Equal Opportunities Policies,Employment and Patriarchy

This paper, based on research in the North of England, seeks to examine the interconnections between equal opportunities policies, women's employment and patriarchy in a local labour market. It is argued that organizations develop a selection of public patriarchal strategies, most notable of which are the denial of inequality and the use of ‘time’ to segregate and disadvantage women within the labour market and labour process. It is masculine culture which has determined the shape and operation of equal opportunities policies where time commitment, individualism and priority to employment are necessary in order to achieve. Equal opportunities policies fail to address not only structural inequalities but also the role that organizations themselves play in maintaining gender segregation. By individualizing women the policies may also undermine women's own employment coping strategies which depend on assistance from other women both inside and outside the employment setting.     

Introduction to the special theme: theorizing transnational labour markets

In this introduction to the special themed section, ‘Theorizing transnational labour markets: economic‐sociological approaches’, I introduce the reader to the topic and give an overview of the four contributions. The terms ‘global labour market’ and ‘transnational labour market’ are broadly used to account for contemporary social phenomena as diverse as the ever‐closer integration of China or India, with their huge labour forces, into the world economy, the off‐shoring of specific operations of MNCs to countries with cheap labour, or cross‐border labour migration. In most of these cases, the existence of global or transnational labour markets is taken for granted by the media, consulting agencies and other economic actors. However, scholars in labour market research and cross‐border migration alike have largely ignored the categories of global or transnational labour markets. Thus far, it remains unclear what these terms really mean and how we should address them theoretically. The aim of this themed section, therefore, is to view cross‐border labour migration through an economic‐sociological lens and thus bring into dialogue migration and labour market scholarship. By introducing a transnational perspective into labour market research, we hope to make a useful contribution towards theorizing on cross‐border labour markets and thereby overcome the methodological nationalism that seems to have crept into this area of scholarship.     

Are fire services ‘extremely gendered’ organizations? Examining the Country Fire Authority (CFA) in Australia

Emergency management organizations often have military‐based histories and continue to maintain militaristic styles of operation. Similar to the military, these organizations tend to be male dominated and culturally masculinized. The militarization and masculinization of rural fire services in Australia are generally unrecognized but highly important elements defining these organizations, and the example of the Country Fire Authority (CFA) is considered here. Using a cultural artefacts approach, historical and contemporary elements of the CFA's structure and practice are analysed using the concept of an ‘extremely gendered’ organization, with a focus on how the CFA is structurally and culturally gendered. We argue there is value in expanding the notion of ‘extremely gendered’ institutions beyond the military, to include other militarized organizations. Doing so not only helps to better understand and address resistance to change and gender equality measures, it also draws attention to the important role that such organizations play in the greater patriarchal order.     

The new ‘hidden abode’: reflections on value and labour in the new economy

In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976 : 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production’: the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new ‘hidden abode’ outside employment, for example in the ‘production of organization’ and in consumption. Although they can open up this new ‘hidden abode’, without LPT's fine‐grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the ‘new economy’. Through developing an expanded conception of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in today's economy.     

Patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics: gendered discourse of ‘Double Eleven’ shopping festival

In this article we consider the Double Eleven shopping festival as a major discursive site where the hegemony of what we call patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics is articulated. The state, the market, the corporations and the media, both mainstream and social media, all played an important role in building up a national spending spree that is deeply embedded in the current class and gender structure of China. The phenomenon of Double Eleven emerged at a time when state capitalism has been overwriting socialist institutions, while patriarchal ideology being further intensified through consumerism. As a consequence, the intersectionality of class and gender becomes increasingly manifest in the Chinese society. We start with a brief overview of the trajectory of gender politics in China since 1949, with specific focus on how the socialist project of seeking gender equality was gradually replaced by the quest for ‘womanhood’ and ‘femininity’. We then discuss, using both secondary sources and our own analysis of news coverage of Double Eleven, why maintaining a high level of consumer demand is of crucial importance for the Chinese state and what the state’s role has been in configuring the hegemonic gender order. A brief section on ideology and discourse lays out the conceptual framework of our analysis. It is at the intersection of a dissipating socialist ethos, emerging economic stagnation and ascending consumerism that the sexist discourse in relation to Double Eleven proliferates, and this is the analytical focus of our empirical section. We elaborate on the theoretical implications of the empirical analysis before concluding.     

Why ‘Work’? Gender and the ‘Total Social Organization of Labour’

Although feminism revitalized the study of work, deconstructionist tendencies may now undermine further theoretical advance. Implicit threats to the very concept of ‘work’ pave the way for conceptual dissolution or, unwittingly, for recuperation by an unreconstructed mainstream. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of ‘work’ which builds on the new insights but avoids essentialist or ahistorical categories. The issue is approached through consideration of the simultaneous embeddedness and structural differentiation which characterize ‘work’ activities and institutions. A reorientation of perspective towards a conception of work as ‘total social organization of labour’ is proposed as a means of moving forward. By focusing on the relational organization of all labour, however and wherever it is undertaken, the concept of work as economic activity is recovered, but no longer restricted by the boundaries separating institutional spheres or the constraints demarcating traditional academic disciplines. While of general applicability, the TSOL is elaborated here in relation to gender and work in the period of mass production.     

Gender Equality and Corporate Governance: Policy Strategies in Norway and New Zealand

Advancing gender equality in the labour market continues to be a policy objective in many OECD countries. Wide national variations are evident in strategies and accomplishments towards improving gender equality at all levels of the labour market, including senior management and corporate governance roles. This article compares policy strategies in Norway and New Zealand directed towards achieving gender equality in the governance of corporate institutions. A principal feature of the New Zealand strategy has been a soft regulation approach in the form of advocacy and encouragement of equal employment opportunity policies, awareness‐raising and benchmarking. For Norway the use of legislation in the form of quotas and affirmative action programmes has been the predominant strategy. Using empirical data collected in 2004–2005 on women's perceptions and experiences of corporate governance participation, this article critically examines these different policy strategies.     

Advancing Gender Equality: The Role of Women‐Only Trade Union Education

The need to improve the level of membership and the number of women activists has been a central feature of overall ‘renewal’ strategies of many British trade unions. Within this, equality education has been a key part of policy‐making. This research draws on detailed case studies of two trade unions and focuses on their women‐only education courses. We suggest that a greater understanding of the contribution of different types of trade union education to the advance of equality is a key factor in the ability of unions to maintain a central role at workplace level, within the context of an increasingly diverse labour market.     

Theorizing equal opportunity in Muslim majority countries

This article offers an interdisciplinary and transnational review of feminist, management and Islamic literatures to develop an understanding of philosophical theorization and institutional framing of equal opportunity in employment in Muslim majority countries (MMCs). The review suggests that ‘the mainstream’ western literature on gender and equal opportunity, along with its secular orientation, may not capture the complexity of gender and equal opportunity in MMCs. Through integrating Islamic writings and gender scholarship, the article examines how equal opportunity theorizing may be advanced by Islamic philosophies and interpretations. In particular, it presents two concurrent principles of gender relations in Islam, for instance, equality and difference of women and men. While Islamic scholars generally agree that women and men are equal because both are created by one God, there are two competing interpretations with respect to the principle of difference between women and men. The first is an egalitarian interpretation which advocates affirmative action in women's favour, and the second is a patriarchal interpretation which supports women's subordination to men. We present this discussion and use it to develop our understanding of equal opportunity or lack thereof in MMCs.     

The social order of transnational migration markets

The ‘infrastructural turn’ in labour migration studies has shifted attention away from the experiences of migrants to the role of public authorities and private actors in facilitating migrant mobilities. As part of a broader turn towards studying transnational mobilities rather than immigration and settlement, this research shows that the formalization of transnational labour migration has made mobility both freer and more difficult. In this article, I reinterpret mobility infrastructures from a market sociological perspective. Transnational labour migration, I argue, is more clearly conceptualized as the organized ‘making’ of cross‐border labour markets. Moreover, from a market sociological perspective the construction of cross‐border labour exchanges is at the same time a question of how the uncertainties inherent in market exchanges are coordinated by market actors. In its focus on how exchanges across borders are possible at all, a market sociological perspective makes note of the conflicting interests, power imbalances and uncertainties that must be handled for a social order of transnational migration markets to emerge. An important question concerns whether alternatives to the less regulated neo‐liberal market order that is evident in most migration corridors are possible and under what conditions. With reference to the challenges facing the regulation of cross‐border labour markets, in my conclusion, I map an agenda for future research.     

Theories of skill and class structure*

This paper notes an increased interest in issues of skill and class structure evident amongst both Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists. It examines three questions in this area. Firstly, what theories are available to sociologists? How adequate are they, particularly for an understanding of trends in manual work in Britain? Finally, what improvements can be suggested? Two dominant grand-theoretical approaches, post-industrialism and Marxism, are analysed Post-industrialist theories of ‘skilling’ are rejected as empirically implausible and Marxist versions of ‘deskilling’ rejected on theoretical and empirical grounds. None the less, a secular decline in levels of training as measured by length of apprenticeships is tmted, but the question of deskilling requires further research. A model of the relationships of skilled trades unions and capitalist employers under different local labour market conditions is suggested which, despite its simplicity, incorporates tnarked improvements upon the Marxist models that have been popular recently. In particular, it is strongly argued that an image of an asymmetric balance of forces adds considerably to an understanding of the variable relations between capital and skilled labour in Britain.     

Separate and Unequal

Through an ethnographic examination of legal processes in Family Court, this article maps some of the circumstances which Indian Muslim women confront in the area of Family Law. It provides a portrait of the politically interested spaces which govern their lives, indicating the osmosis between ‘religious,’ cultural and legal realms, rather than essentialisms about the nature of Islam. It provides a reminder that we can no more separate religious practices fundamentally from patriarchal logic than we can separate jurisprudence and the workings of law, indeed the State, from its constitution in multiple embedded sites of patriarchal logic and race and imperial regimes. Optimal strategies for Indian Muslim women to be socioeconomically and legally empowered are also interrogated in this context, as the paper explores the ways in which gender equality and cultural difference and community support can, or not, protect women. It emphasizes the importance of problematizing both notions of ‘community’ and ‘gender equity’ in any attempt to address women's rights and needs.     

Women and the rural idyll

The existence of a ‘rural idyll’ has been widely accepted by social scientists working within the rural field. Yet the term itself has received relatively little critical attention. In particular, the variable characteristics and impacts of the rural idyll amongst different groups within the rural population has been largely overlooked. The cultural turn in rural geography and the emphasis which has recently been placed on identifying and studying the rural ‘other’ provides an important opportunity for the notion of a rural idyll to be unpacked from the perspective of different rural dwellers. This paper investigates the role of the rural idyll in maintaining rural gender relations. It examines women's attitudes towards and experiences of two key elements of the rural idyll; the family and the community. Drawing on material from interviews with women in rural Avon in the south west of England, the paper shows how women's identity as ‘rural women’ is closely tied in to their images and understanding of rural society. It is argued, in particular, that the opportunities available and acceptable to women are built on very strong assumptions and expectations about motherhood and belonging within a rural community. Some of the more practical implications of these expectations are explored in the context of women's involvement in the community and in the labour market.     

Rediscovering the social question

Neoliberal policies not only privatise formerly public services but also focus one-sidedly on discourses of individual autonomy and responsibility. This makes it difficult to raise ‘the social question’ (the question what constitutes social bonds) publicly since market principles are presented as allowing no alternatives. Social work owes its professional origins however to a shift from early capitalist individualism to policies recognising the need for social reconstruction and cohesion. It was mandated to reconcile the key principles of modernity, personal freedom and equality, although its methodology, often corresponding with social policy regimes, interpreted this mandate variably. Attempts in current social work to adjust to the cancellation of the social question through techniques of ‘activation’ and individualised care further the crisis of the project of modernity which manifests itself in a split between heightened public control measures and privatised concerns for ‘care’, thereby altering its core identity. Reflections on social work's historical position within varying political contexts help to promote a renewed critical examination of the profession's political role and highlight the need to turn interventions at the personal level into occasions that affirm social citizenship, ensure rights and promote social equality.     

The Gender Politics of Human Waste and Human‐as‐Waste: Indonesian Migrant Workers and Elderly Care in Japan

Significant decline in mortality and fertility rates has led to a rapid aging population in many parts of the globe. Coupled with a decrease in caring for one's senior parents at home, this condition creates a crisis in elderly care. Most studies on elderly care in Japan, the country with the highest percentage of senior people in the world, employ theoretical approaches rooted in the fields of aging and migration studies. This article offers a new perspective by not only focusing on the voices of the Indonesian women migrant care workers in Japan by way of in‐depth interviews, but also intersecting feminist and waste studies in its analysis. This different theoretical approach allows this article to argue that the politics of disposability in the ‘global care chains’ is a gendered and ‘affective’ phenomenon. Drawing from Jaggar's ‘emotional hegemony’ and Saraswati's ‘affective structure’, this article shows that emotions matter in constructing the disposability of these migrant workers and elderly people, particularly within the capitalist currents that drive the gendered supply chains.     

‘Just transition’? Conceptual challenges meet stark reality in a ‘transitioning’ coal region in Australia

ABSTRACT

‘Just transition’ (JT) is an increasingly popular concept developed by unions and adopted and adapted by academics, environmentalists, government and non-governmental organizations, and international institutions in recognition of the need to address social concerns and inequities emerging from efforts to address environmental problems. It has been noted, however, that ‘JT’ lacks both conceptual clarity and empirical evidence of its practical applications. This paper examines the ‘theory’ and practice of ‘JT’ by first considering the competing interpretations and conceptual understandings of ‘JT’ and second, the challenges of realizing a ‘JT’ in an Australian coal region where transition is occurring. The paper argues that achieving ‘JT’ requires more than government provisions and interventions and that unions must perform an active part in the ‘JT’ process through their relations with employers, workers, government, and community. It suggests the lack of clarity within the ‘JT’ literature may be the concept’s lasting strength.     

Lost in Transitions? Feudalism,Colonialism, and Egypt's Blocked Road to Capitalism (1800–1920)

We revisit the transition debate to capitalism through the historical case of nineteenth century Egypt and the theoretical lens of uneven and combined development. We argue that the twin concepts of formal and real subsumption of labor under capital offer a necessary methodological device to study capitalist transitions. We conclude that nineteenth century Egypt was not a society experiencing an ‘indigenous’ transition to capitalism that was blocked by colonial intervention. Instead, colonialism warped the ongoing formation of a commercial-absolutist state, which led to a combination of feudal and capitalist social forms that lingered well into the middle of the twentieth century. Through a long-term historical analysis of the Egyptian social formation as a complex ensemble of political power relations and ongoing cycles of articulations of multiple mode of productions we problematize the dominant ‘modernization’ thesis. The modernization paradigm presupposes that economic growth will take place due to globalized markets, transforming, in turn, existing social and political practices and institutions along modern lines. This idea has been reiterated by neoclassical and neo-institutionalist economists who understand economic backwardness as a simple lack of market-efficient behavior of local economic agents. As such, we also emphasize that the gradual integration of the Egyptian social formation into the capitalist world market did not automatically lead to the establishment of a dominant capitalist mode of production within this formation.     

EN-COUNTERING THE OTHER DISCOURSE OF CHICANO-MEXICANO DIFFERENCE

In this period in which Mexicans in the borderlands are being constructed as aliens and sources of cheap deportable labour (not makes of intellectual traditions which encourage transnational area studies and theoretical reflections in the US), it is important to remember that not only people but also ideas cross Mexican–American borders. It is doubly important to scrutinize those intellectual movements that cross state-sanctioned borders while restricting social possibilities and movements.

In this article I consciously assume this charge by focusing critical attention on an influential venue of transnational(ist) travel (On the road to Octavio Paz/On the Road to Chicano) within cultural productions that laid the foundation for an ‘alternative’ Chicano studies epistemology and tradition in the early 1970s. Drawing on disparate cultural studies traditions and the deconstructive insights of Chicana feminists and activists, I encounter the patriarchal dynamics, conceptual idioms, political investments (nationalism/familism) and essentialist difference that undergirded this intellectual formation and its construction of Chicana/o identity. In the process I argue that this formation not only rendered the desired form of political exceptionalism, but also served to distance Chicanas/os from the political and intellectual claims of Chicanas, Chicana feminists and other women and people of colour. However, as my concluding section demonstrates, this circulation of theories was – to use the language of Clifford – ‘cut across’, interrupted and contested by other theories in circulation during the same period that offered different claims to representation, different forms of transnational travel, and other possibilities for imagining social political and intellectual relations.     

New governance of labour rights: the perspective of Cambodian garment workers’ struggles

Globalization has implied the transfer of industrial work to countries of the Global South, where labour rights are seldom effectively protected by legal frameworks. New forms of governance that go beyond state-centred legal regulation are presented as an alternative to fill in ‘governance gaps’. This paper analyses ‘new governance’ from the perspective of Cambodian garment workers and labour movements’ struggles. Drawing on the literature on governance and private regulation and research data from Cambodia, it argues that a technocratic approach makes governance initiatives ignore the economic conflict between labour and capital but also the possible political conflict between labour and government. By ignoring trade union rights, power-blind initiatives might end up weakening both the labour movement and democratic accountability, instead of complementing state’s regulatory roles. This might serve the overlapping interests of the powerful actors both in Cambodia and internationally.