Florence Degavre

Biography

Florence Degavre currently works as a Professor at IACCHOS – the Institute for the Analysis of Change in Contemporary and Historical Societies at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL).

She focuses in qualitative social research and socioeconomics, with her current research project titled ‘WISDOM (Wallonie Innovation Sociale DOMicile).’ Her main research interest is in elderly care. As a socio-economist, she studies the socio-economic logics underpinning social enterprises (SE) delivering care and their articulation with stakeholders and public policies. On the basis of abundant empirical fieldwork carried out in home care, she has examined elderly care through three main angles: 1) SE’s empowerment potential for women in the care sector, 2) social innovation in SEs delivering home care, in particular the role of resource hybridisation as a major factor of innovation, and 3) the transformation of SE in reformed European care regimes since the 1990s, in relation to quasi-commodification, the partial re-familialisation of care and transnational care chains. One of the theoretical contributions aimed at by this work is to show the relevance of gender to conceptualisations and analysis in the field of SE.

Since 2005 she has (co-)conducted 9 grant-funded research projects related to elderly care, social innovation and SE with national and international collaborations. She has previously worked as a Research Assistant and then as an Assistant Professor at UCL’s Faculté Ouverte de Politique Economique et Sociale. Earlier, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Università di Modena Reggio Emilia, and was also a Guest Lecturer at the Université de Lausanne.

Florence holds a PhD in Social Sciences and a Master of Arts in Population, Environment and Development Studies, both from UCL.