The Political Economy of Social Reproduction

The dissertation project examines the practice of nursing in hospitals and contributes to an understanding of the contradictory constellations of social reproduction and its reorganisation in contemporary capitalism as market-driven care work.

Starting from the premise that the orientation of the capitalist mode of production towards unlimited capital accumulation tends to destabilise the social reproduction of capitalist social formations, the research project examines this (crisis) tendency through the analytical prism of social-reproductive contradiction. The existing contradictions between care and capital, as currently experienced by nurses in public hospitals, form the starting point of the study. According to the guiding thesis, the deficits of public services in general can be identified in hospitals as an expression of this contradiction and, in particular, how it manifests itself in the daily work routines and work content of nurses can be examined.