretteDoméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Afflu-
ence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Oakley, AnneThe Sociology of Housework. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974.

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Pahl, RaymondDivisions of Labour. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

Williams, Colin C.Re-Thinking the Future of Work: Directions and Visions, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmil-
lan, 2007.

Windebank, Jan“Dual-Earner Couples in Britain and France: Gender Divisions of Domestic Labour and Par-
enting Work in Different Welfare States.”Work, Employment & Society15(2001):269–290.

https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994248

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