Search results

In 1995, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) launched the quantitative Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) in its Human Development Report (1999). The GEM has been a feature of this report ever since. In 2004/05, a group of researchers from Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia) intended to rely on the GEM to study the experiences of factory women in two of Sri Lanka's Export Processing Zones (EPZs). The experience of this team – at the heart of this chapter – is that the quantitative measures of the GEM, particularly the specific ways in which it causes researchers to conceptualise gender and empowerment, are not adequate to understand the nuanced and complex processes of women's experiences in regards to empowerment. The team's experience caused it to question the relevance and utility of the GEM, and in turn, its sole reliance on a quantitative methodology. As a result, the researchers from Edith Cowan changed their original methodological approach and adopted a stronger qualitative emphasis. In turn, this provided a far more realistic insight into the concepts of gender and empowerment, and indeed the lived experiences of the women it sought to represent.

Organizational literatures stress the empowering effects of worker participation programs. The case of a Mexican garment factory is used to examine the contradictory location of women in self-managed teams. While self-managed teams require independent and assertive workers, women workers are hired specifically for their docility. I argue that managers provide the tools and mechanisms for workers to be autonomous decision-makers, while at the same time they gender teams in ways that assure continued female disadvantage. Placed in this contradictory location, women workers both reproduce and resist gender subordination by carving out spaces of independent action, using the language of traditional womanhood.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the literature on work, gender, and globalization using an intersectional approach.

Methodology – The data for this chapter are derived from two years of qualitative fieldwork at a Mexican multinational corporation. I conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with 86 employees at all levels of the organizational hierarchy as well as content analysis of the company magazine.

Findings – My findings suggest that globalization leads to similar benefits for women and men, with respect to autonomy and decision making in the workplace, but are framed distinctly depending on class. Globalization is gendered in that it offers an additional benefit of economic independence to women. Women at different levels of occupational prestige, however, experience the globalizing process in diverse ways. I conclude by suggesting that globalization results in a tension within the company in how to incorporate female workers in a more meaningful manner.

Originality/value of chapter – Research on globalization in the developing world primarily examines factory workers or women in certain occupations, such as domestic workers. This study focuses on an overlooked group of workers that includes female and male white-collar workers. It offers a comparative analysis of the gendered and class-based effects of globalization on workers of different ranks within the same company. Most globalization studies on Mexico center on the Maquila industry, whereas this study examines workers in a Mexican-owned international company.

This paper uses newly compiled data from two surveys of female home workers undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council in London in 1897 and 1907 to investigate various issues related to their work and wages. The reports detail the occupations, average weekly earnings and hours, marital status, and household size, composition, and total income of approximately 850 female home workers, offering a unique, and as yet unused, opportunity to explore the labor market characteristics of the lowest-paid workers in the early twentieth century. Analysis of the data reveals that the female home workers who were surveyed were drawn overwhelmingly from poor households. Home workers were older than female factory workers, most were married or widowed, and the majority of married workers reported that their husbands were out of work, sick, disabled, or in casual or irregular work. Weekly wages and hours of work varied considerably by industry, but averaged about 7–9s. and 40–45 hours per week, with many workers reporting the desire for more work. The relationship between hours of work (daily and weekly) and hourly wages was negative, and the wives and daughters of men who were out of the labor force due to unemployment or illness tended to work longer hours at lower wages, as did women who lived in households where some health issue was present. These findings lend support to contemporary perceptions that women driven into the labor force by immediate household need were forced to take the lowest-paid work, whether because they lacked skill and experience or bargaining power in the labor market.

Drawing on ethnographic field research on female sex workers and male clients in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s global sex industry, this paper complicates our understanding of human trafficking in two ways. First, introducing the term perverse humanitarianism, the paper extends work on carceral feminism by offering concrete examples of interagency commitments between NGOs and the police. Second, my ethnography reveals that women framed their relationships with male clients as mutually beneficial because the men provided them with alternate pathways to economic mobility outside of sex work. Drawing on the same tropes of victimhood employed by the NGOs, sex workers elicited sympathy from male clients that they leveraged into gifts of money. Using men’s charitable gifts, many women became small entrepreneurs who opened local businesses and empowered other sex workers far beyond what NGOs were able to provide.

By synthesizing case studies on the informal economy throughout the world, I show that women and men specialize in different tasks, work in separate settings, and have differing access to positions of economic power in the informal economy. Moreover, women are more likely than their male counterparts to seek employment in the informal sector. I also explore why gender segregation is such a marked feature of the informal economy by examining characteristics of the informal sector that encourage such gender segregation including the relationship between the informal and formal economies and the social status of informal work.

Using vignettes as its main approach, this chapter highlights some of the tensions, opportunities and decidedly difficult choices faced by many people labouring under conditions of gendered and globalised capitalism. The intersecting domains of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other relations of difference emerge through encounters between and among different people, ideas and practices – often with strikingly different outcomes for those engaged in work, both paid and unpaid. The chapter attempts to exemplify these experiences and trends, ways of being and belonging in the social world, beyond the disembodied academic writing that often populates the pages of organisation studies. With the turn towards embodiment, the chapter questions what new ways of writing and seeing the world might emerge at the intersections of transnational belonging, embodiment and gender? And can writing differently uncover these issues while still being derived from the important and interesting theoretical insights of transnational migration studies and transnational feminist frameworks? Perhaps it begins with putting doubt into the neo-liberal success story, one that can potentially disrupt the narrative so-oft found in business schools around what success looks like in the business world. Yet do so without the traditional switching out of characters that is traditionally the approach taken in gender and race ‘aware’ research: whereby the White women is replaced with a Black (or Asian or Latina) women in the corporate C-suite while the structural arrangements of gendered and racialised capitalism, hardly acknowledged, stay intact. Working at the intersections of feminist inquiry and transnational migration studies, this chapter attempts to do just that.

Women from many cultures have historically been closely tied to the land and the environment through their role as subsistence farmers. But as the more developed nations have shifted to commercial agriculture and improved technology, farming has become a male-dominated industry. China’s shift from traditional family-operated farms to government-controlled collectives required a system of incentives to encourage agricultural labor to remain and prevent mass exodus to the cities. Hukou was created in the 1950s as a system of governmental registration for restricting the internal migration of labor within China, identifying citizens’ residency by place of birth. Residents of rural or urban locations are classified agricultural or nonagricultural labor, respectively. But as China’s industrialization has grown and technology has reduced the need for human agricultural labor, the need and desire for urban employment has intensified. For women, relocating has changed marriage practices, influenced child rearing, and altered their right to land tenure in their home region. This paper examines the role of gender in the changing use of hukou in the development of China, focusing on the impact of women’s patterns of migration on land tenure. Although hukou policies are still changing and there is a lack of data on the most recent changes, initial studies show that there are few who wish to give up their rural hukou in order to obtain urban hukou. Changes over the past decade indicate that rural woman are not only taking on more of the agricultural workload as men are drawn to urban employment, but also that they are less likely to care about environmental degradation in China.

Purpose – The chapter explores how gendered division of labor shapes gender hierarchal relationships, inequality, social mobility, and labor solidarity of women and men workers in the small-scale restaurant industry in China.

Methodological approach – Thirty-four interviews with restaurant workers were conducted and a survey was taken.

Findings – Small-scale restaurants in China are patriarchal in structure that symbolizes a familial hegemonic regime. Labor is divided by gender, age and, to some extent, class with women concentrated in the lower positions. Most restaurant workers are young migrant women who come to the city to work before marrying and having children. Restaurant work is arduous: the hours are long and the wages are low. Women workers do not advance beyond the position of server, while men make use of social contacts and advance in status and wages. Because of kinship and village ties as well as divisions by age and gender, class solidarity cannot be achieved.

Value of the study – The chapter focuses on a topic that has been little studied. It furthers an understanding of intersectionality and inequality among food service workers in the context of China.

This article explores the contribution of ethnographic studies to our understanding of multinational corporations, through a literature review and through a case study of BMW Plant Oxford. The study considers that ethnographic studies can provide a more complex view of power relations between managers and workers, and can develop embedded perspectives taking into account the influences from outside the firm on its employees’ actions, developing the image of the firm not as a solitary entity, but as embedded in complex global networks and social discourses.