This paper explores the factory regime in the ‘Sun'1 food processing factory in Turkey, drawing on participant observation in the factory, informal interviews with women workers and in-depth interviews with the managers of the factory's ‘gherkin department’ in which I worked. This paper argues that the ‘Sun’ bottling and canning factory is best understood through my concept of the ‘familial factory regime’. By ‘familial factory regime’ I mean a factory regime in which the features of the extended patriarchal family are (...) used to manage the labour force by obtaining women workers’ consent. Indeed, the paper suggests that there is a tendency for patriarchy to be reconstituted in the workplace through the presence of a familial factory regime. 1‘Sun’ is a pseudonymous name of the factory, which I gave it because of the heat. (shrink)

In this study, we explore the dimensions of local gender norms across U.S. commuting zones. Applying hierarchical cluster analysis with four established indicators of gender norms, we find that these local cultural environments are best conceptualized with a multilevel framework. Commuting zones can be differentiated between those that are egalitarian and those that are traditional. Within these general categories, however, exist more complex dimensions. Gender-traditional areas may be distinguished between traditional-breadwinning and traditional-essentialist, while egalitarian areas are separated into those that (...) are liberal-egalitarian and egalitarian-essentialist. Examining the factors sustaining this spatial variation, we test the role of compositional and contextual effects. We find limited support for compositional effects because commuting zone demographic makeup explains little variation in gender norm indicators. Instead, we find evidence that local gender norms are sustained through contextual effects where the experience of living in a particular environment shapes residents’ attitudes and behaviors. Contextual effects are exceptionally strong in areas with traditional gender norms, where residents who would otherwise hold gender-egalitarian perspectives have more traditional outlooks than those who share the same characteristics but reside in places with egalitarian gender norms. (shrink)

The World Bank’s premise that “gender equality is good business” characterizes the current gender and economic development model. Policymakers and development practitioners promote and encourage women’s entrepreneurialism from the conviction that increasing women’s market-based opportunities is key to lifting women, their families, and communities out of poverty, resulting in the construction of a gendered entrepreneurial subject. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with home-based garment workers in Ahmedabad, India, this article questions the portrayal of women informal workers as entrepreneurs. Employing (...) a social reproduction framework, I argue that the exploitative characteristics of informal work are falsely interpreted as features of entrepreneurialism. Because work is completed in the worker’s own home, work and care become a mutual burden in which woman’s sense of providing for her family is impeded by both these roles. A feminist social reproduction framework of embodied labor links women’s responsibility for and contribution to family well-being with women’s marginalized economic position. Examining home-based work through this lens reveals the contradiction of the entrepreneurialism discourse. (shrink)