Heidi Gottfried

Doing It the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology.

Part 1 Women, technology and the corporations: sex stratification, technology and organizational change - a longitudinal case study of AT farming out the home - women and the agribusiness technological change and womens role in agribusiness - methods of research in social action. Part 2 Gender and the culture of technology: the culture of engineering - women, workplace and machines engineering the shape of work mathematization of engineering - limits on women in the field. Part 3 Technological change and the changing stratification of engineering automators and automated - human and social effects of technological change computers in the workplace - stratification and labour process among engineers and technicians. Part 4 Sexuality and technology - feminist/Left debates the eye of the beholder - an essay on technology and eroticism.

The Ambivalent Dynamics of Secretarial `Bitching': Control, Resistance, and the Construction of Identity

We conceptualize bitching as an ambivalent communicative practice that takes place in and contributes to the construction of gendered organizational identities. Through interpretive analyses of in situ bitching among corporate secretaries, we show how the ambivalent dynamics of their collective bitching both maintained stereotypical gender attributes and destabilized the properly professional secretarial identity. By elaborating the ambivalent dynamics of bitching, we offer a more nuanced understanding of the interplay of control and resistance in the communicative construction of gendered workplace identities.

Mechanisms of Control in the Temporary Help Service Industry

As firms increasingly rely on temporary clerical workers, previous control mechanisms centered in the workplace no longer are sufficient to maintain labor discipline and ensure production quality and uniformity. Through participant observation of four temporary help service firms and two placement sites, this case study reveals forms of control that differ from those in place at more commonly studied manufacturing enterprises. Temporary help service firms have developed a dualistic form of control that operates on two levels: (1) a decentralized level, whereby the temporary help service firm indirectly controls workers; and (2) a bureaucratic level, whereby the temporary help service firm rationalizes jobs in the organizations hierarchy by delimiting a set of tasks, competencies, and responsibilities.

Gendering the Knowledge Economy: Comparative Perspectives

List of figures List of tables Preface Notes on Editors PART ONE: RE-CONCEPTUALIZING THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY, GENDER AND REGULATION Introduction: Theorizing the Gendering of the New Economy: Comparative Approaches S.Walby Gender and the Conceptualization of the Knowledge Economy in Comparison K.Shire PART TWO: COMPARATIVE REGULATION Comparative Livelihood Security Systems from a Gender Perspective, with a Focus on Japan M.Osawa Varieties of Gender Regimes and Regulating Gender Equality at Work in the Global Context I.Lenz Similar Outcomes, Different Paths: The Cross-National Transfer of Gendered Regulations of Employment G.S.Roberts PART THREE: GENDERING NEW EMPLOYMENT FORMS Self-Employment in Comparative Perspective: General Trends and the Case of New Media K.Gottschall & D.Kroos Living and Working in the New Economy: New Opportunities and Old Social Divisions in the Cases of the New Media and Carework D.Perrons Are Care Workers Knowledge Workers? M.Nishikawa & K.Tanaka Who Gets to be a Knowledge Worker? The Case of UK Call Centres S.Durbin Restructuring Gendered Flexibility in Organizations: A Comparative Analysis of Call Centres in Germany U.Holtgrewe Appendix I Bibliography

Beyond patriarchy? Theorising gender and class

This paper questions recent attempts by feminists to move theory beyond patriarchy, addressing the charge by Pollert that the concept of patriarchy impoverishes analysis of gender and class. In place of patriarchy, the author advocates an alternative feminist historical materialist analysis of hegemonic practices as the means for excavating gender and class from lived experience. This mode of historical materialist theorising rejects the concept of patriarchy as unnecessarily abstract and unable to advance knowledge about the construction of gender in practice. A theory of practice can make sense of the mess of everyday life, and focus research on gendered bodies, spaces and experiences.

In the Margins: Flexibility as a Mode of Regulation in the Temporary Help Service Industry

As firms increasingly rely on temporary clerical workers, previous control mechanisms centred in the workplace no longer are sufficient to maintain labor discipline and ensure production quality and uniformity. Through participant observation of four U.S. temporary help service firms and two placement sites, this case study reveals forms of control that differ from those in place at more commonly studied manufacturing enterprises. Temporary help service firms have developed a flexible frontier of control which operates on two levels: (i) a bureaucratic level, whereby the THS firm rationalizes jobs in the organizations hierarchy delimiting a set of tasks, competencies, and responsibilities; (ii) a decentralized level, whereby the THS firms indirectly controls workers by decentering regulation and dispersing responsibility for control to individual workers. As such, flexibility appears to be a new post-Fordist strategy for increasing capital accumulation and worker regulation.

Comparing Welfare CapitalismComparing Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy and Political Economy in Europe, Japan, and the United States, edited by EbbinghausBernhardManowPhilip. London; New York: Routledge, 2001. 320 pp.

to ask comparative questions concerning divergence and convergence of national systems and has facilitated collaboration among scholars who otherwise might be less inclined to work on comparative projects. The volume goes beyond the usual cases to include both Japan and the United States. Although the relationship between these power blocs does not come into play, the contrasts do show that globalization has not erased significant differences cross-nationally. The editors have assembled an impressive group of both young and senior scholars with loose or close affiliations to the MaxPlanck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Wolfgang Streeck, the Director of the Institute, and one of the principal architects of the varieties of capitalism approach, frames the book in the Preface. In a condensed and concise archaeology of knowledge, Streeck traces the intellectual biography of the approach, beginning with 1960’s convergence theories through each subsequent decade up to the present. During the 1980s at the height of the economic miracles of the Japanese and German models, European-based theorists characterized the institutional architectures of these types as nonliberal, coordinated capitalisms as against liberal-market economies of the Anglo-Saxon countries. It took another decade to develop the “macro-foundation of social life [an approach that] became known as ‘varieties of capitalism’” (Streeck xix). This history, while betraying the biographical origins of the approach in industrial relations and political economy, captures critical turning points at a glance. In the Introduction, the editors present the conceptual vocabulary from the varieties of capitalism approach. They focus on “institutional complementarities between production regimes, industrial relations practices and social production system,” that is, the relative fit between these subsystems (p. 2). Borrowing “contextual logics of causality” from Weber, the authors explore “elective affinities” between institutional complexes, which are seen as more or less loosely or tightly coupled (pp. 17–18). The notion of path-dependency further suggests the relative stability of institutional arrangements coevolving over time. Four sections cover the origins and development of welfare capitalism, in-depth case studies of pension regimes and the financial system, the linkages of industrial relations and welfare state regimes, and the political economy of welfare state reform. Two final chapters draw concluding comparisons. Each chapter focuses on core institutions in comparative perspective. The choice of institutions derives from political economy more than second-generation (especially feministinformed) welfare state theories. Nonetheless, the book accomplishes the first steps toward a new synthesis that links production regimes and welfare state regimes. Following the varieties of capitalism approach, firms occupy a central place in explanations of the variation in social policy trajectories. Several papers explore the neglected role played by employers in the development of modern social policy. Manow tests and ultimately supports Peter Swenson’s proposition that employers’ antiwelfare stance weakens in countries with centralized coordinated production regimes during periods of high economic growth. A game theoretic analysis by Mares also underlines the importance of employers and conflicts within the business community. Ebbinghaus summarizes the general argument as follows, “that there are intricate ‘institutional complementarities’ between the particular welfare states, production regimes and industrial relations systems that structure the incentives under which actors [including employers] make decisions on work . . .” (p. 97). Colin Crouch’s chapter, combining political modes of labor incorporation along with the legacy of precapitalist institutions and cultural cleavages, takes issue with the strong version of path-dependency. Crouch argues against a simple or a fixed correspondence between particular types of industrial relations (contestative, pluralist, neocorporatist) and specific welfare regimes. Most centrally, Crouch adopts the statistical language of “institutional probabilism” to chart “trajectories of change and continuity.” The adherence to the notion of path-dependency has lead to a tendency to create inventories of institutional complexes rather than to employ fine-grained historical analysis. Not only are hybrids ruled out or minimized by pathdependency, as Crouch contends, but also it

129.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-415-25571-6.: Social Policy and Political Economy in Europe, Japan, and the United States

This article explores how gender is embodied and embedded in organizations. Organizational embodiment and gendered work are linked to new forms of labor market segmentation around aesthetic labor. The analysis makes visible the situated forms of body management and the productive modes of embodiment in a gender regime as ways of organizing and ordering masculinities and femininities in a valued hierarchy. A case study of temporary employment provided by a multinational temporary-help company situates the global in culturally local contexts of gendered work and employment conditions.

Temp(t)ing Bodies: Shaping Gender at Work in Japan

Marxist categories, emphasizing class relations, essentially ignore the ways in which gender relations shape class struggle and class formation of women workers. Accounts of class formation use indicators such as unionization and strike activity as a yardstick of class capacities, thus denying the particular conditions women workers face under a dual system of domination: capitalism and patriarchy. Women are a significant percent of the total work force and an increasing percent of the total unionized work force. Yet women work in occupations which have been regularly viewed as nontraditional arenas for unionization. Our analysis looks at the labor process and gender domination as mechanisms of control within the workplace. We argue that an understanding of the differential forms of womens struggles should consider how capital structure and labor markets affect organizational capacities of women workers, and how the degree of gender domination corresponding to technically and nontechnically controlled workplaces shape the organizational form of resistance taken by female workers.

Gender and Class Formation: Female Clerical Workers

The current social reorganization of production centers around a move toward greater flexibilization in the workplace and the casualization of the labor force. As was true for prior changes in labor law, the degree and nature of legislative initiatives reflect the strength of competing interests between capital and labor in the policy arena. By detailing both how some states have been historically more or less proactive and how labor has been more or less successful in shaping the process, this paper compares the development of neo-Fordist regimes in Sweden, Japan, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.