Abstract
This article investigates the transnational marketization and corporatization of domestic services by brokers. Polanyian, institutional logics, and intersectional perspectives and findings on capitalism and violence provide a theoretical framework to understand brokerage as mode of service provision creating and shaping hybrid and unequal work and care arrangements. The Austrian context is a paradigmatic example for the European mode of senior home care provision by recruiting female migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe and placing them in Austrian middle- and upper-class households. The Sri Lankan context is a paradigmatic example for a labour brokerage state, which exploits (paid) household labour of women that satisfy the needs of upper- and middle-class households in the Middle East. Contextual global sociology offers a critical lens to compare the ways in which brokerage is politically, socially, and culturally embedded and creates similar and different modes of service provision based on social inequalities.