Social Policy and Gender Divisions of Domestic and Care Work in France

A number of cross-national comparisons of gender divisions of paid and unpaid labour have highlighted the mismatch which exists in France between on the one hand a narrow gender employment gap due to the full-time and continuous nature of women's employment, supported by extensive state-provided or subsidised childcare, and on the other hand, the persistence of an unexpectedly traditional gender division of domestic and care work. This results in high levels of work–life conflict for French women, and particularly for mothers. In much social policy analysis, the question of how policy might influence the extent to which domestic and care work is shared within the couple has been largely overlooked in favour of discussions of how the state facilitates and encourages the employment of mothers of dependent children. This article therefore focuses on why and how state policy in France, whilst being successful in bringing women and particularly mothers into the labour market, has not brought about a fairer gender division of unpaid domestic and care work in the home.     

Migrant mothers and the geographies of belonging

Much academic research on migrant mothers focuses on mothers who are separated from their children, often through their integration into global care chains, or on mothers within the context of family migration. This paper argues that co-resident migrant mothers' experiences provide an important window on the complexities of the migration experience. Using a specific case study of Ireland, and drawing from a broader longitudinal research project that focuses on recent migrants, the paper explores migrant mothers' understandings and experiences of belonging and not-belonging. We argue that structural obstacles and cultural understanding of care actively conspire to undermine migrant mothers' potential to develop place-belongingness. Interviewees' discussions of their status as full-time mothers were often framed through images of ideal motherhood, but equally highlighted how the absence of affordable childcare and family members isolates them and prevents them from creating a sense of belonging outside of the process of mothering and the home.     

A widening gap? The political and social organization of childcare in Argentina

This article examines how social policies and programmes implemented in Argentina shape the political and social organization of childcare. The author seeks to analyse how welfare institutions are currently responding to emerging needs, and to what extent they facilitate the defamilialization of childcare for different social classes. Because Argentina lacks a truly unified ‘care policy’, four different kinds of facilities and programmes are examined: employment-based childcare services; pre-school schemes; social assistance care services; and poverty reduction strategies. It is argued that far from offering equal rights and services with a universalist cast, these ‘caring’ institutions reflect the ethos of the current welfare model in Argentina: a fragmented set of social policies based on different assumptions for different social groups, which in turn filter down to the social organization of childcare.     

Robert Grosseteste and the simple benefice: a novel solution to the complexities of lay presentation

That pastoral care was the main focus of Robert Grosseteste's theological work and correspondence is well established: Grosseteste is often characterised as the vehement, uncompromising promoter of the pastoral ideal in the face of strong opposition, ecclesiastical and lay. Less close attention has been paid to whether the records of his diocesan administration demonstrate the practical outworking of his pastoral theories. Although narrow in compass, his administrative rolls for the English diocese of Lincoln are not entirely sterile. They show Grosseteste experimenting with a novel form of parish organisation, using grants of simple benefices (simplex beneficium) to ensure appropriate provision for a parochial priestly function whilst offering a constructive compromise to the laity who had the right to nominate clergy for churches (the patrons) when their candidates were deemed inadmissible. The practical working out of these proposals reveals that they had both educational benefits, particularly for potential clergy, and allowed Grosseteste to focus his educational and pastoral efforts directly within the parishes.     

Valuing Childcare: Troubles in Suburbia

I unravel a complex weave of practices in metropolitan Vancouver that lead to the persistent devaluation of childcare. These include the assumptions that women alone are responsible for paying for childcare, the difficulty that parents have determining how skills and educational qualifications relate to high-quality childcare and the tendency to insert childcare workers into various familial scenarios that cheapen the costs of their own social reproduction. I look closely at outer suburbs, because this is where wages for childcare are lowest and parents experience the most difficulty in arranging dependable care. Although various women doing paid domestic work are positioned differently, they share with each other the effects of gendered assumptions about domestic work.     

Mothers,communities and the scale of difference

Only recently did geographic concern turn to why and how, and when and where political identities are reproduced but, as yet, our understanding of the political relations between families and communities remains understudied. This lack of attention is attributable, in part, to the complexities of families and communities but, this aside, all societies regulate reproduction and there are always claims for legitimization of particular views of family values and community relations. With this paper, I argue that highlighting the social construction of scale suggests ways that the social imaginary of a domestic myth is spatially embedded within a nurturing local community. I outline some recent feminist discussion of local childcare cultures and critique of 'the public sphere' prior to raising scale as a way to open up static versions of justice and difference. Arguments in the paper that relate to the social construction of scale are illustrated by examples from a study of the impact of a new child and a residential move on mothers in San Diego. I argue that although the birth of a child highlights important questions that relate to responsibility, self-identity and notions of family, community and society, it is from within a politically structured notion of scale that many of the constraints and contexts of childcare arise. This paper focuses specifically on negotiating childcare as a basis of resistance through day-to-day contestations at multiple scales.     

‘A real woman has to do it all – with the kids and in the office’: Doing femininity in the transcultural context of Russian-German migration

The au pair stay allows young women to experience the doing gender of family work and waged work in another cultural context than their own. This article investigates how Russian university graduates, who had been working as an au pair in Germany, developed transcultural strategies to balance work and family for their prospective future referring to these different experiences. It will be shown that interviewees rejected the Soviet family model of the fulltime ‘working mother’. Some women positively evaluated that in Germany the equality of gender has been better established than in Russia and aimed at sharing housework with their partner. Criticizing the outsourcing of childcare to an employee, in this family model femininity is not based on housework but on women's dedication to motherhood. Other women negatively evaluated that in Germany the family model of the ‘business woman’ characterized by women's role as the main breadwinner of the family and the primary provider of family work has developed. These women preferred to work part-time to be able to care for their families. In this family model the responsibility of breadwinning is ascribed solely to men, while women's waged work is constructed as time devoted to women's individual needs by offering an intellectual challenge and an individual income.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

Farmwomen's emotional geographies of care: a view from rural Ontario

This article contributes to geographies of rural women's health by investigating farmwomen's perceptions of their caring roles and responsibilities, which are crucial to the wellbeing and sustainability of rural people and their communities. Featuring a thematic analysis of interviews and a focus group with farmwomen from Ontario, Canada, the research examines farms and farming as unique places and spaces of care. Informed by the literature on emotional geographies, the article examines how care is situated and performed through farmwomen's negotiation of multiple, overlapping identities and how these are embodied and affective in emotional work. The findings not only confirm the paramount role of women in rural care, they demonstrate the interdependence of family, community and work as central to the challenges of rural women's health. The article argues that the link between health and productivity on the farm is crucial to understanding farmwomen's caring, and highlights the paradox that their emotional work is as much about opportunities for power and resistance as it is about obligation and subordination.     

Shift Work,Childcare and Domestic Work: Divisions of labour in Canadian paper mill communities

The growing prevalence of shift work and non-standard working hours is challenging many taken-for-granted notions about family and household life. This article examines how rotating shift schedules shape household strategies with regard to childcare and unpaid domestic work. In 1993-94 in-depth interviews were conducted with 90 predominantly male newsprint mill-workers and their spouses living in three communities located in different regions of Canada. The analysis in this article is based on these interviews as well as data collected in a questionnaire survey administered to a much larger sample. The article focuses on the effects of rotating shifts and the extent to which household strategies differ between households with one or two wage-earners. The findings reveal that the onus for adjusting to shifts fell mainly on the spouses of mill-workers, who felt constrained in their own choices regarding employment and childcare by the demanding regimen of their partner's shift schedules. In the vast majority of households a traditional division of labour predominated with regard to both childcare and domestic work. When women quit paid employment to accommodate the schedules of shift-workers and ensure time for the family to be together, traditional values reassert themselves. Surprisingly, a high level of satisfaction with current shift schedules was found, despite the significant adjustments to family life they had necessitated. By comparing families employed in the same industry but living in three very different communities, the analysis underscores the importance of local circumstances in mediating the strategies households deploy in coping with shift work, especially with regard to childcare.     

The student is not the fisherman: temporal displacement of young people's identities in Tanzania

This paper examines how young Tanzanians have their identities as environmental actors displaced into the future by local adults, teachers, educational institutions and teaching materials which seek to educate them about environmental sustainability and conservation. Whilst there has been considerable attention to young people's agency in reproducing their own identities, I argue here that the temporal displacement of young identities operates through a network of interlinked structures which act on young people's lives, including the identity work of young people themselves. Educational material produced by non-governmental organisations and the discursive work of adults both seek to position young people as having agency to act in and make decisions about the environment at an undetermined time in the future. Young people themselves can perform different identities within the space of the school and in the community or family, yet they may also understand their own identities as only having agency at a temporally distant point. The displacement of young identities has important implications for pedagogy which relates to environmental education, and for how the reproduction of young people's identities is conceptualised.     

Global Agendas,Local Norms: Mobilizing around Unpaid Care and Domestic Work in Asia

This article explores the articulation and framing of unpaid care work and the mobilization around it at two spatial scales, the global and national. For the latter it focuses on three of the largest and most diverse countries in Asia — India, China and Indonesia. While the concept of unpaid care work has received considerable attention in international development discourse, it is rarely found in feminist mobilization and advocacy across these countries. The article asks why this issue remains largely excluded from women's political agendas. It also explores how it is framed when it is included. While most organizations recognize women's double burden and the importance of domestic labour, they do not consider ‘unpaid care work’ as a legitimate political issue around which to mobilize. Rather, it is framed, if at all, as part of other political agendas, such as the rights of the elderly (in China), the rights to social protection, especially childcare and maternity entitlements (in India), or the right to equal opportunities within marriage (in Indonesia). The study analyses the differences in framing, the conceptualization of gender equality embedded therein, and the implications for policy.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

The unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.     

A contested legacy: the Kennedy Committee revisited

The Kennedy Committee Report on Ireland's reformatory and industrial schools, published in 1970, is an important, though contested, milestone in the history of Ireland's childcare policy. The Committee found its genesis in Church/state conflict and conducted much of its work in the teeth of state and religious opposition. Its published report was watered down on the understanding that the state would act to curb the worst excesses of the system without the need for some of the more damaging discoveries reaching the public realm. Notwithstanding this the published report became the focus of political manoeuvring that stifled its potential effectiveness. Its legacy, therefore, is mixed, marking the beginning of the slow painful modernisation of the Irish childcare system whilst being an opportunity lost in terms of its potential to ameliorate the suffering of children detained in the system for a further three decades.     

In the front line: women,work and new spaces of labour politics in Poland

Pessimistic accounts of women's lives in post-communist Poland view women as powerless and passive victims of the transformation process. In contrast, this article argues that while political change and the restructuring of the economy have closed down some spaces of articulation and organisation, others have opened up. The article focuses on the way in which women in their spheres of work are shaping and actively resisting change through new organisations and individual and collective actions, which are in some ways a break with the past, but in other ways build on previous forms of activity. The work draws on qualitative research conducted over the last decade across Poland. This has coupled extensive interviews with women workers, national and regional trade union leaders, activists and feminists in a number of major Polish cities with reviews of Polish media and policy. We examine the economic and ideological context in which these new articulations are taking place, against the background of Poland's post-war communism and the rise of opposition movements. We look at the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the implications for women within the labour market and in their domestic lives. In particular, we examine initiatives from below in workplace organisation, by focusing on new unions and new actions in the public sector, and the beginnings of organisation in the new areas of the economy such as supermarkets. Finally, we look at how women are articulating their interests beyond formal workplaces. We conclude that we should be optimistic about these new spaces of activism. While some are well established, others are embryonic but provide a strong foundation on which women can increase their participation in spaces that promote their varied interests.     

The just city for whom? Re-conceiving active citizenship for lone mothers in Canada

In this article we argue that the ‘just city’ is one that enables individuals to exercise their citizenship, including making choices to participate (or not) in communal existence. However, inequities in resource distribution encountered by lone mothers on income assistance threaten not only individual sustenance and survival, but also the foundational fabric of our society. The implication that an active citizen is one who exercises their rights and responsibilities in a balanced way is problematic, and has the potential to add blame to poverty, justifying exclusion rather than inclusion. Using qualitative data from a longitudinal study of lone mothers in extreme poverty in Vancouver, British Columbia we illustrate how macro-processes within cities (i.e., delivery of affordable housing, food security, childcare, transportation) impinge upon the micro-processes of these women's lives (i.e., impacts on health, economic security, social mobility). Focusing on citizenship as a set of constrained choices challenges the policies and practices of social planning to consider how the scope of citizenship can be expanded by shaping key urban opportunities. Grounding the vision of a just city in the potential for personal agency suggests that policymakers and planners have a key role in shaping citizenship for the most marginalized and oppressed through a combination of providing supports and enabling opportunities in the urban environment.     

Understanding the Human Factor in Disasters

Abstract

After virtually every major disaster of the last decade there has been a full scale investigation resulting in a lengthy report and a comprehensive list of recommendations. The philosophy of this investigative process, as it is for those incidents with less serious consequences, is that we must learn from experience to prevent future crises from occurring. However, there are barriers to such learning in organisations. This review discusses the different approaches to safety and attempts to show how such 'safety cultures' influence an organisation's attitude to safety management. Three safety cultures are outlined: occupational safety management, risk management and crisis management. Each of these cultures is then linked to a different underlying model of human error causation. This review illustrates how the model of human error causation adopted by an organisation has a profound influence on its choice of remedies for accidents and on its ability to learn from near misses (failures without serious consequences). It is argued that there are major benefits to be gained if an organisation adopts a system induced error perspective on the human error causation. Some of the problems which can occur when an organisation tries to respond to a safety issue are described. These include: overconfidence, an inappropriate emphasis on hardware reliability, a reductionist approach to finding a solution, complacency, and the failure to identify the underlying causes of the accident. A number of major accidents (the Clapham rail crash, the Zeebrugge ferry disaster and the Hillsborough Stadium tragedy) illustrate the key points of the theory.     

Making gender–work practicable: situating men's reconstruction of ‘women's job’ in a Swedish supermarket's micro-politics

Based on empirical data from one Swedish supermarket, this article argues that men's reconstructing of ‘women's work’ in accordance with a masculinised sense of self what Simpson (2004, ‘Masculinity at Work: The Experience of Men in Female Dominated Occupations’, Work, Employment & Society 18, no 2: 349–368) calls ‘gender–work’ is not limited to individual men's perceptions and creations of self. Rather, by investigating the gendered boundary work in which the manager and other workers engage, this study shows how these reconstructions are legitimised and made practicable by organisational micro-politics. By emphasising the specific skills required by ‘their’ department – produce – the male workers distanced themselves from the routine and standardised stocking that dominated the work performed at the supermarket. This notion that working in the produce department required specialised knowledge was legitimised by the manager and the organisation of work at the supermarket. While at times, other workers (most of them women) challenged the boundaries of the produce department, they simultaneously re-established those boundaries by glossing over potential conflicts and maintaining equal treatment existed within the organisation.     

From Informal Recreation to a Geography of Achievement: Women's Soccer in South Australia

Since its inclusion amongst Olympic sports in the 1990s, women's soccer has grown impressively worldwide. Despite its rapid global expansion and growth in the number of playing participants, the sport has been neglected by geographers. In Australia, which is currently the fifth women's soccer country in the world as per registered players, the popularity of the sport has grown significantly in recent years. Perhaps even more strikingly, however, the approach to the sport has changed, to focus on the achievement of results. The shift in the purpose of women's soccer, from a solely social and recreational activity to an achievement sport, is a result of the increasing links between the local women's soccer systems and the global world of sport. The paper examines an exemplar of South Australia, and in particular the Adelaide metropolitan region. Here, in the last 30 years, women's soccer has evolved from a geography of foundation, defined by informal organisation and localised scope, to a geography of achievement, characterised by an institutionalised focus on the production of players, the introduction of higher-profile ‘sportscapes’, a broader pattern of clubs distribution, and a new set of connections with global women's soccer. The current geography of achievement links local and global women's soccer scenes. On the other hand, it funnels access to the achievement level of South Australian women's soccer to a limited central area of Adelaide's metropolitan region. The paper also draws attention to the part that social capital, and especially ‘bridging’ social capital, played in enabling the evolution of Adelaide women's soccer. The role of social capital as a contributing element of the development of sporting systems is a topic that deserves further investigation.