Unequal foodwork: Situating the sociology of feeding within diet and nutrition disparities

Widespread inequities in diet and nutrition present a pressing public health problem. Sociologists working to illuminate the causes and contours of these inequities often center the role of family foodwork, or the multifaceted domestic labor that supports eating, including planning and preparing meals. Mounting sociological scholarship on foodwork considers how food's meanings are socially patterned to reflect broader social structures, ideologies and institutions that influence their manifestation and families' resources to enact them. Here, we present three core contributions from the sociology of foodwork that can advance essential transdisciplinary conversations around nutrition disparities as well as efforts to tackle these disparities. We lay out how (1) family foodwork is historically rooted in broader structures of capitalist exploitation and women's subordination, and today remains gendered through normative discourses equating “good” feeding with “good” mothering; (2) the moralization of foodwork is buttressed by an ideological context idealizing homecooked meals and lamenting foodwork's decline, and; (3) foodwork—and societal evaluations of it—are shaped and stratified by intersecting gendered, classed, and racial inequalities. After reviewing each contribution and its importance for addressing nutrition inequities, we conclude by advocating for a closer conversation across disciplines and highlighting important future directions for sociologists.     

The relations of ruling: a feminist inquiry ∗

This paper explores the complex of objectified social relations that organize and regulate our lives in contemporary society. Its inquiry is driven by experiences in the women's movement of a dual consciousness, with the particularities of being mother and housewife on the one hand, and, on the other, the abstracted discourses and forms of organization creating the matrix of a consciousness outside the local and particular. A strategy for sociological inquiry is formulated which does not begin from a discursively structured position within the objectified relations, but from a standpoint traditionally women's, located in the actualities of the everyday of people's embodied living. The historical trajectory of these relations emerges as increasingly independent and increasingly pervasive organizers of people's everyday/everynight activities. The materiality of printed and electronic texts mediates the intersections of the relations of ruling and the everyday world. Texts are complemented by technologies or disciplined practices that standardize local states of affairs or events, bringing them into correspondance with standardized texts. Baudrillard's conception of ‘hyperreality’ is used to explicate characteristic forms of the text-mediated systems of corporate management. Finally the topic returns to the issue of gender, showing how the dual consciousness which brings the objectified extra-local character of these relations into view has itself been defined in the historical trajectory of their emergence. It is in this context, that a sociology from the standpoint of women can be seen as proposing an alternative organization of knowledge which does not reproduce the relations of ruling, but an explication of just those relations in which our lives are embedded.     

Negotiating Gender in Uncertainty: A Mechanism of Women's Marginalization in the Japanese Workplace*

Abstract Women have been long absent from important white-collar positions in large Japanese organizations. Two approaches have been made to understand women's work experiences and career outcomes in these organizations, namely, the structuralist and the rational choice approaches. The underlying assumption of both approaches is that individual women's career orientations are basically fixed and larger factors outside the workplace play central roles to determine women's career outcomes. In order to understand women's work experiences and perspectives more realistically, however, we need to turn our attention to the workplace itself and to examine the mechanisms through which women are constantly marginalized, if inadvertently, in everyday interactions with others. Drawing on a developing perspective that focuses on the dynamic nature of women's career experiences. this paper, based on a case study, demonstrates a major way in which the influences of outside factors, specifically of women's attitude toward work, are in fact reinforced within the workplace. A major component of this mechanism is women's sense of uncertainty generated through their day-to-day work lives.     

Cranky Old Women? Irritation,Resistance and Gendering Practices in Work Organizations

This article discusses midlife women's irritation and resistance in waged work. Old age is stereotypically conceptualized as a time of tranquility and wisdom, but whether women are included in this stereotype is a matter of question. This article concentrates on instances in which women are regarded instead as cranky and difficult when they age. The article is based on interviews of 56 to 64‐year‐old women and men employees, personnel managers, and trade union representatives employed in 10 work organizations. Of these, the gendering practices of three organizations, a hospital, and food and metal industry organizations, are analyzed in detail. The article asks what irritates midlife women, and suggests that gendering practices in the organizations can be seen to produce that which is perceived as ‘cranky old women’.     

Perceptions of Relational Practices in the Workplace

We examined the intersection of gender and work through an investigation of relationally motivated behaviour in the workplace. Using Fletcher's ethnography of women's relational practices in a masculine work environment as a springboard, we examined Fletcher's typology of relational practice, participants' perceptions of employees who perform these forms of behaviour and whether these perceptions were related to gender. Working adults (N = 128) completed online surveys containing workplace scenarios and rated how effective and submissive they perceived the behaviour to be. Overall, participants rated relational practices as ineffective and submissive, regardless of whether a man or a woman had performed them. However, they reported that they would behave the same way as the target and they offered relationally oriented reasons for their choice. Relational practices remain paradoxical in the workplace, both necessary and devalued.     

Hours,Scheduling and Flexibility for Women in the US Low‐Wage Labour Force

Research on women's experiences with work schedules and flexibility tends to focus on professional women in high‐paying careers, despite women's far greater prevalence in low‐wage jobs. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the work‐hours problems faced by women precariously employed in low‐wage jobs by addressing how work‐on‐demand scheduling and other features of part‐time labour in the neoliberal economy limit women's ability to make ends meet. Using data from 17 in‐depth interviews, we identify four themes — unpredictable schedules, inadequate hours, time theft and punishment‐and‐control via hours‐reduction — and the problems they present. Results suggest that much‐championed flexible work policies that seek to encourage women's career advancement may have little bearing on the work‐hours dilemmas faced by low‐wage women workers. We conclude that social change efforts need to encompass work policies geared to low‐wage workers, such as guaranteed minimum hours and increases in the minimum wage.     

Anchors,Habitus, and Practices Besieged by War: Women and Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad

As war challenges survival and social relations, how do actors alter and adapt dispositions and practices? To explore this question, I investigate women's perceptions of normal relations, practices, status, and gendered self in an intense situation of wartime survival, the Blockade of Leningrad (1941–1944), an 872‐day ordeal that demographically feminized the city. Using Blockade diaries for data on everyday life, perceptions, and practices, I show how women's gendered skills and habits of breadseeking and caregiving (finding scarce resources and providing aid) were key to survival and helped elevate their sense of status. Yet this did not entice rethinking “gender.” To explore status elevation and gender entrenchment, I build on Bourdieu's theory of habitus and fields to develop anchors: field entities with valence around which actors orient identities and practices. Anchors provide support for preexisting habitus and practices, and filter perceptions from new positions vis‐à‐vis fields and concrete relations. Essentialist identities and practices were reinforced through two processes involving anchors. New status was linked to “women's work” that aided survival of anchors (close others, but also factories and the city), reinforcing acceptance of gender positions. Women perceived that challenging gender relations and statuses could risk well‐being of anchors, reconstructing gender essentialism.     

Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender,Juggling Responsibilities and Violence in Paid (and Unpaid) Care Work

Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender‐neutral violence; gender‐specific violence and the juggling of home and work responsibilities. Collective assumptions and expectations about how men and women should perform care work result in men's partial insulation from the more intense forms of exploitation, stress and violence. This article looks at health risks, not merely as compensable occupational health concerns, but as avoidable products of forms of work organization that draw on notions of the endlessly stretchable capacity of women to provide care work in any context, including a context of violence. Indeed, the logic of women's elastic caring appear crucial to the survival of some agencies and the gender order in these workplaces.     

‘You Can Stand on Your Head and Still End Up with Lower Pay’: Gliding Segregation and Gendered Work Practices in Danish ‘Family‐friendly’ Workplaces

This article explores the process of gliding segregation in two Danish workplaces. We address the questions of how and why women and men at the same workplace, with the same levels of education, often end up doing different work tasks. Drawing on a gendered organization perspective and sense of entitlement theory we illustrate the processes whereby structural and cultural expectations place women in predictable and routine work, and men in more developmental work. We also show that the level of education makes a difference to women's sense of entitlement to developmental work, but that the discourse of family friendliness disadvantages women in the allocation of interesting and valued work tasks. The findings illustrate the resilience of gendered work practices and the importance of focusing on workplace interactions to explain this.     

Women's Work: A Challenge to the Sociology of Work

This article confronts the Sociology of Work with the nature of women's work, arguing that this long-standing sociological speciality is threaded through with numerous ontological conceptions that make it difficult not only to understand women's work, but also the changing contours of men's work. On the basis of three key areas in the Sociology of Work — the definition of work, the nature of the firm/organization and the definition of skill — the disjunctures with the nature of women's work are underlined. Feminist research — on housework, homeworking, the link between the productive and reproductive spheres, the sexuality of organization, the gendered nature of skill and on emotional labour, to mention only a few examples — is argued to have contributed profoundly to our rethinking of the workplace for both women and men. Examples of recent feminist conceptualizations of work are provided as illustrations of the direction in which the Sociology of Work could proceed.     

Survivors of Woman Abuse

Abstract

The feminist social work and related literature on abused women has focused on women's processes of empowerment but has overlooked the question of women's movement from individual survival to collective resistance. In this feminist qualitative study, I explore the processes through which survivors of abuse by male partners become involved in collective action for social change. Using story telling as a research method, I interviewed 11 women about the processes, factors, insights, and events that prompted them to act collectively to address violence against women. I found that women's movement from individual survival to collective action entails significant changes in consciousness and subjectivity. Women's processes of conscientization are complex, contradictory and often painful because they involve political and psychic dimensions of subjectivity, protracted struggles with contradictions and conflict, and resistance to knowledge that threatens to unsettle relatively stable notions of identity. I suggest that feminist social work theory and practice must take into account three interrelated elements of women's transformative journeys: the discursive and material conditions that facilitate women's movement to collective action; the social, material and psychic costs of women's growth; and the multifaceted and difficult nature of women's journey in recognizing and naming abuse, making sense of their experiences, and acting on this knowledge to work for change. I recommend that feminist social work practice with survivors recognize that survivors can and do contribute to social change, and develop new, more inclusive liberatory models of working with survivors of abuse.     

Private and public experience captured: young women capture their everyday lives and dreams through photo-narratives

Recent studies about young people suggest a need to change the way researchers and policy-makers have traditionally understood the concepts of youth, transitions to adulthood, educational participation and the need for young people's voice to be heard. For many young women the taken-for-granted features of everyday life such as family, social, education and paid work are the priorities in their lives. Yet those priorities are frequently masked in large-scale studies, resulting in homogenising the diversity of young people's experiences and abstracting educational engagement from other parts of their lives. The study reported in this paper approaches the issue of young women's construction and defining of their identities in interaction with the broad institutional milieu that is part of their everyday experiences. This approach seeks to understand this lived experience through the use of photo-narratives. The paper explores a rationale for this approach in methodological and ethical terms. It allows for an exploration of the complexity of young women's multiple identities and the changing nature of young people's engagement with post-compulsory senior secondary education.     

Tending to the Emotions of Children: Predicting Parental Performance of Emotion Work with Children

Scholars, recognizing emotion work as a type of domestic labor, have examined whether domestic labor theories explain emotion work. Few studies, however, have investigated the predictors of emotion work with children. In this study, the authors examine the usefulness of 3 domestic labor theories (i.e., time availability, relative resources, and gender ideology) in explaining relative emotion work with children. Data are from a random sample of couples with children (N = 96 couples). The results suggest that men's labor force hours are negatively related to men's relative performance of emotion work with children and positively related to women's relative performance. Further, women's traditional gender ideologies are related to increased relative emotion work performance with children for women and decreased relative performance for men. Relative income is also a significant predictor of women's performance of emotion work with children. The authors discuss the implications of the study.     

Preparing,Working, Recovering: Gendered Experiences of Night Work among Women and their Families

The negative physiological consequences of night work are well evidenced, but there has been limited research on the gendered consequences of night work for partnered women with children. This paper examines women's experiences of night work by drawing on qualitative interview and audio sleep diary data with 20 UK female nurses working non‐regular rotating shifts, together with interview and diary data from their male partners and children. The analysis shows how the lived experience of women's night work is characterized by three phases, which we discuss within a timescape perspective. Alongside changes to paid work and sleep during the period of night shifts, the ‘preparation’ and ‘recovery’ phases of women's night work involve intense periods of considerable additional unpaid and unrecognized work and anxiety. Gendered expectations for household management and family wellbeing mean that women night workers undertake considerable responsibility for complex planning before night shifts begin, and re‐enter established domestic routines within hours after night shifts end. Women maintain continuity for their families by actively managing the impacts of night work. This enables the fulfilment and ‘display’ of successful and normative gendered patterns of domestic responsibility, which appears to be central to women's own coping with night shifts.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.     

‘Knowing one's place’: gender,mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract In this article I analyse the gendered space of transnational mobility by problematizing migrant subjectivity in everyday practices. In line with feminist perspectives I highlight the significance of the micro‐scale experience of female migrants from Eastern Indonesia in acquiring mobility as a struggle for new subjectivity. I frame this migration as a production of the subjective space of power. Based on in‐depth interviews with returned migrants, I present reflexive accounts of two migrants on contract domestic work abroad to illuminate the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity. Households take into account the cultural meanings of space in everyday life including local relations in the decisions on mobility. Strategies of ‘knowing one's place’ reflect women's agency in negotiating alternative roles and positions within the intra‐household dynamics and in the workplace. Women's personal accounts have the potential to illuminate spatial processes of migration as a contested space for the repositioning of self in networks of family, kin, local and global relations.     

Alternative Food Networks and the Labor of Food Provisioning: A Third Shift?

Scholars have increasingly examined the sphere of consumption in alternative food networks (AFNs). However, research has largely overlooked women's experiences as food provisioners. This is problematic, as AFNs prescribe practices that could be expanding women's food provisioning labor. This article addresses this gap in the literature by examining how the physical labor of food provisioning varies for women engaged in AFNs relative to those not engaged in AFNs, and how diverse AFNs as well as socioeconomic status (SES) influence the labor of food provisioning for women engaged in AFNs. Using data from the 2012 Ohio Survey of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Issues, I demonstrate that women engaged in AFNs, relative to women not engaged in AFNs, exert more physical labor in food provisioning, that prioritizing local food systems involves more physical labor than prioritizing organic foods, and that women with lower household incomes who prioritize organic foods exert greater physical labor in food provisioning than women with higher incomes who prioritize organic foods. I conclude by arguing that women who prioritize local food systems are engaging in a third shift and that greater attention should be paid to the role of SES in shaping women's experiences as food provisioners in AFNs.     

Attitudes towards Women's Work Roles and Women Managers in a Sports Organization: The Case of Turkey

In recent years the need to apply gender equality principles to all sectors of Turkish society has been widely acknowledged and has become an increasingly important issue because of the modernization and recent Europeanization project of Turkey. However, even as this has been acknowledged, attempts to apply gender equality in employment in sports organizations have been mostly ignored. This article reports on the attitudes towards women's work roles and women managers of 83 women and 138 men who work in the General Directorate of Youth and Sport (GDYS) which is the biggest national governing body for sport in Turkey. The findings of this study indicate that both female and male workers in the GDYS scored lower on their attitudes towards women's work roles and held more negative attitudes towards women managers. Although male workers scored higher on attitudes towards women's work roles than female workers they held more negative attitudes towards women managers. In addition, femininity scores were found to be the only predictor of attitudes towards women's career advancement. Finally, we discussed these findings regarding previous studies and the sociocultural context of Turkey.     

Texts and the ontology of organizations and institutions

This paper examines the problem of how institutions and the phenomena called formal or large-scale organization exist—the problem of the ontology of organizations and institutions. It addresses this problem using an approach that has been developed as part of a sociology exploring the social from women's standpoint, from which standpoint the extra-locality and objectification of these forms of organization are problematized. For the most part, sociology formulates the phenomena of organizations and institutions in lexical forms of organization, institution, information, communication and the like, which suppress the presence of subjects and the local practices that produce the extra-local and objective. This paper argues that texts (or documents) are essential to the objectification of organizations and institutions and to how they exist as such. It suggests that exploring how texts mediate, regulate and authorize people's activities expands the scope of ethnographic method beyond the limits of observation; texts are to be seen as they enter into people's local practices of wrking, drawing, reading, looking and so on. They must be examined as they coordinate people's activities.