Italian welfare as seen from the standpoint of the International Labour Organization (1944–68)

The evolution of Italian welfare cannot be properly understood unless it is viewed within a scenario that goes beyond the national one and accounts for both the different state experiences and geopolitical and supranational conditioning. By adopting a supranational standpoint, the aim of this article is to offer some new sources of reflection on the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in conditioning and assessing the Italian welfare model starting from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. I intend to linger both on the ILO’s role in urging the development of modern social security systems and the adoption of certain welfare measures and on the representation and assessments carried out by the ILO regarding the actual development of the Italian welfare state.     

Restructuring women’s work; labour market and household gender regimes in the Greater Latrobe Valley,Australia

This article examines the impact of economic restructuring on gender relations. It examines the implications of labour market change for households within a region, in this case the Greater Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia. The argument is that the unchanging gender structures of the labour market constrain the intentions and efforts of individuals within households to significantly alter household gender relations. The analysis considers how restructuring has reshaped the regional labour market since 1996, changing opportunities for both men’s and women’s employment. Despite these changes, the regional labour market continues to be underpinned by a ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime and significant occupational and industrial gender segregation. Drawing on four vignettes, the analysis shows that the impetus towards greater gender equality in the household is constrained by a stagnant and stable labour market gender regime.     

Norm negotiation in the Australian Government’s implementation of UNSCR 1325

The Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (NAP) offers an apt example of norm negotiation in implementing United Nation Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325). Launched in 2012, the NAP is nearing completion due June 2019. The purpose of this article is to understand how far and in what ways the NAP has thus far supported the achievement of the transformative ambitions of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda to bring about greater gender equality for conflict-affected women. I argue that whilst this transformative agenda failed to diffuse vertically throughout the Australian NAP, this has simultaneously encouraged horizontal diffusion. That is, the sophisticated discourse on gender equality presented in the narrative part of the NAP did not translate into a robust framework for action (vertical diffusion). This failure has, however, allowed the WPS agenda to be negotiated within individual implementing agencies (horizontal diffusion). Through the juxtaposition of policy analysis with semi-structured interviews with NAP implementers, this article demonstrates that the lack of precision around the implementation strategy has—paradoxically—resulted in significant policy development on UNSCR 1325. Simultaneously, it has led to untargeted implementation, ultimately constraining the possibilities for meaningful impact on the ground.     

All aboard? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto's Junction

Despite early attention being paid to the connections amongst ‘gender, work and gentrification’ in the urban geography literature, there have been few attempts to examine the experiences of women as workers in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This gap leaves open critical questions about the nature of the links between the production of gendered work practices and the production of gentrified urban landscapes. In this article, I explore how women working in a variety of differently precarious situations – as struggling small business owners, self-employed workers and part-time workers – manage the tensions and contradictions of struggling for economic survival while attempting to support community-building efforts and social reproduction needs in a gentrifying area. Using data drawn from interviews and urban ethnographic methods in Toronto's ‘Junction’ neighbourhood, I argue that precarious conditions of work in the context of gentrification engender a variety of diverse economic and social practices – developed through immaterial and affective labour – that, in turn, produce particular, and often contradictory, social and economic landscapes of gentrification. I will explore the ways in which gendered vulnerabilities and insecurities are ironically produced, in part, by the feminized consumption landscape, which primes neighbourhoods for widespread gentrification. Through examining these dynamics, we can begin to theorize the structural production of precarity, and in particular, gendered precarity, through urban processes such as gentrification.     

科学发展观背景下的性别平等问题

科学发展观把追求平等和社会公正作为发展的目标,而社会性别平等问题则是其重要内容之一。为此,在承认性别差异的同时,追求事实上的性别平等,是科学发展观的具体体现。     

Reconceptualising local labour markets in the context of cross-border and transnational labour flows: The Irish example

The increased prevalence of border-crossing labour of various types makes an uneasy juxtaposition of the ‘local’ and the ‘transnational’ or the ‘global’ and raises two classes of questions. These concern, firstly, the definition of the local in local labour markets and, secondly, the role of state borders in regulating and shaping flows of border-crossing workers. The paper begins to explore these issues. It questions the conceptualisation and definition of local labour markets and outlines a case for transnational labour and state borders to be included in their theorisation. Following this, drawing on studies of recruitment and interviews with labour market actors on both sides of the Irish border it discusses how state borders impact on different types of labour in different circumstances and outlines the paradoxical and sometimes contradictory nature of state borders in labour regulation and employers' strategies. It concludes by arguing that state borders might be moved from the edge of local labour market studies to a place much nearer their centre.     

中国与国际移民组织：融入与发展

论文分析阐述了中国与国际移民组织关系的发展和中国加强与国际移民组织合作关系的内外因素。认为从中国与国际移民组织关系发展历程来看,中国不断推动深化两者之间合作关系。这一行为是内外因素综合作用的结果,但内部因素才是最根本原因,即借助国际移民组织提供的多边舞台既有助于增强中国在全球移民问题治理上的话语权以推动中国参与未来全球移民治理规制建构的战略需求,又有助于满足积极提高中国移民治理能力以形塑在国际移民问题治理上的负责任国家形象的现实需要。     

Do rural development programmes promote gender equality on farms? The case of Slovenia

The necessity of gender equality in agriculture has been identified as a relevant political issue and incorporated into strategic documents and programmes of the EU. However, until now, not much has been examined about the actual contribution of these policy actions and programmes to the everyday life of farm women; there is a considerable gap in the data about women in farming across Europe, particularly for new member states. The article addresses this issue by focusing on the situation of gender equality on farms in Slovenia. Pertaining to two measures of The Rural Development Programme 2004–2006 – the Setting Up of Young Farmers and the Early Retirement of Farmers – the aim of the analysis is to compare the beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries of these two measures at family farms in terms of their development capacities and their inclination towards gender equality. Results based on the survey data ‘Generations and Gender Relations on Slovenian Farms 2007’ revealed the above-mentioned measures did indeed reach those family farms that showed better development capacities in terms of economic and demographic conditions. However, the farms did not show significant development in terms of gender equality as examined through division of work and decision-making on family farms. The rigidity in gender statuses and roles on family farms is explained and discussed through the issue of unequal access of women to farmland ownership and agricultural education, and through persistently weak institutional support to increase political participation and power for farm women.     

To Watch or Restrain: Female Convict Prisons in 19th-Century Tasmania

As institutions established to manage exiled British felons, the Tasmanian female factories consisted of four women's prisons located throughout the island colony. The material world of these institutions mediated internal power relations. Superintendents, Convict Department Officials, and the female prisoners themselves manipulated site landscapes. Today, one of these institutions remains as a managed historic site. Tourists experience a tidy and unthreatening landscape of Australia's heroic convict heritage. By juxtaposing excavated archaeological remains with public presentations of convict sites, I explore the position of female convicts from the original penal landscape to the shadows of Australian history.     

History lessons for gender equality from the Zambian Copperbelt, 1900–1990

This article explores the historical causes and consequences of gender divisions of labour in the Zambian Copperbelt. Male breadwinner and female housewife stereotypes appear to have emerged as a product of imported Christian ideologies, colonial–capitalist concerns and an economic climate that largely enabled men to financially provide for their families. Reliant upon husbands for status and economic support, many urban women had little conjugal bargaining power. Gender divisions of labour also meant that people lacked first-hand evidence of women’s equal competence in employment and politics, who they thus often underrated and overlooked. Such perceptions seem to have perpetuated women’s exclusion from prestigious positions – a pattern sustained by macro-economic circumstances in the early decades of Independence. Compliance with the gender status inequalities promoted in pre-marital traditional initiation thus became necessary to marital and economic security, as well as respectability, which was not previously the case. While there were exceptions to these trends, the historical record illustrates the interplay between patterns of resource access, internalised gender stereotypes and cultural expectations.     

Gender equality: a core dimension in Rural Development Programmes in Austria?

The supranational gender equality regime of the European Union (EU), in place since the 1990s, affects gender-related social policy including the so-called ‘gender-neutral’ policy fields such as the common agricultural policy and rural development policy. Especially, the implementation of gender equality in all policy fields through the strategy of gender mainstreaming in EU Structural Funds and Rural Development Programmes has become a key challenge for political and administrative players and stakeholders. Analysis reveals that the existing institutional, political and social barriers for an effective implementation of gender equality in rural development policy are manifold. Instead of promoting rural women's agency and empowerment, Rural Development Programmes and processes in Austria are preserving and perpetuating traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures in rural society.