scholarly journals Cracking IT: Negotiating Working-Class Gender Capital through Group Enterprises in India

2021 ◽  
pp. 095001702110549
Author(s):  
Shoba Arun ◽  
Thankom Arun

Digital work is often associated with higher levels of earning and increased social mobility. Working in the digital economy will not benefit all women equally or act as an enabler of broader social change. The article draws attention to the intersection of gender and class in work in the information technology (IT) sector of India, where women have increased their visibility and participation. Through a gender capital approach and intersectional analyses, the article points to the incontrovertible impact of class and gender when women from low-income backgrounds engage in IT-based group enterprises in the state of Kerala. A central insight from the study is the need to disaggregate types of IT work as women’s experiences in IT are shaped by the simultaneity of working practices, intersectional inequalities and gendered behaviours, often with limits to gender capital and spill-over impact on broader gender and social relations.

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-61
Author(s):  
David Calnitsky

This article proposes an abstract sociological model of stable patriarchal social relations and feminist social change. I describe a patriarchal equilibrium of gender inequality and propose an approach for thinking about how various kinds of interventions can short-circuit the system, pushing it onto a new equilibrium path. In particular, I focus on possible interventions into parental leave policy, describing their social structural and cultural ramifications as well as a range of objections to them. However, more important than the specific interventions proposed is the general model itself, which depicts reinforcing structures of patriarchal culture, gender inequality in labor markets, and gender inequality in the home—and moreover, how this model can evolve. It describes a feedback loop that can lock structures of gender inequality in place but also provides a means for considering the spaces available to both blunt the social reproduction of gender inequality and reinforce “genderless” social relations.


2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Billies

The work of the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative (WWRC), a participatory action research (PAR) project that looks at how low income lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming (LG-BTGNC) people survive and resist violence and discrimination in New York City, raises the question of what it means to make conscientization, or critical consciousness, a core feature of PAR. Guishard's (2009) reconceptualization of conscientization as “moments of consciousness” provides a new way of looking at what seemed to be missing from WWRC's process and analysis. According to Guishard, rather than a singular awakening, critical consciousness emerges continually through interactions with others and the social context. Analysis of the WWRC's process demonstrates that PAR researchers doing “PAR deep” (Fine, 2008)—research in which community members share in all aspects of design, method, analysis and product development—should have an agenda for developing critical consciousness, just as they would have agendas for participation, for action, and for research.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Morton

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, this book looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. The book reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, the book seeks to reverse this course. It urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. The book paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves.


Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman

This final chapter suggests that the incompatibilities of expectations and realities at different levels of the gender structure create “crises tendencies” that may provide leverage that future activists can use to push for social change. While some contemporary social movements agitating for a more feminist and gender inclusive society appear to conflict with each other, Risman argues that using a gender structure framework allows seemingly contradictory feminist and gender inclusive movements to understood they are not alternatives but rather a tapestry, each one taking aim at a different level of our complex gender structure. The chapter concludes with a utopian vision: a call for a fourth wave of feminism to dismantle the gender structure. Since the gender structure constrains freedom, to move toward a more just future we must leave it behind.


Author(s):  
Simplice A. Asongu ◽  
Joseph Amankwah‐Amoah ◽  
Rexon T. Nting ◽  
Godfred Adjapong Afrifa

1992 ◽  
Vol 8 (29) ◽  
pp. 34-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorrian Lambley

How to accommodate and utilize the insights and the methodology of marxism – and, simply, its potential as a vehicle for social change – at a time when the popular perception of its political ideology stands discredited? Dorrian Lambley explores the dilemma through the specifics of developments in British theatre since 1968 – the stifling of the early radical impulses under political and economic pressures, which has produced, at best, a sense of marginalization, at worst a conviction of impotence. In proposing ways of working within this situation, Lambley draws on the writings of dramatists such as Edward Bond to suggest that marxism must recognize the most important of the liberal humanist emphases – ‘the presence of the subject’, but perceived within a marxist understanding of social relations. Dorrian Lambley is presently working on her doctoral thesis in the University of Exeter, where she helped to organize the conference ‘Theatre and the Discourses of Power’, on which she wrote in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ28 (1991).


2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thuc-Doan T. Nguyen ◽  
Russell Belk

This article examines the historical role of marriage and wedding rituals in Vietnam, and how they have changed during Vietnam’s transition to the market. The authors focus on how changes reflect the society’s increasing dependence on the market, how this dependence impacts consumer well-being, and the resulting implications for public policy. Changes in the meanings, function, and structure of wedding ritual consumption are examined. These changes echo shifts in the national economy, social values, social relations, and gender roles in Vietnamese society during the transition. The major findings show that Vietnamese weddings are reflections of (1) the roles of wedding rituals as both antecedents and outcomes of social changes, (2) the nation’s perception and imagination of its condition relative to “modernity,” and (3) the role of China as a threatening “other” seen as impeding Vietnam’s progress toward “modernization.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Royden Loewen

Abstract Rural Canadian communities underwent profound changes as they adapted to the economic and social context after World War II. Those changes, may be described, using John Shaver's phrase, as a "Great Disjuncture". From a "centrist" point-of-view Canadian farms became more fully mechanized, products commodified and farm goals integrated with government policy. This paper focuses on the "local experience" of the "Great Disjuncture". Its subject is the Rural Municipality of Hanover in Manitoba, an ethnic community, dominated by Low German-speaking Mennonites. In Hanover traditional social relations, both on the primary level affecting gender and on the community level affecting the very idea of rurality, entered a dialectical relationship with the forces for change to create a particular localized culture. Here was an instance of cultural re-creation.


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