Journal
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
Volume 91, Issue 1, Pages 1-23Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1111/ecge.12070
Keywords
gender; migration; economic transformation; post-war decades; service employment; caring
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In this article I address one of the key aspects of feminist arguments about the economythat is claims about domestic and caring labor and its necessity for capitalism. I address who undertakes caring labor, in what social relations, and in which spaces in Western economies, where deindustrialization and the rise of service-dominated employment have been associated with a transformation in the nature of work and the composition of the workforce. I review the ways in which this contemporary economic and employment change has been theorized by economic sociologists and economic geographers, in particular by labor geographersthat part of the discipline to which I feel the greatest connectionsuggesting that changes in what is often termed reproductive labor have been relatively neglected at the expense of a focus on immaterial, high-status employment in knowledge-based economies. Through a historical example, I then illustrate the production of difference between women workers in caring jobs in the United Kingdom, arguing that closer attention to the intersection of embodied social attributes adds to explanations of continuity and change in the labor market as well as revealing a legacy of discrimination.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available