Winner of the Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians In Engendering Business, Angel Kwolek-Folland challenges the notion that neutral market forces shaped American business, arguing instead for the central importance of gender in the rise of the modern corporation. She presents a detailed view of the gendered development of management and male-female job segmentation, while also examining the role of gender in such areas as architectural space, office clothing, and office workers' leisure activities.
The new international division of labor and the imposition of structural adjustment on Third World countries has necessitated a reexamination of development policies and a reevaluation of the role of gender in their success or failure. Although women often bear the heaviest burden under structural adjustment, there is also considerable evidence of women being empowered through their responses to the challenges of economic restructuring. Based on case study material from Eastern Europe, the Islamic nations, Africa, China, and Latin America, this volume explores the significant contributions women make to the wealth and well-being of their families and nations. The contributors argue persuasively that women may hold the key to sustainable development, an increasingly critical issue at a time when policymakers are reconsidering the full costs and benefits of a growth-fixated development model. One of the first to embody the new “gender and development” paradigm, this book reports on research at the frontiers of knowledge and theory about the gendered outcomes of economic transformation, restructuring, and social change. By incorporating “voices from the South,” it makes a provocative addition to our understanding of the political economy of development and of the relationship between world ecology and the world economy.
"Drawing on a range of primary sources including the archives of major companies, personal papers, trade magazines, photographs, and recorded anecdotes of turn-of-century life and using the extensive secondary literature on women, sex roles, women's work, manhood, business history and material culture, Angel Kwolek-Folland has built up an intricate picture of office life ... (that) is both challenging and innovative"--Business HistoryIn Engendering Business, Angel Kwolek-Folland challenges the notion that neutral market forces shaped American business, arguing instead for the central importance of gender in the rise of the modern corporation. She presents a detailed view of the gendered development of management and male-female job segmentation, while also examining the role of gender in such areas as architectural space, office clothing, and office workers' leisure activities
In the early twentieth century, an era characterized by unprecedented industrial strife and violence, thousands of employers across the United States pioneered a new policy of labor relations called welfare work. The results of the policy were paternalistic practices and forms of compensation designed not only to control workers, but also to advertise the humanity of corporate capitalism to thwart the advance of legislated reform. In a burgeoning literature on the development of the U.S. welfare state, Andrea Tone offers a new interpretation of the importance of welfare capitalism in shaping its development.
Although there is a growing body of international literature on the feminisation of politics and the policy process and, as New Labour's term of office progresses, a rapidly growing series of texts around New Labour's politics and policies, until now no one text has conducted an analysis of New Labour's politics and policies from a gendered perspective, despite the fact that New Labour have set themselves up to specifically address women's issues and attract women voters. This book fills that gap in an interesting and timely way. Women and New Labour will be a valuable addition to both feminist and mainstream scholarship in the social sciences, particularly in political science, social policy and economics. Instead of focusing on traditionally feminist areas of politics and policy (such as violent crime against women) the authors opt to focus on three case study areas of mainstream policy (economic policy, foreign policy and welfare policy) from a gendered perspective. The analytical framework provided by the editors yields generalisable insights that will outlast New Labour's third term.
This first significant collection of essays on women in China in more than two decades captures a pivotal moment in a cross-cultural—and interdisciplinary—dialogue. For the first time, the voices of China-based scholars are heard alongside scholars positioned in the United States. The distinguished contributors to this volume are of different generations, hold citizenship in different countries, and were trained in different disciplines, but all embrace the shared project of mapping gender in China and making power-laden relationships visible. The essays take up gender issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Chapters focus on learned women in the eighteenth century, the changing status of contemporary village women, sexuality and reproduction, prostitution, women's consciousness, women's writing, the gendering of work, and images of women in contemporary Chinese fiction. Some of the liveliest disagreements over the usefulness of western feminist theory and scholarship on China take place between Chinese working in China and Chinese in temporary or longtime diaspora. Engendering China will appeal to a broad academic spectrum, including scholars of Asian studies, critical theory, feminist studies, cultural studies, and policy studies.
The story of the early decades of American big business, when white-collar jobs were new and their future uncertain America's white-collar workers form the core of the nation's corporate economy and its expansive middle class. But just a century ago, white-collar jobs were new and their future anything but certain. In Company Men Clark Davis places the corporate office at the heart of American social and cultural history, examining how the nation's first generation of white-collar men created new understandings of masculinity, race, community, and success—all of which would dominate American experience for decades to come. Company Men is set in Los Angeles, the nation's "corporate frontier" of the early twentieth century. Davis shows how this California city—often considered on the fringe of American society for the very reason that it was new and growing so rapidly—displayed in sharp contours how America's corporate culture developed. The young men who left their rural homes for southern California a century ago not only helped build one of the world's great business centers, but also redefined middle-class values and morals. Of interest to students of business history, gender studies, and twentieth-century culture, this work focuses on the "company man" as a pivotal actor in the saga of modern American history.
Engendering History broadens the base of empirical knowledge on Caribbean women's history and re-evaluates the body of work that exists. The book is pan-Caribbean in its approach, though most articles are on the English-speaking Caribbean, highlighting the research pattern in Caribbean women's history.
Below the middle class managers and professionals yet above the skilled blue-collar workers, sales and office workers occupied an intermediate position in urban America's social structure during the age of smokestacks. In City of Clerks, Jerome P. Bjelopera traces the shifting occupational structures and work choices that facilitated the emergence of a white-collar workforce. He describes the educational goals, workplace cultures, leisure activities, and living situations that melded disparate groups of young men and women into a new class of clerks and salespeople. Previously neglected by historians, these young clerks became the backbone of industrial-era businesses and a key to their success. By surveying business school records, census and directory records, and business archival materials, Bjelopera paints a fascinating picture of the lives led by Philadelphia's male and female clerks, both inside and outside the workplace, as they formed their own clubs, affirmed their whiteness, and even challenged sexual norms. shifting demands of their employers, City of Clerks reveals how the notion of white collar shifted over half a century. Jerome P. Bjelopera lives and works in the Washington, D.C. metro area. This is a volume in The Working Class in American History series, edited by James R. Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, Nelson Lichtenstein, and David Montgomery.
