Séance avec Yohann Aucante (EHESS) dans le cadre du séminaire "Capitalism, Welfare Regime and Intimate Sphere: Theory of Human Reproduction in Mature Societies in Europe and East Asia".

The concept of decommodification has been made hugely popular in social welfare research by Danish sociologist Gösta Esping-Andersen in the best-seller volume "The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism" (1990). Building on past theoretical and sociological work as well as on a patiently compiled database, Esping-Andersen offered to use this concept as one of the benchmark to distinguish his three ideal-typical worlds. The posterity of this work has mostly been Empirical-typological-statistical and I would like to reframe it in a different way, going back to some of the origins of the concept, analyzing its relevance and limitations over time and especially discussing its ambivalent relation to one of the worlds, namely the social democratic one, that the author implicitly valued more than the others. I will try to emphasize the importance of discussing this theme and its implication for the changing relationship between the intimate sphere and the job market among other things.