Working Life and Gender Inequality

Intersectional Perspectives and the Spatial Practices of Peripheralization

Angelika Sjöstedt, Katarina Giritli Nygren, Marianna Fotaki, Angelika Sjöstedt, Katarina Giritli Nygren, Marianna Fotaki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In the modern globalized world of work, society's capitalist and patriarchal norms perpetuate old and create new differences based on gender, class, ethnicity, age, and other social categorizations.

This book proposes a novel conceptual framework offering theoretical and methodological insights for thinking through the present and future inequality challenges in the globalized world of work and working life issues in the context of spatio-temporal relations. Bringing together global feminist studies of intersectionality and transnationalism, work-life research, and studies of space, place, and identity, this edited collection responds to the growing interest in peripheries, rurality, and other spaces beyond the urban and business market centres. In crossing the theoretical boundaries between intersectionality and peripherality, this volume brings these concepts together to identify how racism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy operate on bodies in the name of work, particularly as expressed in precarious labour conditions. It also advocates for transnational solidarity as part of feminist ethics, while providing an opportunity to reflect on ways forward for feminist intersectional studies of work and working life, drawing on embodied relationality and a feminist ethics of care.

Working Life and Gender Inequality explores the intersectional nature of gender, class, race and other inequalities from a global and spatial perspective. It will be of value to researchers, academics, students, managers, consultants, and policy makers in the fields of organizational studies, leadership, feminist and gender studies, working life, intersectionality and transnational feminism.

1Intersectionality and Peripheralization

Introduction to the Edited Collection

Angelika Sjöstedt, Katarina Giritli-Nygren, and Marianna Fotaki

The idea of this book emerged from a workshop held at Mid Sweden University in October 2016, where gender and feminist scholars from different parts of the country gathered together with the editors to debate inequalities through the prism of intersectionality. While the discussions during the workshop were concerned mainly with geographical inequalities in Sweden, most of the presentations referred to work organizations. The group of scholars attending the workshop came together around their interest in gender relations at work, but the discussions did not focus exclusively on questions of gender. The concept of intersectionality was instead used effectively as a tool to explain economic disparities, the collapse of the marketized health and social care system and various forms of exploitation at work, some of which result from unequal relations between the Swedish centre and periphery (Giritli Nygren and Nyhlén, 2017; Sjöstedt Landén, Ljuslinder and Lundgren 2017; Sjöstedt Landén 2012). However, there are much more pronounced inequalities between countries, regions and continents, relating to the ways in which global political-economic processes marginalize and disempower these areas and their capacity to exercise national sovereignty (United Nations 2020), while creating new categories of dispossessed (Sassen 2014). The reference to ‘gender inequality’ in the title of this volume should therefore be understood as defined by plurality and multiplicity, which will also become obvious in the readings of the various chapters. Our approach to gender inequalities implies an ambition to move beyond understandings of gender equality as an idea, a policy, and a cultural practice emanating exclusively from the Global North. Policies that, on the one hand, have had a positive impact on the lives of some women, and on the other hand, simultaneously served to legitimise capitalist labour market relations and to normalise heteronormative family forms, re-establish differences between groups, and recreate urban, Eurocentric, colonial, and nationalistic stories and orders (see for example Martinsson, Mulinari and Giritli Nygren 2018).

The concept of intersectionality captures ‘The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise’ (https://www.lexico.com/definition/intersectionality). This idea was born out of struggles for racial equality in the US (see e.g. Combahee River Collective 1983). Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), a legal scholar generally credited with mainstreaming the term, strove to highlight the invisibility of black women under antidiscrimination laws that addressed them either as women or black, or omitted them from both categories. Presumptions of the homogeneity of women’s experiences are now regarded as naïve and politically dangerous: ‘It is known that the multiple disadvantages experienced by those positioned at the intersections of various markers of difference are far from being straightforward sums of the component parts forming subjects’ identities’ (Fotaki and Harding, 2018: 101, citing Harding et al. 2013, with reference to hooks 1987; Acker 2006; italics in the original).

Rooted in Black feminism and critical race theory, intersectionality is now not only a category of analysis in feminist and gender studies (Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Yuval-Davis, 2006; Valentine 2007), but also an interdisciplinary concept inspiring global engagement with the idea as a means to promote social equality. It is a method and a disposition, a heuristic and an analytical tool, which has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries, while retaining its theoretical capacity (Carbado et al. 2013) to offer novel insights into these and other issues, such as work and health (Larson et al. 2016). It is thus well suited to enabling understanding of how new forms of dispossession have emerged on top of old inequalities between centres and peripheries following globalization. This is because the process of globalization has wide-ranging consequences for embedding the old as well as establishing new political, economic and cultural power relations.

Tariff-free globalized trade, reliance on transnational supply chains and unrestrained flows of capital are the tools of neoliberal governance, along with privatization of the commons and increased power and centralization of financial capital at both national and international levels (Boden 2011). In the context of globalization, significant transformations are affecting various parts of the world, as well as particular regions, nations and cities, some of which are considered to be at the core, while others are becoming ever more peripheral (Peeren et al. 2016: 2). Peeren, Stuit and Van Weyenberg’s collection entitled Peripheral visions in the globalizing present: Space, mobility, aesthetics provides important insights into many aspects of knowledge arising in and from the peripheries. Indeed, peripheral visions ‘enable a thinking “otherwise”’, which ‘takes the shape of a complex relation to a troubled past that, rather than closing it off, seeks to recognize it and to mobilize it for the present and the future’ (Jansen 2016: 25). Although Peeren et al. (2016) do not focus on the concept of work per se, they show that work and labour play important roles in the materialization of peripherality, and in how it intersects with gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class (see, for example, Jansen 2016 in a South African context).

In his frequently cited review of peripherialization research, Kühn (2015: 372) concludes that ‘in sociological inequality studies “marginalization” or “peripheralization” are clearly a social relation with spatial implications’. Kühn (2015: 369) also highlights that ‘apart from spatial inequalities, centres and peripheries are also determined by temporal inequalities’. The pace of development changes over time, as does what is deemed to be peripheral. However, research strands dedicated to inequality and the production of marginality, such as feminist, postcolonial and intersectional studies, are also curiously marginalized in this review. Yet, although intersectional studies may be marginalized in peripheralization research, peripherality appears to capture intersections of inequalities materialized in labour and work practices. Therefore, we believe that there is much to be gained from developing the concept of peripheralization by placing it in dialogue with intersectionality. For instance, recognizing how wider political and economic transformations affect modes of work and production in organizations, we argue, can help us understand how these shape identities, bodies and subjectivities. Another core argument for attempting to bring these concepts into conversation with each other is to illuminate the issue of labour in terms of transnational dependency and the need for actions of solidarity. As feminist researchers, we have a responsibility to examine the various forms of exploitation in the world of work (e.g. Sjöstedt Landén 2016; Mulinari and Selberg 2013). Moreover, work and labour have been at the core of intersectional analyses in black feminist thinking (see e.g. Crenshaw 1989; Hooks 1987; Hill Collins 2000; Truth 1851), which have been pivotal basis for analytical resources in the field of intersectional research.

Specifically, our edited collection aims to develop critical discourses on inequalities in the context of labour and working lives, through analytical pairing of intersectionality and peripheralization. To this end, this volume presents a conceptual framework offering theoretical and methodological insights to think through present and future inequality challenges in the globalized world of work. First, in crossing the theoretical boundaries between intersectionality and peripherality, we are interested in determining how thinking through these concepts might enable us to identify how racism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy operate on bodies in the name of work, particularly as expressed in precarious labour conditions. Second, we make a case for combining intersectional analysis with transnationalism to think productively about multiple forms of inequality in different geographical locales, and accounting for how these may have further developed with globalized movements of capital, goods and people. This also allows us to develop transnational solidarity as part of feminist ethics, while providing an opportunity to reflect on ways forward for feminist intersectional studies of work and working life, drawing on embodied relationality and a feminist ethics of care (see also Fotaki and Harding, 2018). Third, the foregoing two-pronged approach contributes to decentralizing hegemonic discourses by unearthing ways in which inequalities are organized; that is, how the ‘local’ and/or peripheral intersects with and is often discursively and materially co-constituted by the ‘global’ and/or the centre. Finally, we also see that the concept of intersectionality benefits from spatial and temporal insights that enable discussions of solidarity across geographical, organizational and temporal divides.

Taken together, the contributions of this collection illustrate how power structures, organizational forms and regulatory regimes speak directly to capitalist and patriarchal social norms from intersectional and translocal, regional and national perspectives. This chapter aims to outline a conceptual ‘landscape’ that connects research fields often articulated as separate, and to explore what they can do when put in conversation with each other. It also foregrounds the concepts we address in specific chapters, which are divided into themes, while emphasizing their processual character and connections with one another. The concepts contribute different histories and theoretical resources that we believe to be fruitful for better understanding and critically engaging with current issues relating to the exploitation of labour across different social and geographical contexts. We hope that this will encourage cross-disciplinary and cross-boundary approaches to construct transnational solidarity, decentralize hegemonic discourses, and deconstruct the organizing of inequalities.

Crossing Boundaries: Intersectionality and Peripherality at Work

Several researchers have argued for a need to cut across disciplinary divides in order to conduct relevant research on work and inequalities in today’s globalized economies (McBride et al. 2015; Mulinari and Selberg 2013; Rodriguez et al. 2016) by adopting the concept of intersectionality. McBride et al. (2015: 331) suggest that such research would benefit from ‘an intersectional approach to both the design and interpretation of research’. Labour and working life are at the core of some classic texts that conceptualize intersectionality. For example, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) uses intersectionality to signify the various ways in which race and gender interact to ‘shape the multiple dimensions of Black women’s employment experiences’, while Patricia Hill Collins (2000) foregrounds work–family relations as a core theme. An important contribution of formulations of work and labour in black feminist thought is that, whether paid or unpaid, ‘work is life’ and is thus of concern for relations of many kinds, not least care (Hill Collins 2000: 51). However, ‘understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions’ (Hill Collins 2000: 54). Black feminist thought teaches us that oppression intersects in a matrix of relational and context-sensitive domination, as well as allowing us to understand work in terms of organizational, labour market and educational positioning, and families as intertwined and intersecting with power relations based on gender, race, ethnicity and class. Further, in emphasizing spatial dimensions of class, race, gender and work in the US context, Hill Collins implicitly connects intersectionality with processes of peripherialization, for example as a spatial means of producing enslavement, and the transition to ‘free’ labour intertwined with processes of urbanization. Moreover, how different circumstances operate to form oppression in a particular time and space has always been deconstructed as intersectional in this line of research. The concept of intersectionality is thus attached to multiple struggles for human rights and wellbeing, and is therefore also connected with the construction of a discourse that offers a language of change.

However, theorizing intersectionality and its productive use in other disciplines or politics is not tension-free. One tension has to do with emphasis on the stability of categories (a necessary precondition for recognition) and fluidity between them (to acknowledge change) (see Harding et al. 2013). Thus, while Crenshaw (1991) ‘argued that political and structural inequalities are not reducible to each other’, Lugones (2007) ‘advocated the inseparability of various identities into their sub-component parts and instead proposed an intersectionality frame in which new merging categories can only be understood as “curdled”, because they retain their various constitutive aspects when a new hybrid identity is created’ (Fotaki and Harding, 2018: 101–102, citing Garry 2011). The other source of contention is whether the salience of Black women’s experiences inspiring the intersectionality movement in the US, which is still far from being exhausted both domestically and internationally, has been lost in a generalizable theory about power and marginalization (Carbado et al. 2013). Thus, Jennifer Nash (2019) urges the development of black feminist theory that ‘includes but also exceeds intersectionality’ and thereby refuses to do service to white women’s studies. She discusses how so-called intersectionality wars have taken up far too much energy, losing sight of the concept’s true possibilities. Thereby, intersectionality should not be used simply to protect current articulations of the concept itself; rather, its radical potential to imagine freedom must be nourished (Nash 2019). Our understanding of feminist labour research is strongly informed by this notion of intersectionality as a way of listening to what matters for people’s lives and wellbeing within and outside current moments and places. This also points to the openness of the concept as a work in progress by considering what it performs already and imagining its potential future uses (Carbado et al. 2013). This collection deploys this aspect to explore peripherality, understood as marginalization in the context of precarious work.

The related concepts of precarity and precarization are closely connected with labour research. Although currently taken up in many disciplines and strands of research, they are still largely taken for granted by Western European and North ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Intersectionality and peripheralization: introduction to the edited collection
• 2 #WeAreNotSlaves! an intersectional analysis of class and ethnicity in the Istanbul Airport resistance
• 3 From the periphery to the centre of resistance: women and/in anti-austerity mobilizations in crisis-ridden Athens
• 4 Intersectional perspective on working life: poor, black, working-class women remain on the margins – the case of paid and unpaid domestic labour
• 5 The logic of intersectional marginalization: Palestinian and Israeli practitioners’ observations of inequitable labour practices in grassroots peace organizing
• 6 From the body to the world, from the world to the body: ethnography, migration, and care
• 7 The Imbrication of Gender and Nationality Where the Pay Gap Is Concerned: The Case in Malta
• 8 Intersectional Perspectives on Northern Swedish Rural Men’s Working Life Narratives
• 9 Risky subjectivities: peripheralization and appropriation of small-ward midwives’ work practices in the closure of a rural area’s maternity ward
• 10 On the margins of mine work: organizational peripheries in a globalized world of work
• 11 Inequality regimes in equality work: new public management and peripheralization processes in Swedish schools
• 12 Freedom of choice and gender equality in Swedish home-based elderly care
• 13 How do people become others to be used? processes of peripheralization in Swedish unemployment politics
• 14 Thinking through intersectionality at work: a feminist-and-labour geographer’s approach
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index