Care in a Time of Austerity: the Electronic Monitoring of Homecare Workers’ Time

Austerity places intense pressures on labour costs in paid care. In the UK, electronic monitoring technology has been introduced to record (and materially reduce) the working time and wages of homecare workers. Based on empirical findings, we show that, in a ‘time of austerity’, care is reductively constructed as a consumption of time. Service users are constructed as needy, greedy, time‐consumers and homecare workers as resource‐wasting time‐takers. We point to austerity as a temporal ideology aimed at persuading populations that individual deprivation in the present moment, self‐sacrifice and the suppression of personal need in the here and now is a necessary requirement to underpin a more secure national future. Accordingly, women in low‐waged care work are required to eschew a rights‐bearing, present‐tense identity and are assumed willing to suppress their entitlements to lawful wages as a sacrifice to the future. By transforming our understandings of ‘care’ into those of ‘time consumption’, and by emphasizing the virtue of present‐tense deprivation, a politics of austerity appears to justify time‐monitoring in care provision and the rationing of homecare workers’ pay.     

The specter of failure: rendering Afghan women as sites of precarity in empowerment regimes

This article analyzes how the category of “Afghan women” and discourses of precarity intersect within the women’s empowerment regime in Afghanistan. By examining an NGO that seeks to empower women through writing, I argue that staff members draw upon precarity as a go-to logic to describe the state of Afghan women writers’ successes under conditions of insecurity and limited communication. Specifically, it is writers’ desires to subvert their social orders and to carve out their own futures that staff members and writing coordinators frame as subject to potential destruction. While recent work has highlighted the importance of recognizing the precarious lifeworlds of vulnerable populations, this article points to the potential implications of a hyper-recognition of precarity – namely, the obscuring of the complexities of individual women’s past and present realities. Through analyzing the pedagogies of one empowerment NGO working with women in a post-9/11 Afghanistan, I show how the logic of precarity is concerned with the vulnerability of women’s desires and sentiments, rather than their material and political vulnerabilities. It is thus deeply inflected by a historically situated “common sense” about which potentialities and aspirations are inherent to Afghan women.     

A “shift in attitude”? Institutional change and sexual and gender-based crimes at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

ABSTRACT

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has been slow to address sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) crimes perpetrated during the Democratic Kampuchea regime. However, there appears to have been a tentative “shift in attitude” at the ECCC toward the investigation and prosecution of these crimes. This article draws on feminist institutionalist theories, first to explain the ECCC’s initial failure to prioritize SGBV and then to explain how and why this may have changed. The article suggests that such change has not arisen from the ECCC’s formal rules. Instead, various actors working with and around these “old rules” have drawn on these provisions, civil society initiatives and international and national gender norms to modify “informal” practices concerning the prosecution of SGBV at the ECCC. Sensitivity to SGBV is particularly important in hybrid, or internationalized, international criminal structures, which may be hindered by prohibitive practices emerging from both the international and national components of the institution.     

The “what” and “who” of co-optation: gendered racialized migrations,settler nation-states and postcolonial difference

In this article, I focus on the management of postcolonial difference and the production of belonging in a white settler nation-state in order to rethink the notion of co-optation. I first develop a theoretical framework for understanding co-optation by separating the “who” and the “what” of co-optation: actors who embody diversity in public, political debate become the “who” of co-optation, as their agency is shaped by gendered and racialized processes of subject making. The “what” of co-optation revolves around particular conceptualizations of practices, rights and freedoms, associated in this case with “gender equality,” which is rendered an empty signifier in the process. I then illustrate this framework by drawing from research on the Sharia-based arbitration debate that took place in Ontario, Canada, between late 2003 and early 2006. I focus on the claims of two Canadian Muslim women activists to show that co-optation occurs as attempts to further liberation instead advance illiberal practices.     

Differences in Experiences of Discrimination in Accessing Social Services Among Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Individuals by (Dis)Ability

Transgender and gender nonconforming (GNC) individuals frequently experience discrimination and potentially a lack of respect from service providers, suggesting they have decreased access to professionals with cultural competency. Similarly, people with disabilities experience higher levels of discrimination in social services than their nondisabled counterparts. From an intersectional perspective, this study examines rates of discrimination in accessing social services faced by transgender and GNC people, comparing across ability. Data indicate that although transgender and GNC individuals of all abilities experience gender-based discrimination when accessing social services, those with disabilities experience higher levels of antitransgender discrimination in mental health centers, rape crisis centers, and domestic violence shelters.     

All Data are Wrong,but Some are Useful? Advocating the Need for Data Auditing

In a recent article from the Annals of Applied Statistics, Cox discussed the main phases of applied statistical research ranging from clarifying study objectives to final data analysis and interpreting results. As an incidental remark to these main phases, we advocate that beyond cleaning and preprocessing the data, it is a good practice to audit the data to determine if they can be trusted at all. A case study based on Ghanaian Official Fishery Statistics is used to illustrate this need, with Benford's law being the tool used to carrying out the data audit. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

LGBT Family Lawyers and Same-Sex Marriage Recognition: How Legal Change Shapes Professional Identity and Practice

ABSTRACT

Lawyers who practice family law for LGBT clients are key players in the tenuous and evolving legal environment surrounding same-sex marriage recognition. Building on prior research on factors shaping the professional identities of lawyers generally, and activist lawyers specifically, I examine how practice within a rapidly changing, patchwork legal environment shapes professional identity for this group of lawyers. I draw on interviews with 21 LGBT family lawyers to analyze how the unique features of LGBT family law shape their professional identities and practice, as well as their predictions about the development of the practice in a post-Obergefell world. Findings reveal that the professional identities and practice of LGBT family lawyers are shaped by uncertainty, characteristics of activist lawyering, community membership, and community service. Individual motivations and institutional forces work to generate a professional identity that is resilient and dynamic, characterized by skepticism and distrust coupled with flexibility and creativity. These features are likely to play a role in the evolution of the LGBT family lawyer professional identity post-marriage equality.     

Operational Risk in Financial Services: A Review and New Research Opportunities

We present a framework to describe and analyze operational risk in financial services from an operations management perspective, focusing in particular on process design, process management, and human behavior aspects. The financial services industry differs from other service industries in ways that affect the nature of the operational risks it is subject to. In recent decades, many books and papers have focused on operational risk in financial services; however, this literature has focused mainly on the conceptual and statistical aspects of operational risk management and not on its operational aspects. Operational risk in financial services has not received much attention from the operations management community. The framework presented here is based on the premise that operational risk in financial services can reap significant benefits from research done in the theory and practice of operations management in manufacturing industries as well as in other services industries. The objective of this study is to propose particular challenges and questions raised in the practice of operational risk management that may stimulate future research in this particular area of operations management.