Kiran Mirchandani

Feminist Insight on Gendered Work: New Directions in Research on Women and Entrepreneurship

This paper discusses research on female entrepreneurs in conjunction with feminist theory on gendered work. I explore the ways in which much of the research on womens experiences of entrepreneurship focuses on identifying similarities and differences between female and male business owners, and on providing explanations for the differences identified. While such an approach is useful in compensating for the exclusion of women in earlier studies of business ownership, it does not illuminate how and why entrepreneurship came to be defined and understood vis-a-vis the behaviour of only men. I argue that existing knowledge on women business owners could be enhanced through reflection on two issues — first, on the essentialism in the very construction of the category of ‘the female entrepreneur’ (which prioritizes sex over other dimensions of stratification) and second, on the ways in which the connections between gender, occupation and organizational structure differently affect female and male business owners.

Challenging Racial Silences in Studies of Emotion Work: Contributions from Anti-Racist Feminist Theory

Little or no attention has been paid to the racialized dimensions of the emotion work done by individuals as part of their paid jobs. I argue that this exclusion of racial analyses is symptomatic of a static conceptualization of the subject underlying many studies of emotion work. While theorists illuminate the different forms of emotion work required by women and men, and by individuals in various professions, there is little understanding of the relationship between the emotion work people do and their social locations within interactive race, class and gender hierarchies. Drawing on feminist anti-racist theory I propose a multidimensional approach to difference and stratification, which would allow us to illuminate new forms of emotion work done by people living in todays heterogeneous social and economic context. The theoretical discussion in this article is complemented by an analysis of the experiences of an ethnically diverse group of women who are small-business owners in Halifax, Canada.

An Ethnodrama on Work-Related Learning in Precarious Jobs Racialization and Resistance

This article is based on a research project on the lived experiences of precarious workers in Toronto, Canada. Using interviews with women in part-time, contract, and temporary jobs in three sectors (telemarketing, retail, and garment), the project explores the ways in which racial hierarchies structure jobs as well as forms of resistance that women exercise at work. The authors find that racialized processes stereotype workers and their skill sets, organize their work, determine their access to and exclusion from certain types of jobs, and impose cultural rules that classify and essentialize them in terms of race, language, and ethnicity. In this article, the authors use ethnodrama to represent their findings from this research project. Ethnodrama is a form that is well suited for this work because it allows us to bring the data to life through an embodied performance.

Flesh in voice: The no-touch embodiment of transnational customer service workers

Telephone-based customer service work is often conceptualized as disembodied. Automatic dialing systems direct callers through menu-driven options, and eventually to a distant customer service worker. Interactions are scripted, and workers have little job discretion to deal with out-of-the-box customer requests. Yet, although the bodies of call center workers and their customers do not come into contact, this article considers whether their interactions are in fact disembodied. Based on interviews with transnational customer service workers in India, I argue that bodies matter in remote customer service interactions. Part of the job of a customer service worker is the transmission of bodies through voice. This involves making sense of how ideal workers are embodied in callers’ eyes and using their voices to emulate these imagined ideal workers. I argue that exploring the embodiment of ‘voice workers’ extends analyses of embodiment to date, which have focused primarily on whole bodies in physical contact with others. The findings presented here highlight the importance of interpellation—specifically the work of ‘reading bodies’ which is a significant part of service work, especially work which crosses national borders. Bodies are ‘read’ based on social and historical contexts within which people are immersed and these contexts are influenced by social stratification, state policies, and colonial histories.

Class Borders: Chinese and South Asian Canadian Professional Women Navigating the Labor Market*

This paper discusses some of the results of a study aimed at exploring how highly skilled professional immigrant women from China and India, two of the top source countries of immigration to Canada since 1998, learned to reorient and reshape their skills, experiences, and aspirations in order to secure employment. Drawing on Bourdieus notion of class as relational space, his differentiation of forms of capital and his concept of habitus, we explore ways in which these women mobilize the resources they have at their disposal transnationally in order to realign their class position in Canada. Issues of gender and race are also incorporated into the discussion of class.

Learning racial hierarchies: Communication skills training in transnational customer service work

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on the communications skills training given to transnational call center workers in India whose jobs involve providing customer service to Western customers. Emotion work is a key component of customer service jobs, and this work is constructed as an important soft skill.Design/methodology/approach – Between 2002 and 2009, 100 interviews were conducted with customer service workers, trainers and managers in India. Respondents provided detailed descriptions of their training curricula and some workers shared their complete set of training booklets. The analysis for this paper is based on a section of the curricula that focuses on communication skills used during training programs for Indian customer service agents.Findings – Training curricula designed to enhance the communication skills of call center agents are vehicles through which workers learn to make sense of their place in social, economic and cross‐national hierarchies.Research limitations/implications – The stud...

Methodological K/nots Designing Research on the Enforcement of Labor Standards

This article traces methodological discussions of a multidisciplinary team of researchers located in universities and community settings in Ontario. The group designed and conducted a research project on the enforcement of labor standards in Ontario, Canada. Discussions of methodological possibilities often began with “nots”—that is, consensus on methodological approaches that the team collectively rejected. Out of these discussions emerged suggestions and approaches through which we navigated dilemmas in research design. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the following: (a) epistemological tensions around mixed methods and the politics of mixing, (b) the attempt to capture the relationships between research and its impact, and, (c) the need to develop interviews which both establish respondents as knowers, and simultaneously focus on that which is unsaid/normalized.

Alternative Futures for Work-Related and Vocational Education

Many countries in the world have developed vocational education and work-related training programs and policies to alleviate what has widely become known as the employment crisis amongst youth. This “crisis” has many facets but in this chapter, we focus specifically on one aspect: the integration of young people into labour markets.

Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life became Global, by A. Aneesh: Durham, NC/London, Duke University Press, 2015, 168 pp., US

process. Later, when the child is exposed in the forest, the ‘seven sisters’, a group of goddesses, find him and bring him up. Dhulọba, the hero of the second ovı, receives his name because he is found in the ashes (dhul)̣ of a holị fire by a childless couple who adopt him. He is actually the god Mha _ nkal ọf Ujjain, a son of Parvatı born to her without her coming into physical contact with her husband. A set of motifs more peculiar to these Dhangar stories are concerned with fertility/infertility, purity, motherhood and lactation, and in particular with the combination of infertility and lactation (pp. 122 6 and passim). At several points in these stories, women who are not mothers, including even barren women, start lactating in order to nurse a child. In her comprehensive 123-page-long ‘Introduction’, Feldhaus studies the narratives by exploring five topics: ‘Ovıs and Dhangars’; ‘The Art of the Ovıs’; ‘The World of the Ovıs’; ‘Pastoralist Life and Identity’; and ‘Gender and Women in the Ovıs’. This very substantial ‘Introduction’ also includes contextualised summaries of the stories. The quality of the texts and translations, and Feldhaus’ painstaking analyses, place this book on a par with other excellent work on oral epics and oral narratives that has been done in recent years, such as Honko on the Siri epic in the Tulụ language and Malik on the Rajasthani oral narrative of Devnarayan.̣ The title of the book is taken from the ovı of the god Dhulọba. It refers to the moment just before sunrise when the singing of the story has to be brought to an end, because another working day is about to start. The book will be of interest to students of literature, folklore, and anthropology; to Indologists; and, of course, to all scholars working in and on Maharashtra.

22.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8223-5853-4

I’m working in a very very different industry and I’m talking to American people. I’m getting, you know… a touch of how American life is.