Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996 Gender on the Market is a study of Moroccan women's expressive culture and the ways in which it both determines and responds to current transformations in gender roles. Beginning with women's emergence into what has been defined as the most paradigmatic of Moroccan male institutions—the marketplace—the book elucidates how gender and commodity relations are experienced and interpreted in women's aesthetic practices. Deborah Kapchan compellingly demonstrates that Moroccan women challenge some of the most basic cultural assumptions of their society—especially ones concerning power and authority.
This book provides empirical evidence from Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique and from different production systems of the importance of livestock as an asset to women and their participation in livestock and livestock product markets. It explores the issues of intra-household income management and economic benefits of livestock markets to women, focusing on how types of markets, the types of products and women’s participation in markets influence their access to livestock income. The book further analyses the role of livestock ownership, especially women’s ownership of livestock, in influencing household food security though increasing household dietary diversity and food adequacy. Additional issues addressed include access to resources, information and financial services to enable women more effectively to participate in livestock production and marketing, and some of the factors that influence this access. Practical strategies for increasing women’s market participation and access to information and services are discussed. The book ends with recommendations on how to mainstream gender in livestock research and development if livestock are to serve as a pathway out of poverty for the poor and especially for women.
Susan Dobscha and the authors in this Handbook provide a primer and resource for scholars and practitioners keen to develop or enhance their understanding of how gender permeates marketing decisions, consumer experiences, public policy initiatives, and market practices.
This book covers the gamut of topics related to gender and consumer culture. Changing gender roles have forced scholars and practitioners to re-examine some of the fundamental assumptions and theories in this area. Gender is a core component of identity and thus holds significant implications for how consumers behave in the marketplace. This book offers innovative research in gender and consumer behavior with topics relevant to psychology, marketing, advertising, sociology, women’s studies and cultural studies. It offers 16 chapters of cutting-edge research on gender, international culture and consumption. Unique to this volume is its emphasis on consumption and masculinity and inclusion of topics on a rapidly changing world of issues related to culture and gender in advertising, communications, psychology and consumer behavior.
Product and service designers place increasing emphasis on the colour, form and appearance of what their organization offers and the language with which they describe it. Gloria Moss' erudite, sophisticated and fascinating book, guides the reader to an understanding of the way gender influences our visual perception. In this wide-ranging book the author explores design, visual aesthetics, language and communication, by drawing on an exhaustive range of primary sources of research from psychology, design, branding and communication. The lessons that emerge offer challenges to organizations both in the way in which their design and marketing is perceived by men and women, and how the make-up of their workforce may limit their ability to appreciate and address the diversity of customers' preferences. The challenge for management is to overcome these limitations and ensure that an organization's products and services mirror preferences of customers rather than those of senior managers.
“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Ben Thanh market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In Ben Thanh market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ngoc have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this groundbreaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Ben Thanh market.
In the most comprehensive analysis to date of the world of open air marketplaces of West Africa, Gracia Clark studies the market women of Kumasi, Ghana, in order to understand the key social forces that generate, maintain, and continually reshape the shifting market dynamics. Probably the largest of its kind in West Africa, the Kumasi Central Market houses women whose positions vary from hawkers of meals and cheap manufactured goods to powerful wholesalers, who control the flow of important staples. Drawing on more than four years of field research, during which she worked alongside several influential market "Queens", Clark explains the economic, political, gender, and ethnic complexities involved in the operation of the marketplace and examines the resourcefulness of the market women in surviving the various hazards they routinely encounter, from coups d'etat to persistent sabotage of their positions from within.
tion addressed by this analysis centers on the reciprocal relation between 1 household domestic and market work efforts. It should be obvious by now that this chapter is not concerned ex plicitly with the contributions of individual members to household or mar ket activity, nor does it examine the mechanisms by which work tasks or time is apportioned among them. To reiterate, households per se are the unit of analysis; the division of labor within, with respect to either household or market activities, is ignored. In this chapter, one must pre tend that the social relations within the household productive unit, which critically shape both the nature of work and its allocation, are hidden from view. To return to the earlier metaphor, households establish a to tal household "pie," made up of all the market and domestic chores that they will undertake and the time required for them. Only after that "pie" is created can it be sliced and the pieces doled out to individual members. 2 The household and market pie defined and described here can be roughly conceptualized as the total productive capacity of the household, or as the result of a pooling of individual talents and resources. Indeed, were a measure of the time available for leisure incorporated into the measure of the pie, the household's full income (budget) constraint (i. e. , the total productive potential of the household) could be described.
Reclaim your time, money, health, and happiness from our toxic diet culture with groundbreaking strategies from a registered dietitian, journalist, and host of the Food Psych podcast. 68 percent of Americans have dieted at some point in their lives. But upwards of 90% of people who intentionally lose weight gain it back within five years. And as many as 66% of people who embark on weight-loss efforts end up gaining more weight than they lost. If dieting is so clearly ineffective, why are we so obsessed with it? The culprit is diet culture, a system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, and demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others. It's sexist, racist, and classist, yet this way of thinking about food and bodies is so embedded in the fabric of our society that it can be hard to recognize. It masquerades as health, wellness, and fitness, and for some, it is all-consuming. In Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison takes on diet culture and the multi-billion-dollar industries that profit from it, exposing all the ways it robs people of their time, money, health, and happiness. It will turn what you think you know about health and wellness upside down, as Harrison explores the history of diet culture, how it's infiltrated the health and wellness world, how to recognize it in all its sneaky forms, and how letting go of efforts to lose weight or eat "perfectly" actually helps to improve people's health—no matter their size. Drawing on scientific research, personal experience, and stories from patients and colleagues, Anti-Diet provides a radical alternative to diet culture, and helps readers reclaim their bodies, minds, and lives so they can focus on the things that truly matter.
Legalizing Gender Inequality challenges existing theories of gender-based pay inequality. The book argues that earnings differentials cannot be explained adequately by market forces or society-wide sexism and that the court's reliance upon these theories has tended to legitimate and to legalize a crucial dimension of gender inequality.
