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1 – 10 of over 2000
Book part
Publication date: 29 April 2013

Cecilia Beatriz Escobar Meléndez

This article aims to discuss the effects of unpaid reproductive labour on labour productivity and production. We make use of a Marxist approach, recognising in its method and…

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the effects of unpaid reproductive labour on labour productivity and production. We make use of a Marxist approach, recognising in its method and categories the necessary and adequate tools in order to disclose reality. Capitalism is regarded as patriarchal, and patriarchy as a set of social relations that dominate women and women’s labour-power for the benefit of men and capital. We argue that unpaid reproductive labour involves both class and gender struggles, which affect in a contradictory manner the capitalist accumulation process. Such assertion is reached by using an analytical instrument (based on linear algebra) developed in order to observe the impact that an insufficient fulfilment of the workers’ necessities has on labour productivity and production.

Details

Contradictions: Finance, Greed, and Labor Unequally Paid
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-671-2

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 12 March 2018

Anne Hilda Wiltshire

The purpose of this paper is to delineates workers’ labour turnover and considerations around work, in a context of informalisation of work, through a case study of temporary…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to delineates workers’ labour turnover and considerations around work, in a context of informalisation of work, through a case study of temporary non-resident farm workers in the deciduous fruit sector in Ceres, South Africa.

Design/methodology/approach

The research design is a three-phase exploratory sequential mixed-methods strategy. Findings from 29 in-depth interviews were refined, verified and ranked in four focus groups. These informed grounded indicators in a survey of 200 farm workers employed in peak season and their 887 household members.

Findings

Considerations are informed by work-related insecurities, interpersonal workplace relationships and reproductive insecurity in the form of care of others, social linkages and residential insecurity, seemingly hierarchical. The least important considerations most thwart workers’ ability to complete fixed-term contracts and account for over 70 per cent of labour turnover in the form of resignations. In sum, workers experience constrained considerations around work arising from their material, social and economic conditions.

Originality/value

This is the first study on the labour turnover of farm workers in South Africa and the fifth globally. The research gives precedence to the voice of farm workers and is a thick description of workers’ considerations around work.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 38 no. 1/2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 25 November 2014

Christina Ergas

Studying Cuban urban agriculture is important because empirically investigating existing, innovative projects geared toward sustainability can illuminate the processes that…

Abstract

Purpose

Studying Cuban urban agriculture is important because empirically investigating existing, innovative projects geared toward sustainability can illuminate the processes that facilitate and inhibit environmental reform. I assess the social costs and benefits, achievements, and ongoing challenges at one urban farm. I highlight the interconnection of societal institutions – including gender relationships and gendered economic structures – that can foster or undermine sustainability projects. My analysis of the social dimensions of environmental problems is based on Ariel Salleh’s theoretical work. She argues that women’s invisible reproductive labor mediates paid labor by maintaining the viability of such labor. My contribution is to add an empirical dimension to her work.

Methodology

To assess the challenges of urban sustainability, I spent two months conducting participant observation and semi-structured interviews with workers at an urban farm in Havana, Cuba.

Findings

I find that culturally prescribed gender divisions of labor are entrenched in Cuban urban agriculture. Women continue to do most of the important, yet unacknowledged, domestic work that maintains the health of agricultural labor. Additionally, the heavier burdens women experience during the second shift restrict their ability to participate in local democratic decision-making processes, thereby limiting their capacity to modify oppressive cultural norms and maintaining the status quo.

Implications

Socially just environmental change does not automatically happen when the barriers of capitalism are removed, even if the society bases economic progress on increasing quality of life rather than profit. Instead, socially just environmental change must be a deliberate process that is constantly negotiated, reassessed, and prioritized.

Details

From Sustainable to Resilient Cities: Global Concerns and Urban Efforts
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-058-2

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 12 December 2023

Monica Bhatia

A growing body of literature suggests that creating a just sustainable society will require reorganizing economic arrangements and, in particular, rethinking work. Previous…

Abstract

A growing body of literature suggests that creating a just sustainable society will require reorganizing economic arrangements and, in particular, rethinking work. Previous studies have recognized alternative organizations, such as cooperatives and intentional communities, as sites for building more democratic, sustainable models of work. This study contributes a description and analysis of work and sustainability at Twin Oaks Intentional Community, an 80-person income- and resource-sharing commune in Louisa, Virginia. Some measures show that Twin Oaks members live more sustainably in terms of energy consumption than the average US resident. In this article, I investigate the relationship between sustainability and work at Twin Oaks. I find that sustainable work is linked to the following key principles: broadening definitions of work, prioritizing community well-being, and democratizing decision making. In doing so, I contribute to previous literature on work, sustainability, and alternative organizations by suggesting that (1) sustainability in intentional communities is deeply intertwined with systems of work; (2) broadening definitions of work to include social reproductive labour contributes to sustainability; and (3) the democratization of work can further goals of sustainability.

Book part
Publication date: 22 November 2019

Katharine McCabe

This chapter explores processes of stratification in reproductive healthcare and considers the ways in which mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion shape reproductive opportunities and…

Abstract

This chapter explores processes of stratification in reproductive healthcare and considers the ways in which mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion shape reproductive opportunities and experiences. First, I consider the process of “selective inclusion” among sexual minority women. This examination questions the schisms that exist within the sexual minority population in regard to their visibility and legibility in medical, scientific, and public health discourses and constructions of reproductive health. The second process I examine is that of “exclusionary inclusion” among substance using pregnant women who have been collectively deemed “bad breeders” by medical and state authorities and whose reproduction is explicitly monitored, regulated, and criminalized. The final process I discuss is “side-stepping inclusion” which describes the healthcare and consumer decisions of women who circumvent medicalized childbirth experiences by employing the services of a midwife for their pregnancy and birth care. This chapter examines how medicalization, biomedicalization, and de-medicalization dynamically work together to expand and delimit inclusionary processes, emphasizing the spectral and interconnected quality of these processes. By exploring various processes of inclusion that shape reproductive experiences of these disparate and differentially marginalized populations, this chapter provides a conceptual and critical meditation on the ways in which “respectable reproduction” is deployed in reproductive care. In considering these processes of inclusion and the ways in which they are co-produced by medical discourses and practices, scholars may more clearly grasp some fundamental mechanisms of stratification in reproductive healthcare and knowledge production.

Book part
Publication date: 7 May 2019

Jennifer Cohen

This contribution explores the history of women and feminism in the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) using concepts from feminist radical political economy. A feminist…

Abstract

This contribution explores the history of women and feminism in the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) using concepts from feminist radical political economy. A feminist approach changes the categories of economic analysis to offer a new interpretation of an older history: the formation of the Women’s Caucus. I reread the early history of the feminist project in economics through the lens of social reproduction to understand the influence of life experience on practice, particularly on the 1971 women’s walkout during a URPE conference, and on economic theory. Highlighting women’s multiple roles, as graduate students, mothers, wives, girlfriends, and/or caregivers – but ultimately as women – reveals social reproduction as a site of radical politics and demonstrates the importance of reproductive labor for understanding solidarity. In doing so, the analysis provides an example of how a feminist perspective contributes uniquely to economics.

Details

Including A Symposium on 50 Years of the Union for Radical Political Economics
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-849-9

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 13 December 2021

Olga Doletskaya, Maria Denisova and Oksana Dorofeeva

Russia is one of the few countries where surrogacy is both legal and regulated. Still, volatile legislation and the lack of public acceptance of the practice make surrogacy an…

Abstract

Russia is one of the few countries where surrogacy is both legal and regulated. Still, volatile legislation and the lack of public acceptance of the practice make surrogacy an experience that is hard to navigate. This chapter presents an exploration of the meanings Russian surrogates attach to their work, remuneration for it, and their relationships with intended parents. Drawing on 23 semi-structured interviews with surrogates, we find that while Russian surrogates frame surrogacy as a job and engage in calculations of a fair price for their services, they provide unrequited care for intended parents and their children and embed surrogacy in the context of their motherhood as a way to provide and care for their own children. In this, Russian surrogates occupy the typical position of a post-Soviet ‘mother-worker’.

Details

Infrastructure, Morality, Food and Clothing, and New Developments in Latin America
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-434-3

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 October 2021

Karen P. Nicholson

The purpose of this paper is to use spatial thinking (space-time) as a lens through which to examine the ways in which the socio-economic conditions and values of the post-Fordist…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to use spatial thinking (space-time) as a lens through which to examine the ways in which the socio-economic conditions and values of the post-Fordist academy work to diminish and even subsume the immaterial affective labour of librarians even as it serves to reproduce the academy.

Design/methodology/approach

The research question informing this paper asks, In what ways does spatial thinking help us to better understand the immaterial, invisible and gendered labour of academic librarians' public service work in the context of the post-Fordist university? This question is explored using a conceptual approach and a review of recent library information science (LIS) literature that situates the academic library in the post-Fordist knowledge economy.

Findings

The findings suggest that the feminized and gendered immaterial labour of public service work in academic libraries – a form of reproductive labour – remains invisible and undervalued in the post-Fordist university, and that academic libraries function as a procreative, feminized spaces.

Originality/value

Spatial thinking offers a corrective to the tendency in LIS to foreground time over space. It affords new insights into the spatial and temporal aspects of information work in the global neoliberal knowledge economy and suggests a new spatio-temporal imaginary of the post-Fordist academic library as a site of waged work.

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 28 November 2017

Abstract

Details

Global Currents in Gender and Feminisms
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-484-2

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 5 February 2024

Abstract

Details

Work-Life Inclusion: Broadening Perspectives Across the Life-Course
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-219-8

1 – 10 of over 2000