Brigitte Aulenbacher

Global Dialogue Editors (GDE): How do you transpose the concept of public sociology into your research agenda, bearing in mind both your local research networks and your international engagement within the ISA? Brigitte Aulenbacher (BA): Public sociology is a concept that allows the dissemination of scientific knowledge and stimulates discourse between academic and non-academic...

Senior home care: new care markets and precarious migrant work Like many other countries, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland are increasingly confronted with what are being called “care gaps.” While their populations grow older, informal care capacities within families diminish, as the welfare state is reconfigured according to the now dominant adult worker model. At the same time, the state increasingly withdraws from...

In Central Europe, live-in care is an increasingly important pillar of elder care regimes. Care workers, primarily female migrants, live and work in the households of care receivers. Their responsibilities range from housekeeping to medical tasks. The regulation of live-in care varies from country to country, with precarious working conditions as a common denominator. Central European live-in care is based on circular migration and...

The Great Transformation (TGT), the magnum opus of Karl Polanyi, published in 1944, reconstructs the economic, social, and cultural history of capitalism in the face of the developments he had witnessed between the 1920s and the 1940s: market fundamentalism after World War I, the subsequent crisis and stock market crash in 1929, the Great Depression, fascist and socialist attempts to re-order the economy and society...

In some parts of the world the 2008/9 crisis of finance already sparked renewed interest in the oeuvre of Karl Marx and his congenial partner Friedrich Engels. In particular, The Capital seemed to be custom-made to understand and explain the crisis-ridden development of capitalism and shed light on the contemporary capitalist economy and its effects like the global increase of social inequalities, increasing unemployment, precarity, and poverty as...

Starting with this issue, Global Dialogue’s editorship has changed. Brigitte Aulenbacher and Klaus Dörre have taken over the editing duties from Michael Burawoy who created this magazine with enthusiasm. Prepared by a team of collaborators from many countries and translated into seventeen languages, Global Dialogue publishes contributions from sociologists from all over the world for a global academic and non-academic audience...

The local organizing committee welcomes sociologists from around the world to the 3rd ISA Forum of Sociology in Vienna. Next month, we, the local organizing committee will be welcoming you, the global community of the ISA, to the Third ISA Forum in Vienna. Besides inviting you to visit our website, we would like to highlight some of the ways in which the local and global will...

Care and care work, self-care and care for others, in everyday life and across the life course, by family and kin, and by care professionals, in the market and provided by the state or civil society: all these are fundamental for individuals and for social cohesion. Yet despite a long tradition of research on care, the issue has been marginalized – perhaps because care is often invisible in the so-called private sphere and devalued in the public sphere...

Austria and Germany, two economically powerful Western European countries on the border with Eastern Europe, are regarded as conservative welfare states currently undergoing fundamental processes of reorganization. Both face rising demands, obligations and costs in the domain of care and care work, especially in elder care and child care; both meet these obligations in private households and in professional domains. ...