“No more maids”: Legitimation of Assisted Living Facilities and the Transition from Domestic to Institutional Care in Chile

• In Event: 4442 - The Economic Sociology of Culture and Technology

Abstract

This article interrogates the legitimation of a new institution by exploring how nursing homes and assisted living facilities that cater to the upper class in Chile have overcome the stigma of institutional elder care. Drawing on 37 interviews with providers and consumers of luxury institutional care, I suggest that the declining availability of cheap and unregulated domestic labor give rise to a “servant problem” narrative that legitimizes institutional care as an acceptable substitution for domestic work previously consumed at home. However, providers and consumers have different interpretations of the transit from domestic to institutional care. Luxury facilities’ managers establish symbolic continuities with clients’ homes by constructing residents as entitled heads of household. For residents and families, instead, luxury facilities are a strictly practical solution characterized by ruptures with their home. By focusing on a case of institutionalization rather than of commodification of a new service, the article reveals anxieties and ambiguities not related to monetizing but to bureaucratizing care, as relations and hierarchies of domesticity that unfold at home become mediated by a third party.

Author

• Guillermina Altomonte, The New School for Social Research