Since economists traditionally focus on market activities, women's non-wage labour has not been registered in works on economic development. On the other hand, women's wage labour has been described as supplementary or marginal to the household income as well as to economic development as a whole. The contributors to this collection did their research on women workers in countries from the core, the semiperiphery, and the periphery. The eight articles are introduced by Kathryn Ward, who presents a critical overview of the literature on women workers and globalization. In Ward's opinion we have to develop new definitions for some key concepts in our theories on women and work. These concepts should aim at including housework and work in the informal sector, and women's various acts of resistance. Ward also suggests new perspectives from which we should theorize about women's work in the process of global restructuring.
Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.
The authors analyze the ways in which places have been transformed through the changes taking place within them - shifts in the nature and quantity of paid and unpaid work, in social and political mobilization, in cultural and aesthetic experience and in the built environment. Using a locality study of Lancaster, they emphasize place as a decisive point in understanding social and economic changes. They consider how successfully concepts of `restructuring' explain the relation between local and global change. The book will be a major contribution to international debates on restructuring and the impact of global change on the locality. It will also be of interest to all social scientists interested in the sociology,
Accessible and student-friendly, Global Gender Politics analyzes the gendered divisions of power, labor, and resources that contribute to the global crises of representation, violence, and sustainability. The author emphasizes how hard-won attention to gender and other related inequalities in world affairs is simultaneously being jeopardized by new and old authoritarianisms and depoliticized through reducing gender to a binary and a problem-solving tool in global governance. The author examines gendered insecurities produced by the pursuit of international security and gendered injustices in the global political economy and sees promise in transnational struggles for global justice. In this new re-titled edition of a foundational contribution to the field of feminist International Relations, Anne Sisson Runyan continues to examine the challenges of placing inequalities andresisting injustices at the center of global politics scholarship and practice through intersectional and transnational feminist lenses. This more streamlined approach includes more illustrations and discussions have been updated to refl ect current issues. To provide more support to instructors and readers, Global Gender Politics is accompanied by an e-resource, which includes web resources, suggested topics for discussion, and suggested research activities also found in the book.
In these nine chapters, fourteen academics from the UK, Australia and New Zealand examine some recently accelerating changes in higher education, and the possible implications for female academics. They analyze the globalization process, the global knowledge economy, the influences of new technologies, new managerial styles and organizational structures and cultures accompanying the new dominant economic theories, and a shift in the focus of universities from traditional concerns of liberal education to "national wealth creation". The authors consider the effects of this corporate-, competition-dominated orientation on female academics, and the threats which organizational restructuring may pose to gender equity among academics.
The essays in this book provide the elements for a new theory of spatial development to explain the new socio-territorial reality produced by global restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s. The contributors all account for the contemporary territorial units by focusing on global economic dynamics and the history of particular places. The book looks at restructuring in the automobile and electronics industries; the significance of migrant labour and the informal economy; the consequences of female proletarianization in Southeast Asia; the implications for regional development of the incorporation of Mexico and Malaysia in the world economy; the internationalization of commercial capital and the development of financial centres;
This book analyses changes in gender relations, as a result of globalization, in countries on the semi-periphery of power. Semi-periphery refers to those nations which are not drivers of change globally, but have enough economic and political security to have some power in determining their own responses to global forces. Individual countries obviously face challenges that are to some extent unique, although the prescriptions for economic and social restructuring are based on a common competitive logic. Remapping Gender in the New Global Order draws on examples from four countries on the semi-periphery of power but still located in the top category of the UNDP’s Human Development Index. At one end is Norway, one of the world’s richest and most developed welfare-states, and, at the other, is Mexico, a country that is considerably poorer and more susceptible to the power of the United States and international agencies. Australia and Canada, the other two semi-peripheral countries examined, are in the middle. Also included are comparisons with the epicentre of the ‘core’ base of power – the United States. The individual chapters focus on the effect on specific groups of people, including males and indigenous groups, the mechanisms people use to both cope with dramatic social changes, and the strategies and alliances that are used to affect the course of changes. It covers topics that range from implications of labour migration on care regimes to globalism’s effect on masculinity and the ‘male breadwinner’ model.
Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.