Stay home: Mapping the new domestic regime

Will Davies, Sahil Jai Dutta and Nick Taylor
Economy and Society | Sept 2024

Summary

This paper argues that a new ‘domestic regime’ has taken hold in Anglo-American economies since 2008. The combination of austere fiscal policy and loose monetary policy produced sustained house-price inflation in an otherwise stagnant economy. This, along with broadband-enabled digital platforms, a highly flexible labour market, and an undervalued social reproductive sector, has transformed how capitalism operates in these economies. Taking the United Kingdom as a central case, our goal in this paper is to articulate what constitutes a ‘domestic regime’, and to locate this concept within wider sociological and political-economic debates. To adequately grasp the contemporary regime, we suggest that it needs to be considered in all its multifaceted, interlocking dimensions: the financial, the infrastructural, the reproductive and the productive.

Further Reading