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The purpose of this article is to critically examine Joan Acker's notion of inequality regimes by applying it to the case of global nurse care chains (GNCCs). The article examines the organisational practices of GNCCs and how inequality barriers are practiced and legitimised.

The article is based on qualitative interviews with different institutional representatives involved in Filipino nurse recruitment to Finland (N = 25), recruited Filipino nurses (N = 20) and Filipino nurses working in Finland (N = 9).

The article demonstrates different organisational practices through which inequality regimes are created and sustained. These include the racialised construction of the Philippines as situated in the global periphery and functioning as a resource of labour for the global core and the Filipino nurse as innately more caring. The inequalities are legitimised through deskilling in which the nurses' command of Finnish language is a key form of justification. Filipino nurses' precarious legal status renders them compliant workers from an organisational perspective and vulnerable workers who fear to claim their rights as workers.

By discussing barriers to inequality, the article illustrates how inequalities in diverse workplaces and the undervaluing of nurse work could be addressed.

The article uniquely applies Acker's inequality regimes to the study of GNCCs. It argues that the concept of inequality regimes would benefit from developing it towards a global context.

The chapter introduces a methodological approach to analyzing visual material based on Erving Goffman's frame analysis. Building on the definition of dominant frames in a set of visual material, and the analysis of keying within these frames, the approach provides a tangible tool to analyze contextualized visual material sociologically. To illustrate the approach, the chapter analyzes visual representations of social movement contention in two local contexts, the cities of Lyon, France, and Helsinki, Finland. The material was collected during ethnographic fieldwork and consists of 505 images from local activist websites. The analysis asks how femininity, masculinity, and gender/sex ambiguity key visual representations of different aspects of contentious action, such as mass gatherings, violence, protest policing, and performativity. Strong converging features are found in the contents of the frames in the two contexts, yet differences also abound, in particular in the ways femininity keys different frames of contention in visual representations. The results show, first, that the visual frame analysis approach is a functioning tool for analyzing large sets of visual material with a qualitative emphasis, and second, that a comparison of local activism through visual representations calls into question many general assumptions of political cultures, repertoires of contention, and cultural gender systems, and highlights the importance for sociologists of looking closely enough for both differences and similarities.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how migration affects the care of older people in Italy.

The paper is based on anthropological fieldwork by one of the authors. This consisted of in-depth interviews with 20 “badanti” (migrant caregivers), with relatives of older people and with social workers in the city of Verona, Italy. It further included extensive study of secondary materials on the topic of migrant care of older people.

Badanti, Italian families and older people find themselves locked in an uneasy contract: badanti because they are exploited and often unable to find better, formal employment; Italian families because they are aware that they fail to render their moral duty to their aged parents and grandparents; and older people because they feel neglected and maltreated by their children. Yet the three parties also rely on each other to make the best of a precarious situation. The relationship between badanti and Italian elderly highlights the contradictions within Italian politics on care and migration. This case study shows how migrants help Italian families to hold on to the tradition of family care for ageing parents.

The small sample of badanti and families provides a detailed and profound insight of the complexity of elder care in Italy but does not allow generalisation for developments in the country as a whole.

Policy makers should take notice of the indispensability of informal migrant care in present day Italy.

The originality of the paper lies in the in-depth conversations with badanti and in the way in which elderly care is contextualised in the Italian tradition of care and present day politics.