Hi, welcome to our plenary session number one on this day. I'm very pleased that some of you have reached our session and I'm also very happy to have three guests on our plenary. I just have to say that unfortunately, Dora Gabriel, who has the first presentation, got sick, so I'm very happy that Noemi Katona will present her presentation, will give us insights into the Hungarian case and after that Julia Krulich will present and then we have another case of sickness because Leonhard Planck from the Technical University Vienna is also ill and happily Hans Wollmarie, the co-author of this paper, will jump in. So we have to be flexible, we have to be hybrid, as we theorized yesterday. So I would ask you, Noemi, to give us some insights on the title Carefare Regime in the Elderly Care in Hungary, Traditional and New Actors in a Transforming Market. Noemi, we are really looking forward to your contribution and the floor is yours. Thank you. So welcome everyone. As Florian said, it's my colleague, Gabriela's presentation. Well, it's based on a topic we work on together. So in that sense, I'm familiar with the topic, but it's her work and her presentation that I'm going to read today. So first, I would like to thank the organizers for the invitation and for organizing this conference. It's an honor to be here and start the day with this panel discussion. This time, I'm going to read my contribution, but I will show you some slides. Yeah, it is already there. Care and housing are the main domains of life that are interconnected with the changing role of the state, marketization tendencies, and different regimes, such as gender, labor, and the migration regime. The presentation observes current tendencies in the elder care provision, but instead of focusing on the marketization of care, it shows some alternative tendencies that can be observed in illiberal Eastern European states, such as Hungary. In this paper, I put emphasis on the topic of care and not on housing, but in the end, I will show the possible interrelations between them. In the presentation, I'm going to highlight the concept and the tendency. The concept is called carefare, and the tendency is related to the intensifying role of the church in the elder care provision, which can be called religionization or churchification. I ask the following theoretical questions. Can you move the slides in between? Oh yeah, it's here, sorry. Sorry. Oh yeah. Yeah, that'll do. So maybe we need technical support. I can continue meanwhile, and if we manage, then it's great. Great. Yeah, okay. And if we manage, then it's great. Oh, that's good. Can I do it again? Yeah. OK. No. I'll take this one. Yeah, this one. OK. Sure. Yeah, so I ask the following theoretical questions. How can the term carefree and the phenomenon of bring us closer to the understanding of the current tendencies in elder care? How is the legislation of elder care interconnected to the operation of the Korean political regime and ideologies? How do these trends emerge in the political discourse, if they emerge at all? While the majority of the empirical references is going to be related to the Hungarian case, I'm going to reflect on the possibility of introducing these terms to wider scholarly discourse. I'm going to reflect on the possibility of introducing these terms to wider scholarly discourse. The term care for regime has been coined by Eva Fodor, who's based at the CU. While she focused on childcare provision and her empirical finding included foster care, I found it worth to ponder whether this concept suits to other care as well. The propaganda and childbearing and the promotion of traditional families have been an integral part of the political communication in Hungary since 2010. The propaganda and childbearing and the promotion of traditional families have been an integral part of the political communication in Hungary since 2010. 2018 was declared as the Year of Families, and several new selective family policies were introduced. In 2022, the government claimed to support again the Hungarian families, on the first place during the economic crisis after the war in Ukraine broke out. in the first place during the economic crisis after the war in Ukraine broke out. The political communication mostly targets women to have more children without addressing or supporting man's role in caretaking. The traditional family and the care duties of women within the family are central elements of the Orbán's conservative patriarchal gender regime. A novel type of the gender regime is carefree regime, as Eva Fodor explains. Quote starts, Anti-liberal Hungary has been aggressively promoting the intensification of women's domestic care load through its all encompassing pro-natalism, which ties social citizenship rights to having children, yet offers highly selective state support for the long-term work of caring for small children, even less for other forms of care. Carefare regime is a substantive part of the economic, ideological, and political system of the urban era. Chronitalism is a key element in it, which covers the various selective family policies that support the childbearing of middle- class families and the political narrative built around it. The political rhetoric emphasizes the importance of Hungarian families in preserving the nation. However, this cannot be said concerning elder care. Senior care is under-emphasized in the political discourse, and it is completely absent from family policies. The fundamental law declares that, quote starts, everybody is responsible for themselves, stated in Article 0, and that adult children have the duty to take care of their parents in need. It's Article 16. Those who do not fulfill this duty are accountable. Moreover, the amendment of the social law in 2022 explicitly declares that families are predominantly responsible for all their relatives and they are followed by the municipalities, religious institutions, civil society and the state, which comes at the very end, the state. The national strategy on long-term care, which was released in 2020, emphasizes the importance of aging in place. However, the existing large home care market is completely silenced in the document, which also shows that there is no political aim to regulate this sector. Instead, the caring family member model is emphasized. It has been introduced in this national strategy, which entails elements like psychological support for caregivers, education programs to sanitize future generations to senior care, etc. But the financial support of informal carers is mentioned in this strategy. It does not contain any actual measures concerning finances. At the same time, it also suggests flexible working hours for informal carers, which actually promotes the unpaid second shift for women instead of adequately financing state-provided senior care. József Perötz argues that post-socialist labor markets can be characterized by strongly informal working relations. That is what we can see in different care markets all over the world. However, informality suits particularly in the Hungarian home-based care sector. world. However, informality suits particularly in the Hungarian home-based care sector. The majority of the care workers choose not to register themselves as sole proprietors, as they find the amount of 140 euros per month too high compared to their salary, or simply they just do not find reasonable to register and fall from this amount. If the care worker is not an entrepreneur, they can be registered at the National Tax and Customs Administration of Hungary by the employer household. In this case, the family becomes an employer, however, neither the employer nor the care worker is obliged to pay taxes or social security contributions. Home-based care work is still an informal and invisible form of labor in the country, and it seems that the state is making new effort to regulate or finance this sector. According to the definition of Ferris and Mercati, marketization of care can be understood as a result of the changing rule of the state, where the state outsources care services to for-profit companies and non-profit organizations. The state is not a direct service provider anymore and often supports the expansion of private care actors. Somewhat different tendencies can be observed in Hungary. One of the main differences is that the Hungarian state does not facilitate marketization tendencies in the care sector. Moreover, the possible emergence of market actors in eduker is silenced. Consequently, the number of private care homes has not been increasing significantly in the recent years. However, the informal market is blooming. New actors and small businesses related to healthcare are gaining ground. Another interesting feature is that corporates and international care institutions are entirely missing from the field. One of the reasons is that the state does not create an attractive environment for these kinds of companies. Another explanation can be the small number of affluent households who could afford the service. Instead of for-profit service providers, historical churches and church-based organizations undertake the task facilitated by the government. Now I address the second point of the talk. It is related to the tendency that faith-based institutions and organizations became major providers of public services. Churches have played an increasingly important role in providing services in the collapse of the socialist system. However, an exponential growth can be observed in this regard in the last decade. The phenomenon can be seen in childcare, public education, and in the social care system generally in Hungary. Public spending on religious activities have risen steeply and the number of faith-based organizations performing public services has expanded. We do not have data on other facilities maintained by the church yet, but I can show you some maps regarding the primary schools. You can see three different years, 2001, 2010 and 2011. The growth is remarkable. Landwijk, Beiten and Seleva calls this turn religionization of the welfare state. The intensification of Christian values and the emphasis of Christian ideology in the public discourse is closely connected to the anti-gender rhetoric and family mainstreaming of the government. Beyond the discursive level, various political measures have been introduced in Hungary that had significant symbolic and material effects in increasing gender inequalities and discriminating non-heterosexual people. They also raised the attention to the religionization of social citizenship, where good citizens are seen as Christian and religious people. Eva Fodor calls this tendency churchification in her research focusing on foster care. She says, while in Western liberal democracies engaging for-profit and non-profit providers allow states to control and cut costs, in Hungary state services are not commodified or marketized but churchified, increasingly overseen by politically and ideologically loyal religious organizations, which preach a specific ideology and support the sustenance and reproduction of an anti-liberal political order." While the churchification of senior care is greatly underexplored, the number of places and church-maintained institutions providing long-term care for seniors has increased by 41% since 2010 by 2019. Numerous institutions have been transferred to the church, but also new facilities have been built since 2010. The funding system and the favoritism of churches is an integral part of the political ideological operation of the urban system. Registered church is entitled to 168.5% of the norm, of the normal subsidy, if it maintains an institution which is social, child welfare or child protection public function. Meanwhile, the subsidy for non-public social institutions, such as private institutions, that provide personal care is only 30% of the subsidy of the norm. In this case, the question I raise is very simple. Is the state and the church separated or not? Where does the authority and control of the state end? Churches are not only service providers, but their social activity can be understood as a mission. But what can we learn from these developments in a country where the expressions care market and marketization of care are a taboo in the public discourse? Poland has somewhat similar heritage and the current developments to Hungary. Parallel to other countries in the region, civil society did not have the room to develop during socialism. The Catholic Church as a third sector was present, but its activity was rather limited. After the transition, civil society was very much encouraged by various government initiatives. A major turn took place when Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice Party, had joined forces with the Catholic Church against liberal values of the EU. Reforms suggested that families with at least three children were put single parents at a disadvantage. Currently, the Catholic Church provides nursing and general social services in Poland, but similarly to Hungary, we cannot see the exact scale. I'm conducting research on housing specifically, but I have decided to bring two examples from the field and some questions about the interconnectedness of care and housing. Residential care, home-based care, and community-based care are all research areas that contain issues concerning housing. First, I would mention the rather understudied topic, the presence of the black market in senior care. Along with the marketization tendencies, not only the grey zone, but the black market of care is prevailing all over the world. Article used the terms unlicensed care homes, illegal care homes, and ponzi scream, which is a type of fraud. The topic is emerging in the US, in India, in China, and from time to time in Eastern European countries too, including Romania, Poland, and Hungary. In Hungary, some news has been recently reported about illegal senior care homes that operated without any license and provided extremely poor working conditions for the care recipients. In these cases, services provided in private houses, mostly in smaller towns. These scandals were recent, but earlier articles reported about over 30 illegal institutions that were prosecuted in the last decade. In some cases, several patients died since these institutions have been especially dangerous in the times of COVID. Many questions emerge. Why would anyone send his or her mother to a place like this if they are aware of the living conditions, the lack of hygiene, and the risks coming with this situation? What are the alternatives if a family cannot afford to pay for a decent and legal care provision? Where is the responsibility of the state in this case? However, there are good examples as well. In March, me and my colleagues visited a Hungarian village of 2,500 inhabitants. And this village, the migration balance has been negative since 2010. The number of the population of working age is decreasing, while the aging rate is gradually increasing. Due to the emigration of young people, the old generation is mostly living alone. There isn't any social institution providing a long-term residential care in the settlement. However, there is a daycare service for the older population. Daycare enables the elderly to meet daily, have lunch together, spend time in a meaningful way. That's how service users become a community. The idea of creating an age-friendly village comes from the mayor, but he has been collaborating with community initiators and civil helpers who want to contribute to the project. The users of the daycare service explained that if there was the opportunity, they would be happy to stay even for the night as they feel home in the community and simply they don't want to be home alone. In the conclusion, I would like to highlight two points. In many countries, yeah, oops, where's the break button? In many countries, including Eastern European states, elder care is not politicized. The topic is a problem and an issue to be addressed is intentionally left out from the political discourse. Only a small number of activists or a few eager lobby groups try to raise their voices for decent salaries in social care, the regulation of home-based care, or the rights of care users. Research shows that the different forms of inequalities in the access to elder care can be outstanding. These tendencies are even more visible in illiberal regimes where the already high level of gender inequality is reinforced by the measures or the lack of measures of the central state. Not talking about elder care as an issue implies the silence can be turned into a possible political gain. That's why it is so important to discuss these questions here at this conference. Yeah, thank you very much, Noemi, that you presented this. I think it was not only very fruitful for the insights into current developments of a care regime or a care fair regime, but also about the political situation and the intermeshing of religious, political and market tendencies in Hungary. So thank you very much. I think we will discuss it afterwards. I hand directly over to Julia Grulich from the Georg August University Göttingen, who will present about why household never ends, a sociological analysis of technological's broken promises in the home. So I'm very looking forward to this and this floor is yours. Thank you. Can you make that big? Technologies fail. So maybe let me start while you try that. Yes, I am going to talk about, it's more a theoretical, conceptual talk that I will give you. I just recently started a huge European research project about smart home technology and gender relations. And I'm not going to talk about the empirical part of it, but rather the theoretical backgrounds that we have in this project. And I'm going a little bit beyond what we are doing in our research project. I'm a sociologist. I'm usually interested in organizations and work. And with work, I was always researching paid work, paid employment, working conditions, and gender relations. And just recently, I've started to be interested in smart homes and work in the household, so also unpaid work. And when talking about that, we cannot go around care. This is what I'm going to talk about today. And we have heard that yesterday already a little, and I'm going to quote her, and she already said she won't be here today, but I'm going to quote Cornelia Klinger. She was here yesterday, and she wrote a very nice paper once about her sociophilosophical perspective on reproductive labor, on care. And this is the reason why we needed it big. It's beautiful. And the main argument that she gave there was that care never ends. From a sociophilosophical perspective, primary care is a necessity of life. It comes from natality, morbidity, and mortality of life. It's the randomness, the frailty, the precariousness, and volatility of life. And you can see this here in the wheel of life. There are different life aspects that all of us are at one time or another, like get into where care plays a major role. And it's something that we cannot avoid, in which is part of the renewal and circle of human life and also is linked to the reproduction of human life and also is linked to the reproduction of human labor power. This is something very secular, repetitive, and somehow never finished. And this is one perspective how you could look on the aspect of care and why it never stops. It's like It's like anthropologically given that it never ends. And if we would refuse to care, to refuse to do care work, that would mean to destroy ourselves and the people we love. This is what care is primarily about. But care is more than that on this philosophical level. We also can look at it very pragmatically. We can look at it as a work. And I very much love this photograph. It comes from a book about cleaning, a cultural technique, which highlights that care is something that needs to be done on a daily basis. And usually, and we have heard that yesterday, it takes place within the household. And it's a broad range of household tasks that awaits us here. We are talking about care, but what do we mean when we say care? I think it's necessary to be more precise when talking about care. And we have different aspects of care work. We have this social emotional support for partners, friends, elderly people and children. We have this very physical taking care of them. We have the emotional part of it and we have all these very boring tasks of daily life like washing, cleaning, shopping, organizing, all these things that keep the household together. And you could also add self-care to a certain degree like taking care for yourself to reproduce your own labor power in order to do all these things. And now I need to take a look if you see anything, yes. And we have a huge discussion about domestic work. We have heard that today already. Domestic work is an equivalent to all other kinds of work. That's what the ILO is stating, the International Labor Organization, when she talks about decent work for domestic workers. talks about decent work for domestic workers. And the ILO estimates that the value of unpaid care and domestic work is to be as much as 9% of the global GDP, which would equivalent to 11 trillion US dollars. With women contributing at around 6.6% compared to men who do 2.4% of the GDP. This estimation suggests that in several countries, the value of unpaid care work exceeds the respective values of other very important market sectors, such as manufacturing, commerce, transportation, and others. So we cannot deny that this is a very important part of the economy. And at the same time, we face a huge devaluation of care work. Usually, the time spent outside of paid labor, which we consider still as taking place outside the house, is assumed to be spent at leisure. You're not working, you're only a housewife, you're staying at home means having free time and doing nothing. And they are perceived as not working, as unproductive. And at the same time, we have this paradox that they contribute a huge amount to the economy. And here we come to one of the main parts. And we, I assume, are aware here at this conference, maybe more than elsewhere, that this kind of work is highly gendered. I already mentioned that, that women and men contribute to a different amount to the paid and unpaid care work. We have estimations and statistics about that in Germany, that on average, women in Germany spend 52% more time per day on unpaid care work than men. And in Europe, and you can see that here at the end, we have almost all women, like 92% are regular carers, and 81% are daily carers. So women are doing the majority of the unpaid care work. And we also know from, and you already mentioned that, who is doing that work. We have some estimations. A lot of work is also in Germany done illegally and unregistered and done by migrants, by women over 50. This is the social group that we can find in the private households who are taking care and supporting private households there. But at the same time, it's mostly still wives and daughters who do this kind of work. And we have a legitimation that is very familiar to all of you, I think. It's that women are caring and loving by nature. We are naturalizing this kind of work and that women are doing that. And they are simply better at it than they are doing it. This is the reason that it's given. And what I'm very inspired by and what I like is the idea that comes from the Marxist feminist perspective from the 70s, who says that gender norms and family are only an adaptive response to the organization of work. And work here means the whole working system, paid, unpaid labor in the household, in the labor market. And that the idea of love conceals the exploitative nature of care work. This is something that I think is important here and which I will take with me throughout this talk. And what I wanted to look at is the idea of technology coming into the household and entering this very private, feminized sphere and what is gonna happen there. And still staying in this technology sphere, we now, technology's promise is, and this accounts for all the spheres of life, is it should make our lives easier and better and we have less work, it will be get more comfortable doing work, we will have more free time, our life should be better thanks to technology. That's the promise that technology is giving us. And we have this very old song, maybe some of you know that. It's also from the 70s. It's a song from Johanna von Kotzian. The little bit of housework takes care of itself, says my husband. Das bisschen Haushalt macht sich von allein, sagt mein Mann. Das bisschen Haushalt kann so schlimm nicht sein, sagt mein Mann. Wie eine Frau sich überhaupt beklagen kann, ist unbegreiflich, sagt mein Mann. It's a very provocative hit. It was on the hit list several times in Germany. And inside of it is, it is not understanding why the housework should be considered as something that needs technology improvement, when it already got some. There was a washing machine, there have been several items in the household that made it easier. So while still looking at it, it is already so easy and why should we do at all something about it? And on the other side of this perspective, we have, and I only chose one example, We have Frances Gapes, she's the inventor of the self-cleaning home. She said that housework is a thankless, unending job, a nerve-twangling bore. And her only wish was to get freed from that, and that was a major motivator for her then to invent the self-cleaning house she got several patents for that in the 80s it took her 12 years to build this house and yeah it's very interesting to look deeper into that it never became and i assume nobody of you is living in a self-cleaning house it became never a mass production it's not something that is like part of our is living in a self-cleaning house. It became never a mass production. It's not something that is like part of our daily living. So it's still something very extraordinary and an exception somehow. But she said having children on her own, being divorced and having to take care for them, that this is a huge amount of work and this is something that needs to be solved and that technology can help with that. And at the same time, from science and technology studies, we know that the reasons why technologies fail are the special characteristics of care work. And I will explain that using the example of smart homes. Care work has special characteristics that makes it very complicated to technologically improve the situation. Care work means you don't have standardized activities. You have different activities they are unpredictable they are always surprising elements in that it's dirty it's messy it's chaotic and it's always linked to social relations and to emotions it's what earlier russell hochschild once coined as emotional work. This is all this unpaid work that you do in relation to others, your own emotions, your own feelings, and the one of your close ones. And it's highly normatively loaded. You have this idea of being a good housewife, a good mother, which is all linked to care work. And when looking at smart home visions, then you see that, and maybe you have seen already, I put here one picture of one advertisement that they always use very similar pictures coming from all these images that you can buy online smart houses are portrayed as households that are sterile sterile neutral and very bland nothing is going around there nobody is no lego no lego at all and nobody's like walking there. You have huge spaces. It's white, it's clean. It's like this minimalist dream that you can have from your household. And there are, just recently, that a feminist perspective is putting on these smart home visions. And there are some different researchers going on already. And there's one from Chambers. She was looking at these advertisements and all these political papers on smart homes. And she claims that they are disregarding, totally disregarding the diverse household types that we have. And they totally miss to address the burdens that housework places, especially on women. They are not talking about that at all. It's not the topic of smart homes. What smart home is all about when it comes to advertisement and politics, it's about energy, it's about a certain amount, it's about security reasons, but it's not at all about household, it's not about care work, it's not about reducing the amount of work that we have there and even if it would we know from history that when new technologies enter the household and i already mentioned some i mentioned i hope i mentioned vacuum cleaners the the fridges the dis washing machine, the dishes. This is something that helped women in the household. It gave them more free time at one side. And at the second, on the other side, we know, from research about that, that in that moment, the standards were higher. This was not that suddenly they had more free time that they could use for themselves in order to educate, to only lay around and sleep, or have that free time that we all assume women have at home. But instead, there was a rise of standards, like the house needed to be cleaner than before, and the clean house became morally loaded to be cleaner than before. And the clean house became morally loaded to be like pure, stand for purity, for a perfect flawless house and for a moral integral being in society. This increased labor in the household. You needed to do the laundry more often. You had the washing machine, you could do that more often, it was easier. So no gain in free time because you were simply doing more often it was easier so no gain in free time because you were simply doing more in the same time and when we look at that from now times from a smart home perspective but then we say when smart home technologies are entering the household and where we have very few but we have some studies who point in that direction, that more work is coming. You need to, and maybe all of you did that already once, if you wanted to buy a new technique device, I don't know what you do, but I always do the mistake to go on Amazon and looking at reviews, and then I'm doing research, and I do research, and I read, and I read, and I never buy anything because nothing is really good. This takes a lot of time doing, like acquiring technology, taking care that it fits to each other, because when you have a smart home system, then it somehow needs to work together. Then having it means like programming it, installing it, and then maintaining it throughout its life. So it's work. Continuously you have to work with that. And this is what strangers and others call digital housekeeping, which usually means more work. And this is interesting, and maybe there is a certain shift, more work for men. Because it's usually the husband, the man in the household who's taking care for this technology part of household life and then taking care for smart home technologies. And there we come to our next point, because what is little thought about so far in the smart home context is that there are power inequalities in the household. Households, as I mentioned at the beginning, are social, cultural, economic units that are formed throughout asymmetrical relationships. You have the relationship between parents and children, very asymmetrical. You have earners and non-earners. You have men, women, tax-savvy, non-tax-savvy people in the household. And this gives you certain decision power that gives you to a certain degree power over others. And this is something that we need to take into consideration. Now we might think, and this is a reasonable thought that we could have, aha, this could be a new risk for women, as we already know that most violence to women is happening in the private sphere, is happening in the household. So it would be a new entry point for being more in control of women. But there is another aspect to that, and that I think is also interesting. Sadowski and others, they are talking about big mother, and this is what you see there at the end. It's also called Sense Mother. It's a little gadget that you can buy this nice white thing there. You can place it everywhere in your household. You can put it near the fridge and then it will tell your household members when they open the fridge and take out the Coke, for example, and reminding, no, you already had a lot of sugar today, maybe it would be better to take the water. So it takes care for you. It reminds you of doing the best out of yourself under the disguise of motherly care, of being interested in your health. You can track everything under the guise of mother care. And maybe some of you are wearing smart watches, this is all part of it, or you're having children whom you gave a chip to track them in order to always know where they are, only to take probably care of them. So this is a new aspect of controlling and tracking, which is linked to maternal care. And now I come to my last point. This techno fix that is tried to be used here in the household, nurtures fabulous futures in domestic dystopians, and I quote here from Spiegel, she's doing nice cultural analysis about technologies in the household, that come with an ambivalent mix of utopian fantasies and dystopian anxieties. We have heard that yesterday, that things in the context of care are ambivalent, and this accounts for technology more than all the other things. It is ambivalent. You can use it for the best of society. You can use it for the worst. And we have several criticisms from a feminist perspective, which I think is interesting. And what I put here is maybe what is the best that technology can bring, which is also discussed in the context of care. But looking at this, and this is the taking care for people aspect of care, is also criticized. taking care for people aspect of care. It's also criticized, for example, Fidelici, also a feminist Marxist thinker, she is saying that a technical solution is taking place instead of a radical system change, which would be needed. And this radical change of the system would need a revalorization of care work in general. So it's not done with simply putting technology in the household. We should re-evaluate the care work as such. We have heard that yesterday talking about caring societies, taking care more seriously and making working conditions better. And looking at these examples here that you have in the pictures, she says, and I quote, "'I know that in Japan and the US "'they are inventing household robots "'and even robots that care for people like nurse bots. "'But is this the society we want?' So this is one criticism that we have. And another one is, and this is coming from the Husemans, he's a biotechnologist, and Joyce, his wife, is an academic and activist in the same field of sustainability mostly. They are claiming that capitalist technology is destructive to the environment and to individual health. So it's doing the total opposite of that, of what we are expecting. Or it has at least some side effects and costs that come with it. And the example that they gave is including climate change as a result of energy production, the unknown effects of most synthetic chemicals, pollution from industrial activities, or the way the introduction of the car has changed the world. Another aspect is that the discourse about smart home technologies took a curious twist, Spiegel says. She says, the rhetoric of liberation and labor exploitation is moving from the human to the virtual. The home is now a discourse of battleground for post-human rights and virtual justice. We are talking about the rights for robots instead of the rights for care workers. This is what we can see here. And then I come to the final point, and again this is from a Marxist feminist perspective from Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, also from the 70s, and I quote, her work day is unending, not because she has no machines, but because she's isolated. And we have heard that somehow, I think, partly maybe already yesterday, and we can see that, I don't know how much time I have, no, in history, when talking about the introduction of the washing machine and so on, where I said women gained more free time, but it also came to the point that they didn't need to hire any more care helpers. So there have been a lot of women unemployed. This was one part of it, but also the middle-class households suddenly being totally alone in the household. And before that, at least have had servants and haven't been totally alone so this isolation is a throughout modernization of the household is to say is something that keeps with with the system and didn't improve anything as we know today so what we can maybe think of and this is something I'm very interested in at the moment and I think it links to that is the question if we need to abolish the family it's an old thought and it's about the idea of new forms of gender relations family and housing in the interconnection of that so thinking about for example collaborative housing and in how far collaborative housing is able to change gender relations in the household and might be another or better solution to free us from care work. So with this, I'm at the end. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Julia, for giving us this insight also into ideological dimensions and power structures related to the technological promises. I would directly please make some make notes. I see many of you are making notes and we have afterwards time to discuss all these interesting themes together. But before I would like to ask Hans Wollmarie from the WU Wien to give us insights into this presentation, which was originally designed by Leonhard Planck but also of you so I would ask you to give us these insights. Thank you and thank you very much for the two very interesting talks before me. So Leonhard got sick this morning and I can't really read out the text that he sent me because it's not the finished product yet. I suppose the train right here was dedicated for this. So I need to somehow face the slides as well. So it's a mixture of the text that I have here and the slides. So be gentle, please, with me. The presentation is based on a project that the two of us did together with Manfred Krenn and Wolfgang Blas. It's about shareholder-oriented transnational investment in critical social infrastructures and was commissioned for the Chamber of Labor in Vienna. Vienna. It's about analyzing transnational investors in the three sectors of housing, health, and care, and they're analyzing their value extractive business models. Okay, so what I would like to start is with highlighting that over the last years, and in particular since the COVID-19 crisis, there's been a visible return of geopolitics and a cost of living crisis. Governments have refocused attention to safeguarding critical infrastructure sectors, which are deemed essential to the stable functioning of the economy and society. So one element of this has been to shift away from a market-focused provision of everyday essentials and is reflected in rising skepticisms against transnational investment. So to speak, it's becoming more contested and some of these headlines illustrate this. For example, Blackstone or the Blackstone Rebellion in Denmark's housing sector or the rise and the fall of the French care giant company AuPair, former market leader in care homes in Europe. There are probably well-known examples to most of us here. What might be less well-known is that there is this new generation of national policies around the screening of foreign direct investments. this new generation of national policies around the screening of foreign direct investments. This was initially motivated by protecting the European Union's industrial base against predominantly Chinese investment in key technical infrastructures. Since its launch in 2017, it has been further expanded to cover a rising number of sectors. And the EU Commission actively encourages member states to improve national laws and monitoring instruments so this is the comic of geopolitics to some extent that I mentioned. Seen from the established policy paradigms that exist this constitutes an obvious break from a neoliberal consensus which disapproved of discriminating between domestic and foreign capital. So something is changing there. Yeah, moving on to, so this is the broader context of the study, so moving on to the research focus. Yeah, against this background, a key motivation was to reframe this debate around foreign direct investment screening by going beyond its narrow focus on specific investors and geopolitics alone. In particular, we wanted to highlight the risks that are associated with specific extractive business models of those transnational investors and how they are enabled or constrained by specific institutional setups. In the study, we look at the UK, Germany, and Austria.. For this presentation I'm going to look at Germany and Austria because Germany and Austria represent an interesting comparison as they both form part of the cooperative conservative welfare type but have a very diverging experience both in the care and housing sector. Yeah so so for this analysis, we draw on the variegated neoliberalization literature, which states that over the last four decades, we are experiencing a common trajectory towards further neoliberalization, but because of path-dependent institutions that vary nationally and also regionally we see this play out very differently which means that there are different starting conditions in each region or country depending on how the variegated neoliberalization materialized in said region. So these institutional changes that are happening can be interpreted as windows of opportunity for transnational investors to enter and establish themselves in critical infrastructure sectors. And it happens in very different ways. There's a classic financialization story, if you wish, in the UK. And then there's very different trajectories in Germany and Austria. So we argue essentially that it is important to widen the perspective on transnational investors to understand how their strategies differ and then in the end also be able to answer the policy question what is to be done. We used descriptive statistic based on company database, Orbis, and administrative data and then we also carried out a policy regime analysis. Okay, so first step is to widen the perspective on transnational investors. We came up with a typology that brings together different private for profit oriented investors with transnationally configured business model. So what we can see is that in addition to so-called strategic investors, such as Vonovia and Housing or AuPair and Care Homes, which often have a sectoral connection to their investment objects, there are a number of other financial investors. These include players such as banks, insurance companies or pension funds. But there's also newer players such as banks, insurance companies or pension funds. But there's also newer players such as private equity funds, actively managed mutual funds or passive index funds. They also play a crucial role, for example, BlackRock. While all of them are operating in the logic of the shareholder value doctrine, it makes analytical sense to keep these types apart because of their different strategic approaches, mode of participation and specific regulations. So depending on the business model, there are different regulations in place or there are different liberties of siphoning of value for each of these investors. So for instance, while private equity actors such as Blackstone primarily focus on taking over companies that are not traded on stock exchanges. Large index fund investors such as BlackRock or Vanguard are primarily investing small minority shares in publicly traded companies. Then there's national regulations in place that make it harder for them to make above average profits but in reality it plays out a little different so this this is part of the variegation that i mentioned earlier at the same time these types are all intertwined in different ways in the context of liberalized capital markets and offshore financial centers. For instance, the largest pension fund, CPPI, that's the Canadian one, used to be the most important shareholder in AuPair. In dynamic perspective, one of the ways in which private equity investors organize their exit is selling the restructured units to strategic investors. So private equity companies selling to strategic investors, something that has been coined financialization 2.0 by Viborg, Albers, and Susanne Hick. So our goal essentially with this was to go beyond the usual suspects and also go beyond essentializing transnational investors and give a more nuanced picture of what is going on in the countries and then yeah moving on from this we looked at the sectors health care and housing as i said so for the purpose of this conference it's going to be care and housing and given my own expertise focus a little bit more on housing the what you can see here is that the national aggregates of care homes operated by different types of providers, namely public, non-profit and profit providers, is a starting point to gorge the presence of transnational investors across the countries in care. And we can see structural differences in the provider mix. Overall, we can see a much larger role of public providers in Austria as compared to the German care home sector. So there's 41% in Austria and only 6% in Germany. However, over the last decade, its role has been relatively reduced as private, both non-profit and profit providers gained in importance. This is care, but this development is actually paralleled in housing in Austria. Looking beyond, the national aggregates reveals also interesting deviation from the overall modest world of profit-oriented investors in Austria. So if we change the spatial focus, in particular, the region of Styria in Austria is sort of an outlier, as we have around half of the beds operated by for-profit providers in this region. Looking at specific types of investors reflects overall differences between the two countries. What's particularly striking is the absence of private equity investors which have spearheaded transnational investment in care homes in many European countries, including Germany. This doesn't really exist in Austria. There we have seen a steady increase in investment by private equity in Germany, sorry, that is, we have seen a steady increase in investment by private equity, which is estimated to account for at least 6% of the beds across Germany in 2021. And this number is constantly rising. The other important group of transnational investors, strategic investors, is firmly present in Germany. While it has largely bypassed the Austrian care home sector, there's one important exception though. The French AuPair group has gradually expanded against a relatively restrictive regulatory framework by buying the Austrian Senecura group in 2015. And that's an interesting point to make. AuPair actually advertises on their homepage in their communication to their investors that they are specialized in entering highly regulated markets because there's a lack of competition because only they know how to get into these highly regulated markets. Moving on to housing. The level of transnational investment in Austria's housing system remains constrained in view of the relative stability of the housing system. As a first proxy, the overall share of housing units that are owned by both national and transnational profit-oriented investor is only at 5% across Austria. And this number has remained relatively stable since the 1990s due to the absence of major neoliberal restructuring. The German case is very different. It has undergone significant institutional changes. I'll show it on the next slide. In numbers, this has meant that until the late 2000s, approximately 2 million public housing units have been privatized and primarily sold to transnational investors. Actually, American private equity companies were at the spearhead in the German case. This corresponds to roughly 5% of the total housing stock at that time and actually exceeds in volume the number of units that were privatized during the right-to-buy program in the UK. So actually the biggest privatization that ever happened in the European continent of housing, public housing. Much of this housing stock has gone from public hands to financial investors and ended up with strategic investors over the last decade. This is a financialization 2.0 that I already mentioned. And this latter group has gained further in importance. You can see from the table here, the top 10 investors accounted for more than 1.1 million housing units. And one should add that their strategies are also spatially nuanced towards specific regions and cities, which means that in some cities, they account for up to 10% of local housing systems, contributing also to further contestation. Most of you will be aware of what is or has been going on in Berlin. And also there are similar movements in Frankfurt and also in Hamburg that are trying to somehow address this problematic concentration of ownership with profit-oriented strategic investors. So yeah, here are some of the key institutional changes in the housing regimes in Germany and Austria. Like I said, these critical junctures constitute the causes for the variegation that we can observe the much more prominent role of different investors with transnational business models in germany's housing system clearly needs to be understood against the institutional changes in the housing regimes and in particular since the 1990s so there's two key elements that i can highlight here the first is the abolition of the Non-Profit Housing Act in 1990, which increasingly pushed non-profit housing companies into the logics of marketization. The second relates to the so-called on-block privatizations that I just mentioned that began at the turn of the millennium. During the global financial and economic crisis, ownership changed from the financial investors to the strategic investors, as mentioned. In Austria, like I said, major neoliberal restructuring has not taken place. However, the housing regime did experience neoliberal reform, significantly lower than in Germany, though. But one thing that needs highlighting is the landlord-friendly liberalizations of the tenant law in 1994 and also individual privatizations at the beginning of the 2000s. So what we can see is that, yes, Austria is an exceptional case in the sense that it has remained fairly stable with regards to both care and housing. But we do see that there are gradual changes also that might in the future enable profit-oriented investments. And this leads me to the concluding remarks. So here I need to just work the slides. So the first motivation also for our study was that there is an importance of transnational investments in both sectors in Germany, which clearly shows that the established typologies from welfare regime literature at least need to be re-evaluated against this background. There's a very lively debate going on within housing studies about the different categories of housing regimes and how they might or might not describe actual empirical outcomes. Mark Stevens, for example, shows that yes, in the 1990s when these typologies became popular, they did describe the empirical reality, but in the 2020s, they need rethinking. What the comprehensive investor typology can help us do is to identify these windows of opportunity and find out why in a particular country, transnational profit-oriented investment was enabled. And this would mean that this also enables policymakers to reverse these kind of situations and do something about it. We have seen that a multi-level perspective is needed to assess these changes. So another criticism maybe of welfare regime literature is its methodological nationalism. So a multi-level perspective shows that there are also subnational contestations and welfare state restructurings going on. The example of Styria was just mentioned. And Vienna is actually also an outlier within the housing regime in Austria. And then lastly, that's an interconnection of the two fields. There's the need to rethink and redirect the role of real estate assets towards providing use values rather than exchange values. What I mean by this is that when you look into the situation in Syria and the care homes that are owned by profit-oriented investors, these are actually real estate funds from Germany who own the care homes that are owned by profit-oriented investors, these are actually real estate funds from Germany who own these care homes. So they are not interested in the care work that is monetized, but what they're actually monetizing is the value of the real estate. So that's something that regulators should also take into account. And then this could be addressed by strengthening non-profit roots on care and housing and thinking them together, especially in the case of care homes. And that's where I am finished. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Hans, for these insights also into institutional changes and settings and for these at least partly threatening developments concerning privatization. I think many of you have questions and I would ask you to formulate them or also maybe points of critique or discussion points. We have enough time so take your time and formulate these questions and yeah, who wants to ask, who wants to begin? Please, a microphone is coming. I have a question to Noemi Katona. I would like to know how does Hungary's care for regime and certification of care affect minorities like the Roma? Thank you. I think we could collect two or maximum three questions. Attila has also a question. I have two questions. Attila has also a question. I have two questions. The first one is to the Hungarian example. And then don't laugh at me when I'm asking very naive questions. Can we see this nationalist authoritarian turn as a double movement or not? And that I think is a very important question in various ways and try to justify it. Why? I think, is a very important question in various ways, and I try to justify it why. I think it's an important question, and it's not easy to answer, actually. For instance, just in itself, churchification can be, you know, re-embedding it into social relations, for instance. Or actually this type of a thing, saying that, you you know care is to be provided by society Not the market as they are taboo in the market as well can be also seen Seemingly as a some kind of a double movement, but I think what is important here And I give my answer, but I'm very curious in your answer that this is plainly a double movement talk or promise which is actually not done and then this is something very important so this is neoliberal authoritarianism in its prime phase the only thing they want to get rid of and discipline uh you know the social sphere in order to please the large-scale capital and And then this is why they are doing this. This is actually one of the underlying motives behind the Orson. Plus, very importantly, a little bit of a political game, changing the redistribution, right? So let's give the redistribution what we are giving to, not to these liberal whatever NGOs and so on and so on and so on, but let's give it to the church because that's a very important ally. and so on and so on and so on. But let's give it to the church because that's a very important ally. So that would be the first question concerning this double movement. So it's not a double movement. I mean, there's a debate on this in the literature. So for instance, has says that this is a kind of a double movement. But I think this is absolutely just a fake promise of double movement. And this is why it's so misleading. And that, I think, is something important to think about. So I just wanted to that. The second one is to Julia. I have a zillion questions to Hans as well. But I keep it because there are very, very interesting. But Julia had a very good talk and then just wanted to say, once again, this kind of a naive thing that maybe this kind of a technologization of care is de-valorization in the end. Because there was, in the end, that this is a substitute of valorization. But this is how market valorizes this. And then the, how would you see this question once again i know it's a little bit of a purposefully naive question okay thank you yeah thank you for this very easy question um we will start maybe with you but you can also contribute who wants to start to answer? You can start. Yeah, thank you very much for the questions. I will start with the question on minorities, the Roma minority, and the effects of chagrification and carefare. These are, I mean, I would maybe separate them, don't talk first about chagrification and then the care for regime. Because I think one, the trugification, I mean, now I was rather referring to what's happening in the care sector. But it's also trugification as a process is really relevant for education, as has been also mentioned. They don't have exact data how it affects, for example, in the education, so in terms of school, the Romani children's education. But coming back to the elderly care sector, it's quite, again, I don't have, of course, like specific data on ethnicities in the care homes, the churchified care homes, but I would say it's rather rare that Romani people are in these care homes, the churchified care homes. But I would say it's rather rare that Romani people are in these care homes, generally in care homes, not specifically churchified care homes, which is based on many reasons. It's really hard to get into care homes. We did not provide here this data, mean there is more or less around yeah I think 60,000 places in care homes but there is an extremely long waiting list basically so it's really hard to get into care homes almost for every second place in a care home somebody is waiting 40 years to get in and then there's plenty people actually die even before getting into those care homes and and there is also a really high fee people have to pay in order to get into those homes. So it's not, even though it's a state-provided service, people need to pay a lot of amount of money to get in. And in most, in many cases, and of course, it's generally Roma minority, they rather live in segregated places. They're rather poor, so they can hardly afford paying that amount of money. So in that aspect, it's not really about how they are affected by churchification, but it's rather they are rarely presented in the elderly care homes, not even in the churchified ones, but generally in the state-owned ones. The care for regime, and then I come back to how Eva Fodor used this term, which was, as we said, she's more focusing on child care and criticizing the family policies of the Orban regime, which is very much favoring middle class and upper middle class families, where obviously less Roma families are represented. So in many ways, they are, in that sense, less targeted by this care for, or they're less favored by these policies. But it's not, yeah, so this kind of double shift and these policies and how, so it is, what is really important that when the political rhetoric, the role of mothers is emphasized, it's rather the, yeah, sorry. I'm trying to make it more focused. So when this really important part of the Hungarian regime, which is about that women should have more children, and that's the role of the women, they want to have actually middle class mothers to have more children. So they want to have more kids in the middle class families, not on the Roma families. It's not explicitly racialized in this political rhetoric, but it's very much there in the concrete political measures how they distribute or how they give money for families in the political measures. So in that sense, this kind of care for regime and having more kids, it's much more targeted on middle class, non-Roma families, but it's not explicitly racial. The second question about the level movement I think is a really difficult one. Actually, I wanted to ask you the same yesterday evening after listening to all these talks, because I was really wondering about that. There is really, when we talk about, so that's I think why Hungary is in many way somehow a particular case when we talk about the marketization of care, because it's not explicitly marketized, not just in the political rhetoric, because it's really silenced there, but also the political measures are not favoring the market. So in that sense, it's very different from what we see in Austria and Germany, that the households are not getting extra money to fuel basically this informal care market. But that has also practical effects in terms of if you see about the numbers of for-profit care providers in the care homes, it's extremely low. I mean, you could probably see it on this graph about the maintainers of care homes, that it's almost invisible, it's really low. I don't have the exact percentage, but it's very, very low. So it has this effect that the formal care homes are not marketized. And the example mentioned in the presentation about the illegal care homes, it does exist. Of course, we don't have statistical number about that, but it's also not that much prevailing. What is prevailing is the informal living care market. But again, because of, we do the research, and that's the background of the talk today, we do research with Dora Gabriel on the marketization, the market actors within the healthcare sector, also focusing on living care work. And we see that there is a large informal care market, of course, in living care. But when we talk to care workers working in those households, and when we talk to families who employ living care workers, it's always middle-class families. It's still kind of the more wealthy, the richer parts of the society who can afford any kind of market-based services. And all the others, they don't receive any money for that, they don't have very low support from the state, so they do care for themselves, the family is doing it. So it has, it does, so in that sense, it's not simply political talk that market is silent and is not supported, because the political measures have this influence that the formal market is very, very small, basically. But I do agree very much that it's a kind of double. So silencing the market doesn't mean that there is no market. So yeah, I don't think I have a very concrete answer to your questions. So in many ways, I do this kind of difference between the political talk and the silencing of the market doesn't mean that there is no market. In that sense, it's not, yeah, it is, it does, I mean, there is a general marketization. I don't have a more clear answer to that, sorry. Yeah, I shortly answered to the question. The question was if the technologization of care cannot, could be considered as a valorization of care. And yes, I would agree to a certain amount. But it's not intended. It's a byproduct of the commodification of the private sphere in general. We have the theory of digital capitalism, who is making capital out of private data. This also accounts for the households, the private ones. And it's also interesting looking at the landlords and how they make use of smart home technology. And therefore, I think it is a byproduct. And at the same time, it's not a real fix. It's not like, first, it's not intended. It's not that they want to improve care work. And they don't achieve. It's not improving, really, through that. It's not better for the individuals. They are not cared for better. It's not cleaner than before. It's not easier. It's not cheaper. It's nothing. I don't see any category in which it would be better. And when talking to people, and we are carrying out interviews with smart home owners, like in private households, they're also admitting to that. They say, yes, I did all this counting. I tried to rationalize it. But at the end, I have to admit I do it for the fun of it. And it's not like making my life better at all, but I like it. So this is a very manly, nerdy approach to that. So this would be the answer. I think it's not done by putting the label. It's valorized on that. And what is value? Is it only a financial value? Because, yeah, for the market, it's a value. It's discussed as a new growing market which everybody wants to jump on and which promises a huge profit and this is a trend that we see since the 50s that the individual households became not only the place of production, like producing human labor force, taking care for the elderly, for children, for the actual labor force, emotionally taking care for partners and so on, but also like consuming. It's a place for consuming. And this is, again, one step in this process that we already observed before. Yeah, thank you very much. We have time to collect another small round of questions. Andreas Novy, please. Yeah, in continuation of the discussion on counter movements and your question, discussion on counter-movements and your question. I think there is a misunderstanding of the political left being in favor of protection and the political right being in favor of market strategies. And I think the Hungarian case is a very good example that it's more complicated. The Hungarian case is a very good example that it's more complicated. My research on Hayek showed that Hayek is not so much a pro-market philosopher. He is a supremacist. And once you have this understanding of neoliberalism as a supremacist ideology, it's much easier to understand the Hungarian case. And the Hungarian case is an upper-middle class project with a very clear class struggle implication. And all these anti-Roma policies are in fact anti-poor policies. And that's much easier camouflaged if it's ethnicized, because then you have a minority against whom you fight, and we, the Hungarians, the majority. So that's what I call a cultural war. But in fact, it's a supremacist project. And if you understand it like this, it makes it much easier to understand how the conservative welfare regime that we have in Central Europe is unfortunately very much inclined to be transformed into this type of supremacist regime because the class dimension is strongly linked to the gendered hierarchy and we have felt and that's really the difference of the last years of this reactionary political right that it's assuming gender hierarchy as part of their ideology and in the Hungarian case you have it explicit and advanced but if you look at the black blue governments at the regional level in Austria, you have a very similar link of class and gender politics in Austria as well. And unfortunately, that's very much culturally rooted in our societies. That's why this type of reactionary politics is so dangerous, and that's why looking at Hungary is so interesting. And just to add a positive side on churchification, I mean, I studied a lot on Latin America, and the Latin American Catholic Church was always a very strong ally of colonial power. But it also became the key real counter-movement via theology of liberation. And if you take this pope currently, I assume he's not very popular with the urban regime. And so you have a contradiction of churchification as subordinating or ally and potential international opposition with political implications. Yeah, thank you. I think in the last row, but also next round. Thank you for your presentations. I have a question for Hans, especially. I heard the talk because Leonard gave it another day, also a couple of months ago. And I was wondering if you were next to the German investor you found, are there any other in Austria, especially, investment firms or foreign direct investment companies trying to pick up the market, because you highlighted that it was just this one investor, but I was wondering if this is a trend somehow, right? Thank you, and Alex, please, this question. Yeah, but we have around five minutes, so please, short questions. I only have two short questions. A student at JKU. My first question was at Junior Grudig. Okay, I need a second to translate it into English. I wanted to ask whether or not the producers of that technology also actively, I'll say, sabotage the technology in order to sell it or because of the valorization of care work. One example I had to think of that is very old was an American producer of instant cake mixes that made their cake mixes, made you add extra ingredients just so the houseworker could feel like she had, in that part, she had more part at baking the cake and whether or not the new technology for a housework has something similar. So the houseworker feels more involved in it and that way would gain more prestige by being a good house worker. And my second question was at Naomi Katona also about the churchification. You talked about how the Catholic Church was working with the government but different churches also grew during the parts between 2001 and 2019 that you showed us, especially the Baptist church that wasn't even there before, but also other denominations. So was the government actively working only with the Catholic church or generally with churches, or how can you explain that? Yeah, thank you. I know that there are a few other questions, but we will have time more than 30 minutes in the next break. So I would ask... Maybe we can listen then. Yeah, for sure. Who has an urgent question? Really urgent? But there was somebody... No, no, no. Benjamin, you're... Take the chance. I also had a question for Hans Vollmari. I wanted to ask if you could explain or even speculate a little bit more about why these changes have been happening so much more in the German case opposed to the Austrian case. Specifically also regarding the role of governments and regional governments. Do you think it was more a strategy of purposely looking away, for example, or facilitating the entry of transnational investments? And in this regard also, do you think that they're primarily targeting high-end providers to buy up? So when you look at the landscape of providers, are these companies interested in providing high-end, more expensive care services? Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I would ask Hans to start with the answer because… Okay. Yeah, thank you, both of you. Stephanie, maybe to you first. Actually, in Austria, there's not much more transnational investment going on. So that's the result. But of course, there's profit-oriented investment also in these sectors. So in our study, we looked at cross-border investment, so transnational investors. If you would want to paint the whole picture, you would also have to look at national investors because they play a bigger role in the Austrian case. So that's a preliminary result, but we haven't looked into detail because we explicitly only looked at international investment. And there we can actually say that it is much less in Austria than it is in Germany or the UK. And to you, Benny, so there's actually two questions, I think. So the second question, yeah, absolutely. Especially in the UK, you get actual care deserts because of profit-oriented investment in wealthy areas, the Southwest and around London and Manchester. And then there's in the north of England areas where care access is severely limited because profit-oriented investment isn't interested in offering their high-end services there because no one is able to pay for it so that's a phenomenon that is very pronounced in the UK it has been criticized by German scholars and we haven't seen it that big of a problem in Austria and then reasons maybe for Austrian exceptionalism as you know that's something I'm also working on at the moment. There are two working theses, so I can't really answer definitely. I mean, in the case of housing, the most important institutional change was the nullifying of the Limited Profit Housing Act in Germany. So that's definitely the one institutional change that really, really influenced the housing regime. Then that hasn't happened in Austria so that's one main reason. And then there's two other theses, one being that the social partnership in Austria plays a very important role that makes it more resilient to institutional change because there's always this finding of compromises going on. And then there's the other thesis that in case of, so there's the Austrian conservatism, which is even more conservative than the German type of conservatism. And that makes it very hard to implement social ecological reforms, for example, as we can see at the moment with the current government, which is actually partly green. But it also makes it very hard to implement neoliberal reforms. So the conservatism kind of goes both ways. So, yeah, those are two theses, but I don't have a definite answer to this. Thank you. I would also give you the possibility to shortly answer if you... I'm not aware of any technology where this is a consideration, but I'm just doing a huge research. We are writing a paper, colleagues in this research project and me, and we have read over 130 papers about dedicated to gender in smart home context. And the research is mostly technology-driven and market-driven. It's mostly about how to get people to buy these things, how to make it more attractive, more appealing to them. It's about acceptance, acceptance of technology. And their agenda is always like a cross issue in these papers that we have looked at. And this is a great idea that you have, Hart. I think they would welcome ideas like that because this is a great idea that you have had i think they would welcome ideas like that because this is exactly what they are looking for how to make it more appealing for the individuals and they like stereotyping and putting age and race and gender on that and we are also very much often asked for translating it to the technical management sphere in these terms like what do women need what do they want what men want and they as apparently they expect expect that it's different what they want and to give direct advice yeah it's it's a topic and thank you very much also for the really great comment reflecting on this issue. I mean, it's a long, it's a big topic and of course it would require longer conversations, so I would just briefly say a couple of points related to that. So I totally agree that this class, in the child care policies and in this care for regime also described by Eva, the class dimension and how gender hierarchy is reinforced and the gender inequality is reinforced in this measure, that's pretty strong. And in that case, I see a bit different the topic of how elderly care is actually really absent in the political discourse and how it's really not focused on in political measures. So what you have been saying, it's very much a great explanation for these childcare policies and the rhetoric on childcare. And I do see it, I mean, as I said, basically the whole senior care is really not discussed. It's a really major issue that is really not addressed in the politics. So in that sense, the class dimensions and the gender hierarchy is not expressed that as well because it's generally really under, it's like really silenced. And if we see, I mean, when we say that that in the senior care policies or discourse around that, the role of the families and the responsibility of families is very much highlighted, but in that sense, in the political rhetoric, it's less gendered because in the child care, it's explicitly women who should do this care work, while in elder care, it's emphasized that it's the role of the family. So there is not directly said that it should be women, but practically we know that it is mostly women, actually female family members who do this work actually at home. This whole topic of churchification, I think it's really interesting and as you can see, it's a very actual political trend. And many things are not researched yet. What is actually happening, for example, in those schools, that's more research, but what is actually happening in those senior care homes, it's not really known. So what kind of difference it makes in those homes in terms of how people are cared for. But it's, but that's also, I would say, it's not really the point in this whole phenomenon. It's, I think Attila said it really correctly that it's very much about building loyalties. It's very much about allocating state resources to loyal stakeholders, so that's the main point. And of course the other main point is the political rhetoric and the positioning of the conservative regime and highlighting the Christian values. And there I come back to the question about what kind of churches. It's not only the Catholic church, but it's written in the law, there is, it's a really big other topic, so I'm really happy to talk more about that in a break because this whole churchification is a big issue. So it's part, what's happening in the social service providers or in the social sector is connected to a general, yeah, part of the general how the role of the church is seen differently and acknowledged differently by the Or in by the urban regime um and uh and there is a agreement between the so-called established or historic churches so they're kind of appointed some churches the historic ones the protestant churches also baptists also included there which are acknowledged by the by the state um and um and also the role of the church as a service provider, and not only as a religious institution, that's also acknowledged and seen differently today. And how is that happening? I'm happy to talk more about that in the break. Thank you very much. I think all of you deserve a big applause, especially especially thank you to Noemi Katona and Hans Molmary who jumped in very briefly and this is very nice. So let's have a good coffee break. Thank you for your attention and see you.