CARE4CARE POLICY BRIEF SERIES| 1/2022 DEFINING CARE: CONCEPTUALISATIONS AND PARTICULARITIES PROFESSOR JAYATI University of Massachusetts Amherst, Further articles by Prof. Jayati Ghosh in this series: → The structure of care work and inequalities among care workers → Recognising and rewarding care work: the role of public policies What are the activities that constitute care work and what is the care economy? This is a more complex question than may be supposed at first, partly because definitions of work are themselves not always clear-cut. Despite the essential nature of care activities, it is only relatively recently that care work has been recognised as such, that is, as productive work. One reason for this is that work has traditionally been seen as referring to those activities that fall within the production boundary framed by the UN System of National Accounts(SNA). 1 This has tended to exclude activities that produce goods and services for household consumption, so that a range of care services was automatically excluded. The nature of work and how to capture it in empirical data have been among the most complicated and debated issues in social sciences. Internationally accepted definitions of work and of economic activity have themselves changed over time. Most standard dictionaries define work as any ‘activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result’. 2 Economic activities are typically defined in a more re­strictive way, as actions that involve the production, dis­tribution and consumption of goods and services at all levels within a society. Of course, this begs the further question of what constitutes‘goods and services’. Work­ers are seen as coterminous with economically active persons, and are those who are engaged in activities in­cluded within the boundary of production. This in turn includes(a) the production of all individual or collective goods or services that are supplied to units other than their producers, or intended to be so supplied, includ­ing the production of goods or services used up in the process of producing such goods or services;(b) the own-account production of all goods that are retained by their producers for their own final consumption or gross capital formation;(c) the own-account production of housing services by owner-occupiers and of domes­tic and personal services produced by employing paid domestic staff. 3 If this is taken to its logical conclusion, it should indeed include a very large range of human ac­tivity, especially once the second element of the produc­tion boundary is taken into consideration. Even so, some activities of social reproduction remain within an unde­fined and often shifting grey area, particularly the‘pro­duction’ of children and the tasks associated with this. 1 The System of National Accounts(SNA) is the internationally agreed standard set of recommendations on how to compile measures of economic activity. The SNA describes a coherent, consistent and integrated set of macroeconomic accounts in the context of a set of inter­nationally agreed concepts, definitions, classifications and accounting rules. Source: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/sna.asp. 2 This formulation is from Judy Pearsall(ed.): The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Tenth edition. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 1647. 3 OECD. 2002. Measuring the Non-Observed Economy. Paris.