‘The Right to Choose or Choosing What's Right? Women's Conceptualizations of Work and Life Choices in Contemporary Russia’

The resulting social and economic transformations of marketization and democratization have had a significant impact on the employment terrain of post‐socialist Russia. This has had particular effects on the forms and structures of work available for women. Our article argues that as a result of these social and economic transformations, the metaphor of ‘choice’ inherent in current theoretical approaches to the study of women at work in western contexts can also be adapted to the post‐socialist context. Building on existing research on women and work in the UK and in Russia, we seek to provide new insights into Russian women's own understandings of work and non‐work choices grounded in an analysis of women's use of rights discourses. Drawing on in‐depth interview data with 49 women living in the provincial Russian city of Ul'ianovsk, we explore constructions of work in relation to narratives of discrimination; as a means of ‘samorealizatsiia’, and as ‘choice’ reflecting the continuing inseparability of public and private roles for women. Situating our work in wider global debates affecting the gendered nature of employment, the examination of the use of rights discourses not only highlights the multiple ways in which women perceive their choices about work but also offers an alternative conceptual framework.     

Women's family power and gender preference in Minya,Egypt

Structural and ideational theories are adapted to explore the influence of women's resources and ideational exposures on their family power and gender preferences in Minya, Egypt. Data from a household survey of 2,226 married women aged 15–54 years show that residence with marital kin decreases women's family power. Women in endogamous marriages have greater family power than women in nonendogamous marriages but still tend to prefer sons. Educated women report weaker son preference and greater influence in decisions but still tend to prefer sons. The positive association of women's education, paid work, and urban residence with a variable measuring girl or equal preference and family power suggests that selected resources and ideational exposures may improve girls’ well‐being in Minya.     

Gendered Divisions of Fertility Work: Socioeconomic Predictors of Female Versus Male Sterilization

Domestic labor researchers have examined a multitude of duties disproportionately performed by women, yet the responsibility associated with navigating a couple's fertility—fertility work—has been overlooked. Using data from the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (N = 1,415), the author examined how racial and socioeconomic factors affect the division of contraceptive fertility work among married and cohabiting women who rely on either their partners' vasectomies or their own sterilizations. Drawing theoretical connections between fertility work and housework, resource‐ and gender‐based perspectives were used to assess whether women's or their partners' characteristics are stronger predictors of sterilization type, and whether women's absolute or relative education level has a greater impact. Findings suggest that White and socioeconomically privileged women are more likely to have vasectomized partners than disadvantaged women. Male partners' characteristics were more closely associated with sterilization type than women's characteristics, lending greater support for the gender‐based hypotheses.     

1964 Tokyo Olympics as Post‐War

This is an analysis of the historical continuity of the military‐cultural spatial formation of the Tokyo Olympic Games throughout the prewar and postwar era. The sites that eventually became the basis for hosting the 1964 and 2020 Olympics had already materialized in the plan for the 1940 Olympics. Tokyo's modernization process entailed a shift of the city's core from the rich cultural heritage accumulated since the Edo in the city's northeast towards an area extending from the southwest of the city center into the suburbs. The northeast area of central Tokyo had been home to commoner districts since the Edo period, and with land that was highly subdivided, did not lend itself to large‐scale development. But the southwest of the city center was originally the site of feudal estates, and these large sites were generally amenable to large‐scale development. These areas were home to numerous Imperial Japanese Army bases before the surrender, which after seizure during the US occupation eventually became the footprint for large parks and urban developments. The 1964 Olympics played a determinative role in the developments of the southwest of the city center. This continuity from prewar to postwar planning is reflected in the similar placement of venues, and the their conversion from former military uses. So the Olympics came to postwar Japan as a postwar event, in the strict sense of the word. The term postwar here refers foremost to the strategy of converting the social consciousness from war that accompanied reconstruction and economic growth.     

Wives' Relative Wages,Husbands' Paid Work Hours,and Wives' Labor‐Force Exit

Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,254) and discrete‐time event‐history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are their own or their husbands' absolute wages. In addition, I show that women married to men who work more than 45 hours per week are more likely to exit the labor force than are wives whose husbands' work approximately 40 hours per week. My findings highlight the need to examine how women's partners affect women's labor‐force participation.     

Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society‐Nature Opposition

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society‐nature and city‐countryside—and their co‐identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society‐nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials‐flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolism's raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio‐natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlap's distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.     

Post‐Fordist reconfigurations of gender,work and life: theory and practice

Based on an in‐depth study with 56 informants (25 women and 31 men), across the ICT (information and communication technology), creative and academic sectors in one city/regional hub in Ireland, this article investigates the so‐called revolution in work/life practices associated with the post‐Fordist labour processes of the Knowledge Economy from the perspectives of workers themselves. Recent theorizations of post‐Fordist work patterns emphasize a rearranging of work and life place boundaries; a reconfiguring of work and life time boundaries; and a dissolving of the gendered boundaries of work and life (production and social reproduction) (Adkins and Dever 2014 ; Morini and Fumagalli 2010 ; Gill and Pratt 2008 ; Weeks 2007 ; Hardt and Negri 2004 ). Our findings suggest that, instead of dissolving boundaries, workers constantly struggle to draw boundaries between what counts as work and as life, and that this varies primarily in relation to gender and stage in a gendered life trajectory. Work extensification is compensated for via a perceived freedom to shape one's own life, which is articulated in terms of individualized boundary‐drawing. While younger men embraced ‘always on’ work, they also articulated anxieties about how these work habits might interfere with family aspirations. This was also true for younger women who also struggled to make time for life in the present. For mothers, boundary drawing was articulated as a necessity but was framed more in terms of personal choice by fathers. Although all participants distinguished between paid work and life as distinct sites of value, boundaries were individually drawn and resist any easy mapping of masculinity and femininity onto the domains of work and life. Instead, we argue that it is the process of boundary drawing that reveals gendered patterns. The personalized struggles of these relatively privileged middle‐class workers centre on improving the quality of their lives, but raise important questions about the political possibilities within and beyond the world of post‐Fordist labour.     

Straight out the barrio: Ozomatli and the importance of place in the formation of Chicano/a popular culture in Los Angeles

Abstract

Ozomatli's history of formation, the multiplicity of its sounds, the role played by its music in enabling political activism and political coalitions illuminate the relations between identities and politics at the present moment. The group is grounded in Los Angeles contemporary Chicano/a culture and in the new social relations, new knowledges, and new sensibilities of an emerging global city in a transnational era. Speaking from the interstices between commercial culture and the new social movements, Ozomatli's music and political work offers us invaluable bottom‐up perspectives on the terrain of counter‐politics and cultural creation at the beginning of the twenty‐first century.     

Single and the City: State Influences on Intimate Relationships of Young,Single, Well‐Educated Women in Singapore

Low fertility rates and an aging population challenge the city‐state of Singapore. The Singaporean government therefore encourages singles to marry and have children. Using ethnographic data and interviews (N = 28), collected between August and December 2012, this explorative study examined the relationship between government interference and the love lives of young, well‐educated, single women in Singapore. Getting married is expected not only by the state, friends, and family members but also by singles themselves. The author examined how young women view and experience these social ideals in their daily lives. Foucault's (1982, 1984) idea of governmentality and Budgeon's (2008) idea of couple culture were used to investigate how government policies intervene in the romantic relationships of individuals through various channels, such as the housing policy, matchmaking initiatives, and social norms. The government may effectively affect individuals in certain ways, whereas at other times individuals may act in a manner that is opposite to what the government expects.     

Women leaders,self‐body‐care and corporate moderate feminism: An (im)perfect place for feminism

This article offers self‐body‐care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism and a manifestation of postfeminism for women leaders. It explains how postfeminism as a bodily practice surfaces through women leaders' body work and how women ‘top' leaders strategize to stabilize their credibility by identifying their own and other women' body work needs and the steps they take to meet these. Self‐body‐care extends understandings of body work as part of postfeminist governmentality and contributes to understandings of moderate feminism as that which deflects and reflects feminism and constrains and empowers subjects. As such self‐body‐care offers an (im)perfect space for disruption and for Gender and Organization Studies (GOS) scholars to pursue the implications and potential of postfeminism. We call for women elite leaders to be part of feminist futures and illustrate self‐body‐care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism by highlighting complexity in the postfeminist thesis and reflexively re‐examining two of our previous published empirical studies of women ‘top' leaders.     

Doing Gender,Doing Surveys? Women's Gatekeeping and Men's Non‐Participation in Multi‐Actor Reproductive Surveys

Gender differences in research participation have been documented in both quantitative and qualitative studies, a pattern that is particularly pronounced in studies of reproduction. We use the National Survey of Fertility Barriers to analyze three reasons frequently used to explain men's non‐participation in reproductive research: (1) Reproduction is a sensitive subject for men, (2) reproduction is women's domain, and (3) men's unavailability due to seemingly pragmatic reasons (e.g., work schedule). Using binary logistic regression, we test these three explanations across two different models: women's gatekeeping (denying researcher access to partners) (n = 1,637) and men's own non‐response (n = 1,454). A substantial minority of women (12.8 percent), engaged in gatekeeping, but the dominant mechanism of men's non‐participation was their own non‐response once women granted researcher access to partners. Consistent with prior studies on general survey non‐response, several demographic variables were associated with men's participation. Additionally, findings suggest that the notion of reproduction as women's domain received the strongest support, though specific variables within this construct differed for models predicting women's gatekeeping versus men's non‐response of their own accord.     

Introduction

Abstract

“What impact has city life on the individual–our behavior, personality, values, relationships?” George Simmel's 1905 publication of “The metropolis and mental life” remains a seminal essay on this central yet neglected question which we now term “urban psychology.” The centenary of Simmel's essay in 2005 is an apt time to take stock of the history and current status of urban psychology, with a special issue of this journal gathering data-based articles on diverse aspects of urban psychology. This four-part article (a) summarizes Simmel's 1905 essay, (b) comments on the dramatic population trends since 1905, (c) elaborates on 10 remarkable points about urban psychology, past and present, and (d) previews the five urban pychology reports in this special issue.     

‘Now,We Have the Same Rights as Men to Keep Our Jobs’: Gendered Perceptions of Opportunity and Obstacles in a Mexican Workplace

Drawing on extensive qualitative data at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation, this case study investigates professional employees’ perceptions of changes to a prohibitive work policy requiring women to quit working upon marriage and having children. Employees believed the policy change meant working women were valued employees, but how this translated into opportunity highlighted distinct views of the types of positions professional women could occupy at the company, reinforcing sex‐segregated job allocation. Whereas women's narratives pointed to cultural resistance, men's narratives attributed the dearth of women in higher level positions to their lack of professionalism and commitment to work. The work policy change only guaranteed the right for women to work as the company modernized to fit the neoliberal demands of the global marketplace. Now women faced the challenge of turning that right into career advancement in a traditionally masculine‐defined company. I argue that even with the policy change, gendered discourses on women in professional occupations constructed and maintained gender inequities in the workplace. This study contributes to the scholarly discussion on gendered discourses within the context of global restructuring by showing how mechanisms at work maintain gender inequity in the workplace.     

Reports of past conferences

Since the advent of the People's Republic, the school has served as a metonym for the city in China, both in the public imagination and in state policy. This article explores how two different ideologies (socialist and post‐socialist) were manifested in two different visual images of the city and school, which in turn shaped the urban institutions and landscapes. In the socialist era, party‐state propaganda offered an image of a model society which was predominantly rural, and where formal education had been marginalized by alternative forms of learning. Cities and schools were understood to be dangerous repositories of bourgeois capitalism which must be scoured of their elitist and decadent characteristics through the importation of rural practices and values. In the post‐socialist era, the city is now envisioned as the centre of modernity and progress, and schools are seen as the path to development and ‘quality’ (suzhi). The rural is pathologized as backward. This new ideology has reshaped the Chinese urban educational landscape from one of enforced egalitarianism to one characterized by inequality and exclusion.     

Chinese Male Peasant Workers and Shifting Masculine Identities in Urban Workspaces

A key feature of China's internal rural–urban migration is the transformation of work from a rural‐based agricultural sector to urban‐based industrial and service sectors. This article critically examines the interplay between urban work and accompanying social relations in the workplace (that is, service and low‐skilled manual jobs) and the (re)construction of male peasant workers' subjectivities and identity formation. The qualitative data from the men's life histories suggest that familial gender practices, conceptualized as an appropriation of the traditional Confucian ‘father–son’ relationship, are of importance in shaping the men's occupationally located shifting identities in traditional urban ‘female’ jobs. This exploratory study aims to examine complex and multilayered accounts of rural–urban labour migration, in terms of how the men accommodate themselves to the city, involving both material constraints (structure) and creative cultural practices (agency). Their biographical transformations are located within wider socioeconomic and political transformations associated with China's current modernization project, of which they are a major constitutive component.     

Transnational Traders: El Salvador's Women Couriers in Historical Perspective

An estimated one‐third to one‐half of Salvadorans who carry remittances and goods between El Salvador and the United States are women. Scholars studying these viajeras argue that their work simultaneously represents a break from traditional gender relations confining women to the home and an extension of gender traits that favor women in developing social ties. Although social ties are crucial to the courier trade, this argument ignores antecedents to viajeras' work in El Salvador and suggests that transnationalism pushes women into realms of labor and physical mobility that have been gendered masculine. Using ethnographic methods, I examine the relationship between women's historical work in El Salvador and their current work as viajeras, as well the relationship between viajeras' experiences and those of women transnational traders in other parts of the world. My findings contribute to a small but growing body of research suggesting that instead of merely being excluded from or manipulated by global processes, many women in the Global South have expanded the realm of their activities to help shape variable forms of global capitalism. Studying how they do so sheds light on local mechanisms for combating gender inequality and promoting development.     

Women's Work? The Relationship between Farmwork and Gender Self‐Perception

Women have long been involved in agricultural production, yet farming and ranching have been associated with masculinity and men. In recent years women have become more involved and more likely to take active and equal roles on farms and ranches and thus increasingly are doing tasks that have been associated with masculinity. Prior work indicates that women are perceived by others as more masculine when they do these tasks, but less work has focused on the association between women's involvement in farming and women's own perceptions of their gender (i.e., how masculine or feminine they feel). Using 2006 survey data from a random sample of women in livestock and grain operations in Washington State, we find that women's involvement in farm and ranch tasks is associated with their gender self‐perception, with more involvement being associated with a more masculine self‐perception. Women who view their primary role as independent agricultural producers or full partners also perceive themselves as more masculine than women who view their primary role as homemaker. We discuss the implications of these findings for women's experiences in agriculture.     

Eritrean Refugees’ Utilization of Antenatal Services in Israel

This study analyzes Eritrean refugee women's utilization of antenatal services in Israel by means of retrospective self‐reports surveys (N = 63) targeting women's service utilization (array of services used, frequency rates, facility rates and demographic correlates) and semi‐structured interviews (N = 10) targeting women's experienced barriers for service utilization. Findings show that Eritrean women make substantive use of the full array of services, with user rates increasing over time. However, frequency rates are low, although increasing when women have more experience with the system. Facility rates are not in keeping with the recommendations of the Israeli Ministry of Health. Interviews reveal that the barriers of work and a complex system of antenatal care limit women's frequent service utilization in the right facility, while the barrier of miscommunication limits their understanding of the services they actually utilized. Findings stress the importance of analyzing different facets of utilization and their demographic correlates.