The papers in this panel examine care as a set of practices embedded in institutional forms in and beyond the market. Taking a comparative approach to the question of care provision and commodification, we explore care in both the United States and Lebanon. One contribution examines the care work of women’s organizations in Lebanon in the 1940s and 1950s. A second focuses on Black women's reproductive labor in Atlanta and the transition from domestic service to team cleaning, corporate child care, and home health care. The third paper examines the expansion of corporate child care chains in the United States, evaluating how company executives envisioned approaches to labor supply. KinderCare and its peers transformed childcare into a scalable, standardized sector governed by managerial logics.

Taken together, the three papers foreground institutionalization as a key process in the history of care. In the United States and Lebanon, care has shifted between household, associational, and corporate forms. Rather than treating commodification as the sole analytic endpoint, the panel asks how different institutional sites organize care’s meaning, redistribute responsibility for its provision, and shape the conditions of caring labor. We draw on Shahra Razavi’s “care diamond” framework, which conceptualizes care provision as distributed across households, markets, states, and not-for-profit institutions. The movement of care across the “care diamond” reveals not linear marketization, but ongoing renegotiation among families, voluntary organizations, corporations, and states.

By placing Lebanon and the United States in comparative dialogue, this session highlights both shared dynamics and divergent trajectories in the structuring of social reproduction. In each case, women’s labor remains central, yet its organization is mediated by race, class, and political geography. We explore how capitalist societies continually reorganize care across public and private domains, generating new forms of inequality even as they expand the infrastructures that make social reproduction possible.