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Ann Anagnost, University of Washington
“Home-making” and the lost domestic arts are becoming revalorized in movements for sustainable living in the United States and elsewhere in the Global North. The idea of “making” acquires a new sense of agency in this context as a critical practice that is both transformative and intensely social, employing the Internet as a means not only for learning and sharing new skills but also for sharing reflections on the value of non-commodified forms of labor for making bodies, families, communities, economies, and modes of citizenship.
Integral to these discussions is an awareness of this as an “untimely” return to self-provisioning as an exit strategy from the tyranny of waged work, evoking an agrarian past reworked as a possible time-space for a more sustainable future. Moreover, feminist arguments about the unrecognized value of unwaged reproductive work in capitalist economies are clearly present in the consciousness of these home-makers in their self-understanding as well as in their struggles to represent the value of what they do to the wider world.
Reworking gendered divisions of labor, reclaiming the household as a unit of production, delinking from the commodity economy through self-provisioning and participation in gift and barter economies are practices that shape this new domesticity and invest it with a hope for transforming an “extractive economy,” injurious to the planet, to a more “life-affirming” economy, more attuned to improving the quality of life for all (Hayes 2010:13).
In the U.S. context, the political subjects that converge on these utopic possibilities are not homogenous. They bring together feminists, post-feminists, local food activists, evangelicals, and libertarians (identities that are, in fact, not discrete among these categories), raising the question of how to read the openings and closures of this movement for a progressive politics. Moreover, race and class may constrain this as a “life-style choice” for those who are predominantly white and middle-class. The role of family assets and middle-class cultural and social capital may not be fully acknowledged in making these new households viable. This makes critically important the question of how this reclaiming of a household mode of production might contribute to more inclusive movements for social justice and broader social change.
Al James Queen Mary, University of London
Over the last decade, the desirability and means of successfully integrating paid work with other meaningful parts of life has received widespread attention. As the neoliberal attack on social provisioning has transferred the burden of care down to the ‘natural’ level of home where most women retain the major responsibility for the ‘messy and fleshy’ components of domestic and family life, significant gender variations in work-life stress persist. Studies have highlighted, therefore, the importance of employer provided ‘work-life balance’ (WLB) arrangements as a means for improving gender equity in market employment and household caring, and for combating the increasing work pressures that are destabilising many households and communities. Yet despite the profound moral and social significance of WLB, it is increasingly recognised that employers are unlikely to implement meaningful WLB arrangements unless they can identify ‘bottom-line’ economic advantages that arise from their implementation. However, there remains a paucity of empirical evidence to support the so-called ‘WLB business case’. At the same time, conventional WLB business case analyses often sideline social equity concerns of workers and their families, and in their focus on revealed output measures of firm performance, say little about the underlying determinants of firms’ competitive performance in the New Economy.
In response, this paper presents new empirical evidence from two high tech regional economies (Dublin and Cambridge) to develop an alternative socioeconomic analysis focused on: (i) gendered experiences of work-life conflict in the IT industry; (ii) the arrangements that different groups of IT workers and their families find most useful in ameliorating those work-life conflicts; and (iii) the mechanisms through which workers’ use of those preferred WLB arrangements helps foster and support routine learning and innovation processes within knowledge-intensive firms. The analysis also links managerial and worker perceptions of the learning benefits of WLB provision to measured improvements in firm performance across a range of metrics. As such, the paper responds to earlier calls by Lewis et al. (2003) to develop a ‘dual agenda’ that moves beyond either/or thinking to consider both business and social imperatives in pursuit of optimal work-life balance outcomes. This research is also particularly timely given the challenges of the recent economic downturn and post-recession recovery: with employers keen to effect cost savings, workplace arrangements designed to assist workers in reconciling competing commitments around work, home and family will not be immune. Accordingly, the social and economic ‘business case’ for WLB becomes even more salient.
Diane Perrons, London School of Economics
The economic crisis was sparked primarily by mis-management of capital markets through speculation and excessive risk taking largely by very highly paid men in the financial centres of the western world but the underlying causes are deeply rooted in the neo-liberal model of global development itself. While the gains from speculative activity were enjoyed by a minority the reverberations are widespread within and beyond western economies and especially severe in countries closely connected to western economies through trade.
My central argument is that that neo-liberalism has been associated with unsustainable increases in earnings inequalities and a related imbalance between productivity and wages resulting in a fall in the share of output accruing to labour. These economic inequalities by nation, social class, gender and race not only lie at the heart of social injustice but formed a key element in generating the current crisis. As the processes generating current inequalities are so profound and embedded it is necessary to move beyond marginal adjustments to the current neo-liberal orthodoxy towards more inclusive models of development in order to secure economically sustainable and socially just societies.
The paper explores the processes leading to and explanations for rising earnings inequality and enduring gender inequality on a global scale drawing specific illustrations from OECD countries and a more detailed analysis of the processes generating and legitimising inequality between finance and care workers in the UK.
Sasha Roseneil, Birkbeck, University of London
Abstract to follow
