Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever, eds, The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hbk £68; eBook £53.99.
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RATING: 70
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Buy this book?
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No
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There is some very interesting work profiled in this collection, which makes it well worth reading. I don't recommend it for individual purchase because it is not published in paperback, and the price for the eBook is too high. On the other hand, SpringerLink (formerly Palgrave Connect) has an enlightened policy on online access through library subscriptions, so if you have access to a university library get it there or recommend it if not available.
The collection offers a wide range of insights into the variety of contemporary forms of labour, their gendered character, and their relationship to the notion of 'ideal workers of post-Fordism'. All the contributions have value in this respect. However, very few take up empirically or critically the idea of a post-Fordist sexual contract - a puzzling feature though not a fatal one, as there are problems with it, discussed briefly below. It is the idea of contingent employment captured in the sub-title that opens the volume and holds it together, and I found that the best way to approach the collection was through the lens of the contemporary reproduction of labour power and its gendered implications. A slight tweak of focus, I shall suggest, brings some powerful implications more sharply into view.
Adkins tells the reader at the start that the book is concerned with 'labour in post-Fordist capitalism and especially with its reworking and restructuring', evoking a context in which 'capital seeks not a social contract with labour but a contingent and provisional contract, a contract where nothing is guaranteed for the worker or would-be worker other than the hope or possibility of work but not necessarily a sustaining wage or a life that can be planned into the future’; and she identifies contracting, sub-contracting, externalisation (subjection to market competition), ‘insourcing’ (break-up, and the transformation of workers into assignment workers), rewriting contracts, and applying commercial rather than labour law as ‘techniques of contingency’ (1). She presents the independent contractor and the entrepreneur as the 'ideal workers of post-Fordism': ‘workers who invest in their own human capital, contract out their own labour and take on the risks and costs of such investments and of contracting themselves, as well as the risks and costs of their whole lives and lifetimes. Moreover, these are workers who paradigmatically fund these activities via indebtedness: they invest in themselves as assets in the hope of future returns’ (2). The general theme is by now a familiar one, and Adkins, with Maryanne Dever, is prominent among writers who attach particular significance to indebtedness. But she goes further here, suggesting that it is not only class relations that are being recalibrated through the 'contingent contract', as 'the contingent contracting of post-Fordism and the reworked labour settlement it is unfolding is also the scene of the roll-out of a post-Fordist sexual contract’ (2). The contrast is with the ‘Fordist sexual contract’, ‘including the regulatory ideals of the dependent housewife, the male breadwinner, the family wage and the hetero-normative family on which it rested’ (2), which have been dismantled in favour of an ‘adult worker’ model, ‘where all workers - regardless of their circumstances - are positioned as duty-bound to work or, if not in employment, to be actively seeking and constantly prepared for the possibility of waged work’ (3). 'Critically,' Adkins argues, 'while the Fordist sexual contract ideally placed women in the space of the home and separated domesticity and motherhood from the world of paid labour, the post-Fordist sexual contract places the ideals of intensive mothering, domesticity, entrepreneurialism and an investor spirit towards work and working on the same continuous plane’. Regarding such ideas as ‘illusive and virtually impossible to attain, requiring constant and exhausting labour and especially constant investment in the self’ (3), Adkins asks 'how and why many women are so attached to and endure their exhausting and impossible lives' (4), and answers as follows:
‘In part this is of necessity and about “getting by”, but also at issue here are powerful affective attachments to work and working, especially affects such as love, which enable fortitude and endurance in the present via a heightened anticipation of and hopes for a better future, even if that future must be endlessly deferred. Such affects - which have a history which is not coterminous with post-Fordism - attach women to precarious, insecure, fatiguing and impossible forms of work and living, indeed to the continuous plane on which the terms of the post-Fordist contract are endlessly played out. The volume therefore underscores how the contingent contracting of post-Fordism is connected to particular forms of suffering - endurance, exhaustion, deferral - which are embedded in the very attachments that many women have to their work and their lives, indeed in attachments to the demand that to become a viable economic subject, workers must invest the whole of their lives in their work’ (4).
The 'post-Fordist sexual contract' barely surfaces in the book after this point, and I'm not convinced that it is a useful concept. For a start, the idea of a sexual contract based on the male breadwinner needs to handled with care, and is perhaps as important for the way it shaped gender ideologies and attitudes and practices in relation to welfare provision from the late nineteenth century onwards as for its capturing of actual patterns of employment. To the extent that the male breadwinner-female housewife was an empirical reality, it has been on the way out for at least forty years, and its unravelling not only preceded the advent of 'contingent contracting', but had rather different roots. Considered as an ideological construct it has certainly had considerable power, and it has had to be dismantled by state and other authorities seeking to establish the 'adult worker' model. But just because the Fordist sexual contract is unravelling or being dismantled, it does not follow that another contract is replacing it. As Adkins says, it rested on a genuine (if implicit) contract between a heterosexual couple with dependent children, institutionally supported by the state. The focus on the adult worker model is the freely contracting individual, so does not imply a sexual contract in which a woman bears children for a male partner who earns a wage on which all depend. Its impact on household structures, women's choices, and attitudes and practices around domesticity and motherhood is both empirically and theoretically an open question. So while Adkins identifies tensions and contradictions faced by women in particular, and raises important issues for social and sexual politics, there is no case for assuming that new forms of capitalist accumulation require or tend to bring about a particular new sexual contract, nor any clarity as to who the contracting partners would be. In short, no male breadwinner, no sexual contract.
But this is an aside. As noted, the collection addresses contingent contracting and its sexual and gendered implications rather than any post-Fordist sexual contract as such. In fact, Adkins devotes most of the introduction to very lengthy summaries of the other contributions, broken only by a discussion of labour sub-contracting (17-20). I would rather have seen much shorter summaries, complemented by an analytical conclusion that reviewed the implications of contingent contracting and perhaps the case for a post-Fordist sexual contract - but there isn't one. Readers must draw conclusions for themselves.
The three chapters in the first section of the book are grouped under the heading 'Work Readiness, Employability, and Excessive Attachments'.
Dan Irving looks at trans women's experience of employment, or the lack of it, asking what those transitioning from male to female need to do in order to render themselves employable, exploring transition as a time when economic subjectivity is negotiated, and asking whether the sets of expectations surrounding transition that are held by trans women and their employers are 'indicative of new moral economies constitutive of im/proper gendered subjectivities within post-Fordist society’ (31). ‘Women,' he argues, 'are often hired and promoted based on the naturalisation of their embodied performance of femininity and their ability to conjure feelings such as excitement, security and satisfaction. Additionally, the good female employee is one who always serves clients with respect and demonstrates submissiveness towards authority’ (36). Transition, he suggests, is 'an available moment in which the trans woman can fashion herself as a recognisable woman who will eventually generate value for capital' (37). I found this unconvincing. Accepting that this line of argument reflects expectations in significant areas of employment, it applies much more in some work situations than others, and not at all to the increasingly prevalent cases where workers in service industries have no direct contact with clients; and Irving's own evidence contradicts it: one of his fifteen informants says that ‘I have to speak up and be assertive in a very different way than I used to be in order to get known and [get] attention’ (45), not that she has to learn to be submissive. So it is arguable that trans women are likely to unsettle rather than conform to and reinforce gendered sterotypes in the work place. In any case, as regards generating value for capital, capital's 'gain' of a submissive female is necessarily matched by its 'loss' of an equally value-generating authoritative male, and I doubt that Irving means to argue that capital has an interest in male to female transition across the workforce.
Kori Allan looks at Enhanced Language Teaching and Bridge to Work programmes set up in Toronto to integrate skilled immigrants to Canada into the labour force, identifying mismatches between programme funding and areas of vacancies, poor programme content that is often reduced to exhortation to participants to 'invest in themselves' in further training, and never give up, and unwillingness on the part of employers to hire. She argues that 'programmes for the active un(der)employed are less about the specific content or knowledge they provide than about the ability to produce citizens who increase their potential value in an unknowable future by continually investing in their human capital in the present' (63). It's a good general point, but I'm not convinced that it is the intended outcome of the resources Canada devotes to attracting skilled migrants. It reflects just as much a poorly thought out integration strategy, the contradiction between any state-funded programme to influence labour supply and a market where private employers are free to take no notice, and perhaps even the unsuitability of state-sponsored programmes to attract skilled migrants in the context of post-Fordist contingency. I wasn't too convinced either by the following contribution, in which Mona Mannuevo discusses the affective attachment to their work of Finnish academics who combine it with motherhood. It's not that the pressures generated are not real, especially in the context of 'growing pressures of evaluation, rationalisation, and competition' (77). Rather, it's the failures to reflect on the specificity of personal commitment to research as a component of work in academia (it's not only 'educated middle-class women' who are 'so deeply attached to their work', 76), and to connect the material to post-Fordist contingency. She herself comments that affects ‘are key to understanding value production, and therefore they are neither ‘new’ nor solely a ‘post-Fordist’ phenomenon’ (80), and while she provides no details about the nature of the contracts of the individuals in the 33 case studies she draws upon, the discussion suggests that they are primarily full-time academics with rights to paid maternity leave and other 'Fordist' terms and conditions. This is a good account of pressures on 'researcher-mothers' when intensive commitment to both is expected of and by the academics themselves, but of all the contributions here it is the least closely associated with post-Fordist contingency. In any case, isn't it a good thing that academics, mothers of young children included, pursue research which they see as important to their values and sense of themselves? If so, the problem lies with other bureaucratic and related demands on their working and free time, and obligations and induced commitments to pursue research which is not valued, and is career-enhancing without being life-enhancing.
The second set of three papers is grouped under the heading 'Rewriting the Domestic, New Forms of Work, and Asset-based Futures'. In the first, Susan Luckman explores the world of women who work at home as sole trader creative producers of the hand-made (see also Luckman 2015). Her focus is on Etsy, and 'mumpreneurialism'. Picking up on work by Adkins herself, Fiona Allon (2014) and Carol Ekinsmyth (2011, 2014), she argues that 'the contemporary online craft economy is more logically located within the broader contemporary moment’s extension of the “ordinary and normalized presence of financial capitalism” - including its “entrepreneurial subjectivities” - into the everyday of the domestic and home life', necessitating 'a "retraditionalisation of gender" in forms sympathetic to contemporary capitalist and familial relations and identities' (92). But the entrepreneurship in evidence evokes old-fashioned petty capitalism rather than new forms of financial capitalism, to which there is little visible connection, and a 'retraditionalisation of production’ rather than of gender: indeed, it appears to embrace a reworking of the relationship between parenthood and work, along with conspicuous support for new gender norms: for example, it currently features a competition item 'Who Is #TheModernDad?', with the following focus:
'The modern day father comes in various forms. Today’s father is no longer always the traditional married breadwinner and disciplinarian in the family. He can be single or married; externally employed or stay-at home; gay or straight; an adoptive or step-parent … Traditional family norms are changing and we here at Etsy want to support and enable parents, regardless of their gender, to play equal roles in building successful companies and nurturing their families' (https://blog.etsy.com/uk/2017/05/26/who-is-themoderndad/, accessed 26 July 2017).
In fact, although Etsy promotes itself with images of woman apparently working from home, and sells itself as promoting community-based and community-building small enterprise, its producers are by no means exclusively mothers working from home. Luckman's material doesn't point unequivocally in the way she suggests, and there is some tension too between her recognition that this is a fairly privileged area of home-based employment to the extent that it is one at all, and her argument, perhaps better applied to other forms it takes, that such self-employment 'can operate as a twenty-first century poorhouse' (103). The next chapter, by Jessica Taylor, on 'Mommy bloggers', takes a critical look at the issue of the supposed novelty of the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, and public and private, citing Marjory MacMurchy, The Canadian Girl at Work: A Book of Vocational Guidance (Minister of Education for Ontario, Toronto 1919) on the extent of women's employment a century ago, and noting the manner in which 'home economics' subsequently introduced principles of scientific efficiency into household management and assimilated it in this way into the world of work. What is new, she suggests, is that 'reproductive labour is not only framed within a neoliberal logic of the market, but also gains another layer. Specifically, reproductive labour becomes a site for potential investment not just in children or in other members of the household but in a creative self' (115). But what she goes on to describe is more prosaic: the monetisation or commoditisation of mommy blogging through product placement and endorsement, and their enmeshment with the market, or 'joining of the community with commerce' (118), mediated by companies such as Toronto-based Mom Central Consulting, which links mommy bloggers to family-focused brands. To the extent that Etsy presents the mother as producer, and mommy blogging monetises motherhood without reference to any male figure, let alone a male breadwinner, both these contributions do reinforce the point that the 'Fordist sexual contract' is dead. But as noted above, they don't suggest that a post-Fordist sexual contract that has replaced it.
To sum up so far, two strong themes have emerged - the pressures arising from contingent contracting, and a tendency towards the monetisation of motherhood or commoditisation of community in some areas of petty commercial enterprise. In Chapter Seven, 'The Financialisation of Social Reproduction: Domestic Labour and Promissory Value', the editors, Adkins and Dever, introduce the idea of a crisis of social reproduction. At issue, they say, is 'how, in conditions of post-Fordism, the renewal, sustainability and maintenance of life is not only increasingly privatised - whose costs are typically met via debt - but also how the maintenance and renewal of life is under threat and increasingly precarious' (132). At the same time, they contextualise this perspective by reference to Silvia Federici (2012: 104-5), who argues that 'capitalism fosters a permanent crisis in social reproduction ... that is not incidental but central to the process of capital accumulation'. They return to the theme at the end of the chapter ('Rethinking social reproduction', 140-142): socially reproductive labour (in the original source, 'the work of reproducing human beings') 'reproduces us for capital, for the labour market, as labour power, but it also reproduces our lives' (140, here citing Federici, 2013). But they address this only in relation to the 'in-the-world-linkages being forged between domestic labour and financial value', and 'the emergence of domestic labour as an object of calculation in regard to the operations of finance markets and in particular the performance of securities,' suggesting that 'domestic labour is now entangled in the creation of promissory financial value', and hence 'less concerned with the reproduction of labour power and more with the reproduction of financial capital' (140-41). I found this argument bizarre when I first came across it (Adkins and Dever, 2014), and I still do. The claim that domestic labour 'has become a point of immediate accumulation in relation to the process of securitisation' (141) is based on a single highly technical article, published in final form in 2016 (Da, 2016), which finds a long-run connection between asset prices and household electricity consumption. There is no discernible connection to new forms of financialisation, and no engagement on the part of households with financial instruments (as there has been with mortgage finance) that have become the objects of the new and speculative practices of securitization and led to their ruin. The shift away from seeing the wage as a 'medium of exchange' and the means of household survival and social reproduction strikes me as quite wrong.
The final three chapters embrace ‘Dispossession, Familism, and the Limits of Regulation’, and are all strong contributions. Orly Benjamin's exemplary analysis of legal contracts governing the contracting out of social services in Israel is a strong recommendation to investigate her work further (Benjamin, 2016). She shows how they facilitated job-splitting, created primarily 'unskilled' minimum-wage roles, deterred skilled applicants, 'erased' caring skills from nursing, teaching and the provision of care and made relationship-building between nurses, teachers and social workers and patients, students and clients impossible. The chapter highlights the mechanisms by which 'deleterious effects for women are produced via the restoration of the assumption that women already hold the essential skills required by caring services and should therefore receive only minimal occupational training' (166), and it is a meticulous piece of evidence-based analysis. Lydia Hayes, writing on video surveillance of care workers in domestic and institutional settings, complements it well, addressing not only the issue of potential and actual abuse in unsupervised situations, but also the micro-management that accompanies such fragmented and time-governed roles. Again, her monograph should be of interest (Hayes, 2017). In the final chapter, Ayse Akalin offers an insightful analysis of the strategies migrant domestic workers in Turkey employ to preserve their character as free labour, highlighting the practice of inventing a family crisis to leave one situation and enter another, a kind of ‘weapon of the weak’ that still helps perpetuate the global care chain by enabling the movement of labour (206). As Akalin reports, recent regulation has both improved the situation of such workers, giving them some access to social security, and impeded their free movement by tying their right of entry to a particular employer. These three chapters together offer the most focused accounts of the varied specifics of ‘contingent contracting’, and the most satisfactory set of chapters in the volume.
So what is the slight tweak needed to bring all these contributions into sharper focus? It is simply to abandon the narrow and over-specific association of a situation in which 'capital seeks not a social contract with labour but a contingent and provisional contract, a contract where nothing is guaranteed for the worker or would-be worker other than the hope or possibility of work but not necessarily a sustaining wage or a life that can be planned into the future’ with ‘post-Fordism’, in contrast with an earlier ‘Fordist’ dispensation. Along with ‘workers who invest in their own human capital, contract out their own labour and take on the risks and costs of such investments and of contracting themselves, as well as the risks and costs of their whole lives and lifetimes’, this is simply the realization of the end-point of the evolution of labour under the regime of competition between capitalists on a global scale, as envisaged by Marx in the first volume of Capital: first, the tendency of capital to ‘view each process of production in and for itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes’, and, by extension, without concerning itself with the potential this offers for a living wage or household survival; and second, the consequential requirement that the ‘possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production’, calling for ‘the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity taken up in turn (Marx, 1976: 616-18). And as fascinating as ‘mumpreneurs’ and ‘mommy bloggers’ may be, from this perspective it is Benjamin's deskilled, casualised and task-governed care workers, nurses and teachers who show the direction of travel – along with their counterparts in distribution warehouses, food delivery, and task-based ‘zero-hours’ professional services. Such workers may commit to an endless variety of sexual contracts, temporary or permanent, or none at all.
References
Adkins, Lisa, and Maryanne Dever (2014). 'Housework, Wages and Money’, Australian Feminist Studies, 29 (79), 50-66.
Allon, Fiona (2014), 'The Feminisation of Finance', Australian Feminist Studies, 29 (79), 12-30.
Benjamin, Orly (2016). Gendering Israel's Outsourcing: The Erasure of Employees' Caring Skills. Palgrave Macmillan.
Da, Zhi, Wei Yang and Hayong Yun (2016). 'Household Production and Asset Prices', Management Science, 62,2, 387-409.
Ekinsmyth, Carol (2011). 'Challenging the Boundaries of Entrepreneurship: The spatialities and practices of UK "mumpreneurs"', Geoforum, 42, 1, 104-114.
Ekinsmyth, Carol (2014). 'Mothers' business, work/life and the politics of "mumpreneurship"', Gender, Place & Culture, 21, 10, 1230-1248.
Federici, Silvia (2012). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press.
Federici, Silvia (2013). 'Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with Silvia Federici' (by Marina Vishmidt), Mute, 7 March, at http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici, accessed 22 July 2017.
Hayes, Lydia (2017). Stories of Care: A Labour of Law. Palgrave Macmillan.
Luckman, Susan (2015). Craft and the Creative Economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital, Vol. I. Penguin/Verso.
The collection offers a wide range of insights into the variety of contemporary forms of labour, their gendered character, and their relationship to the notion of 'ideal workers of post-Fordism'. All the contributions have value in this respect. However, very few take up empirically or critically the idea of a post-Fordist sexual contract - a puzzling feature though not a fatal one, as there are problems with it, discussed briefly below. It is the idea of contingent employment captured in the sub-title that opens the volume and holds it together, and I found that the best way to approach the collection was through the lens of the contemporary reproduction of labour power and its gendered implications. A slight tweak of focus, I shall suggest, brings some powerful implications more sharply into view.
Adkins tells the reader at the start that the book is concerned with 'labour in post-Fordist capitalism and especially with its reworking and restructuring', evoking a context in which 'capital seeks not a social contract with labour but a contingent and provisional contract, a contract where nothing is guaranteed for the worker or would-be worker other than the hope or possibility of work but not necessarily a sustaining wage or a life that can be planned into the future’; and she identifies contracting, sub-contracting, externalisation (subjection to market competition), ‘insourcing’ (break-up, and the transformation of workers into assignment workers), rewriting contracts, and applying commercial rather than labour law as ‘techniques of contingency’ (1). She presents the independent contractor and the entrepreneur as the 'ideal workers of post-Fordism': ‘workers who invest in their own human capital, contract out their own labour and take on the risks and costs of such investments and of contracting themselves, as well as the risks and costs of their whole lives and lifetimes. Moreover, these are workers who paradigmatically fund these activities via indebtedness: they invest in themselves as assets in the hope of future returns’ (2). The general theme is by now a familiar one, and Adkins, with Maryanne Dever, is prominent among writers who attach particular significance to indebtedness. But she goes further here, suggesting that it is not only class relations that are being recalibrated through the 'contingent contract', as 'the contingent contracting of post-Fordism and the reworked labour settlement it is unfolding is also the scene of the roll-out of a post-Fordist sexual contract’ (2). The contrast is with the ‘Fordist sexual contract’, ‘including the regulatory ideals of the dependent housewife, the male breadwinner, the family wage and the hetero-normative family on which it rested’ (2), which have been dismantled in favour of an ‘adult worker’ model, ‘where all workers - regardless of their circumstances - are positioned as duty-bound to work or, if not in employment, to be actively seeking and constantly prepared for the possibility of waged work’ (3). 'Critically,' Adkins argues, 'while the Fordist sexual contract ideally placed women in the space of the home and separated domesticity and motherhood from the world of paid labour, the post-Fordist sexual contract places the ideals of intensive mothering, domesticity, entrepreneurialism and an investor spirit towards work and working on the same continuous plane’. Regarding such ideas as ‘illusive and virtually impossible to attain, requiring constant and exhausting labour and especially constant investment in the self’ (3), Adkins asks 'how and why many women are so attached to and endure their exhausting and impossible lives' (4), and answers as follows:
‘In part this is of necessity and about “getting by”, but also at issue here are powerful affective attachments to work and working, especially affects such as love, which enable fortitude and endurance in the present via a heightened anticipation of and hopes for a better future, even if that future must be endlessly deferred. Such affects - which have a history which is not coterminous with post-Fordism - attach women to precarious, insecure, fatiguing and impossible forms of work and living, indeed to the continuous plane on which the terms of the post-Fordist contract are endlessly played out. The volume therefore underscores how the contingent contracting of post-Fordism is connected to particular forms of suffering - endurance, exhaustion, deferral - which are embedded in the very attachments that many women have to their work and their lives, indeed in attachments to the demand that to become a viable economic subject, workers must invest the whole of their lives in their work’ (4).
The 'post-Fordist sexual contract' barely surfaces in the book after this point, and I'm not convinced that it is a useful concept. For a start, the idea of a sexual contract based on the male breadwinner needs to handled with care, and is perhaps as important for the way it shaped gender ideologies and attitudes and practices in relation to welfare provision from the late nineteenth century onwards as for its capturing of actual patterns of employment. To the extent that the male breadwinner-female housewife was an empirical reality, it has been on the way out for at least forty years, and its unravelling not only preceded the advent of 'contingent contracting', but had rather different roots. Considered as an ideological construct it has certainly had considerable power, and it has had to be dismantled by state and other authorities seeking to establish the 'adult worker' model. But just because the Fordist sexual contract is unravelling or being dismantled, it does not follow that another contract is replacing it. As Adkins says, it rested on a genuine (if implicit) contract between a heterosexual couple with dependent children, institutionally supported by the state. The focus on the adult worker model is the freely contracting individual, so does not imply a sexual contract in which a woman bears children for a male partner who earns a wage on which all depend. Its impact on household structures, women's choices, and attitudes and practices around domesticity and motherhood is both empirically and theoretically an open question. So while Adkins identifies tensions and contradictions faced by women in particular, and raises important issues for social and sexual politics, there is no case for assuming that new forms of capitalist accumulation require or tend to bring about a particular new sexual contract, nor any clarity as to who the contracting partners would be. In short, no male breadwinner, no sexual contract.
But this is an aside. As noted, the collection addresses contingent contracting and its sexual and gendered implications rather than any post-Fordist sexual contract as such. In fact, Adkins devotes most of the introduction to very lengthy summaries of the other contributions, broken only by a discussion of labour sub-contracting (17-20). I would rather have seen much shorter summaries, complemented by an analytical conclusion that reviewed the implications of contingent contracting and perhaps the case for a post-Fordist sexual contract - but there isn't one. Readers must draw conclusions for themselves.
The three chapters in the first section of the book are grouped under the heading 'Work Readiness, Employability, and Excessive Attachments'.
Dan Irving looks at trans women's experience of employment, or the lack of it, asking what those transitioning from male to female need to do in order to render themselves employable, exploring transition as a time when economic subjectivity is negotiated, and asking whether the sets of expectations surrounding transition that are held by trans women and their employers are 'indicative of new moral economies constitutive of im/proper gendered subjectivities within post-Fordist society’ (31). ‘Women,' he argues, 'are often hired and promoted based on the naturalisation of their embodied performance of femininity and their ability to conjure feelings such as excitement, security and satisfaction. Additionally, the good female employee is one who always serves clients with respect and demonstrates submissiveness towards authority’ (36). Transition, he suggests, is 'an available moment in which the trans woman can fashion herself as a recognisable woman who will eventually generate value for capital' (37). I found this unconvincing. Accepting that this line of argument reflects expectations in significant areas of employment, it applies much more in some work situations than others, and not at all to the increasingly prevalent cases where workers in service industries have no direct contact with clients; and Irving's own evidence contradicts it: one of his fifteen informants says that ‘I have to speak up and be assertive in a very different way than I used to be in order to get known and [get] attention’ (45), not that she has to learn to be submissive. So it is arguable that trans women are likely to unsettle rather than conform to and reinforce gendered sterotypes in the work place. In any case, as regards generating value for capital, capital's 'gain' of a submissive female is necessarily matched by its 'loss' of an equally value-generating authoritative male, and I doubt that Irving means to argue that capital has an interest in male to female transition across the workforce.
Kori Allan looks at Enhanced Language Teaching and Bridge to Work programmes set up in Toronto to integrate skilled immigrants to Canada into the labour force, identifying mismatches between programme funding and areas of vacancies, poor programme content that is often reduced to exhortation to participants to 'invest in themselves' in further training, and never give up, and unwillingness on the part of employers to hire. She argues that 'programmes for the active un(der)employed are less about the specific content or knowledge they provide than about the ability to produce citizens who increase their potential value in an unknowable future by continually investing in their human capital in the present' (63). It's a good general point, but I'm not convinced that it is the intended outcome of the resources Canada devotes to attracting skilled migrants. It reflects just as much a poorly thought out integration strategy, the contradiction between any state-funded programme to influence labour supply and a market where private employers are free to take no notice, and perhaps even the unsuitability of state-sponsored programmes to attract skilled migrants in the context of post-Fordist contingency. I wasn't too convinced either by the following contribution, in which Mona Mannuevo discusses the affective attachment to their work of Finnish academics who combine it with motherhood. It's not that the pressures generated are not real, especially in the context of 'growing pressures of evaluation, rationalisation, and competition' (77). Rather, it's the failures to reflect on the specificity of personal commitment to research as a component of work in academia (it's not only 'educated middle-class women' who are 'so deeply attached to their work', 76), and to connect the material to post-Fordist contingency. She herself comments that affects ‘are key to understanding value production, and therefore they are neither ‘new’ nor solely a ‘post-Fordist’ phenomenon’ (80), and while she provides no details about the nature of the contracts of the individuals in the 33 case studies she draws upon, the discussion suggests that they are primarily full-time academics with rights to paid maternity leave and other 'Fordist' terms and conditions. This is a good account of pressures on 'researcher-mothers' when intensive commitment to both is expected of and by the academics themselves, but of all the contributions here it is the least closely associated with post-Fordist contingency. In any case, isn't it a good thing that academics, mothers of young children included, pursue research which they see as important to their values and sense of themselves? If so, the problem lies with other bureaucratic and related demands on their working and free time, and obligations and induced commitments to pursue research which is not valued, and is career-enhancing without being life-enhancing.
The second set of three papers is grouped under the heading 'Rewriting the Domestic, New Forms of Work, and Asset-based Futures'. In the first, Susan Luckman explores the world of women who work at home as sole trader creative producers of the hand-made (see also Luckman 2015). Her focus is on Etsy, and 'mumpreneurialism'. Picking up on work by Adkins herself, Fiona Allon (2014) and Carol Ekinsmyth (2011, 2014), she argues that 'the contemporary online craft economy is more logically located within the broader contemporary moment’s extension of the “ordinary and normalized presence of financial capitalism” - including its “entrepreneurial subjectivities” - into the everyday of the domestic and home life', necessitating 'a "retraditionalisation of gender" in forms sympathetic to contemporary capitalist and familial relations and identities' (92). But the entrepreneurship in evidence evokes old-fashioned petty capitalism rather than new forms of financial capitalism, to which there is little visible connection, and a 'retraditionalisation of production’ rather than of gender: indeed, it appears to embrace a reworking of the relationship between parenthood and work, along with conspicuous support for new gender norms: for example, it currently features a competition item 'Who Is #TheModernDad?', with the following focus:
'The modern day father comes in various forms. Today’s father is no longer always the traditional married breadwinner and disciplinarian in the family. He can be single or married; externally employed or stay-at home; gay or straight; an adoptive or step-parent … Traditional family norms are changing and we here at Etsy want to support and enable parents, regardless of their gender, to play equal roles in building successful companies and nurturing their families' (https://blog.etsy.com/uk/2017/05/26/who-is-themoderndad/, accessed 26 July 2017).
In fact, although Etsy promotes itself with images of woman apparently working from home, and sells itself as promoting community-based and community-building small enterprise, its producers are by no means exclusively mothers working from home. Luckman's material doesn't point unequivocally in the way she suggests, and there is some tension too between her recognition that this is a fairly privileged area of home-based employment to the extent that it is one at all, and her argument, perhaps better applied to other forms it takes, that such self-employment 'can operate as a twenty-first century poorhouse' (103). The next chapter, by Jessica Taylor, on 'Mommy bloggers', takes a critical look at the issue of the supposed novelty of the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, and public and private, citing Marjory MacMurchy, The Canadian Girl at Work: A Book of Vocational Guidance (Minister of Education for Ontario, Toronto 1919) on the extent of women's employment a century ago, and noting the manner in which 'home economics' subsequently introduced principles of scientific efficiency into household management and assimilated it in this way into the world of work. What is new, she suggests, is that 'reproductive labour is not only framed within a neoliberal logic of the market, but also gains another layer. Specifically, reproductive labour becomes a site for potential investment not just in children or in other members of the household but in a creative self' (115). But what she goes on to describe is more prosaic: the monetisation or commoditisation of mommy blogging through product placement and endorsement, and their enmeshment with the market, or 'joining of the community with commerce' (118), mediated by companies such as Toronto-based Mom Central Consulting, which links mommy bloggers to family-focused brands. To the extent that Etsy presents the mother as producer, and mommy blogging monetises motherhood without reference to any male figure, let alone a male breadwinner, both these contributions do reinforce the point that the 'Fordist sexual contract' is dead. But as noted above, they don't suggest that a post-Fordist sexual contract that has replaced it.
To sum up so far, two strong themes have emerged - the pressures arising from contingent contracting, and a tendency towards the monetisation of motherhood or commoditisation of community in some areas of petty commercial enterprise. In Chapter Seven, 'The Financialisation of Social Reproduction: Domestic Labour and Promissory Value', the editors, Adkins and Dever, introduce the idea of a crisis of social reproduction. At issue, they say, is 'how, in conditions of post-Fordism, the renewal, sustainability and maintenance of life is not only increasingly privatised - whose costs are typically met via debt - but also how the maintenance and renewal of life is under threat and increasingly precarious' (132). At the same time, they contextualise this perspective by reference to Silvia Federici (2012: 104-5), who argues that 'capitalism fosters a permanent crisis in social reproduction ... that is not incidental but central to the process of capital accumulation'. They return to the theme at the end of the chapter ('Rethinking social reproduction', 140-142): socially reproductive labour (in the original source, 'the work of reproducing human beings') 'reproduces us for capital, for the labour market, as labour power, but it also reproduces our lives' (140, here citing Federici, 2013). But they address this only in relation to the 'in-the-world-linkages being forged between domestic labour and financial value', and 'the emergence of domestic labour as an object of calculation in regard to the operations of finance markets and in particular the performance of securities,' suggesting that 'domestic labour is now entangled in the creation of promissory financial value', and hence 'less concerned with the reproduction of labour power and more with the reproduction of financial capital' (140-41). I found this argument bizarre when I first came across it (Adkins and Dever, 2014), and I still do. The claim that domestic labour 'has become a point of immediate accumulation in relation to the process of securitisation' (141) is based on a single highly technical article, published in final form in 2016 (Da, 2016), which finds a long-run connection between asset prices and household electricity consumption. There is no discernible connection to new forms of financialisation, and no engagement on the part of households with financial instruments (as there has been with mortgage finance) that have become the objects of the new and speculative practices of securitization and led to their ruin. The shift away from seeing the wage as a 'medium of exchange' and the means of household survival and social reproduction strikes me as quite wrong.
The final three chapters embrace ‘Dispossession, Familism, and the Limits of Regulation’, and are all strong contributions. Orly Benjamin's exemplary analysis of legal contracts governing the contracting out of social services in Israel is a strong recommendation to investigate her work further (Benjamin, 2016). She shows how they facilitated job-splitting, created primarily 'unskilled' minimum-wage roles, deterred skilled applicants, 'erased' caring skills from nursing, teaching and the provision of care and made relationship-building between nurses, teachers and social workers and patients, students and clients impossible. The chapter highlights the mechanisms by which 'deleterious effects for women are produced via the restoration of the assumption that women already hold the essential skills required by caring services and should therefore receive only minimal occupational training' (166), and it is a meticulous piece of evidence-based analysis. Lydia Hayes, writing on video surveillance of care workers in domestic and institutional settings, complements it well, addressing not only the issue of potential and actual abuse in unsupervised situations, but also the micro-management that accompanies such fragmented and time-governed roles. Again, her monograph should be of interest (Hayes, 2017). In the final chapter, Ayse Akalin offers an insightful analysis of the strategies migrant domestic workers in Turkey employ to preserve their character as free labour, highlighting the practice of inventing a family crisis to leave one situation and enter another, a kind of ‘weapon of the weak’ that still helps perpetuate the global care chain by enabling the movement of labour (206). As Akalin reports, recent regulation has both improved the situation of such workers, giving them some access to social security, and impeded their free movement by tying their right of entry to a particular employer. These three chapters together offer the most focused accounts of the varied specifics of ‘contingent contracting’, and the most satisfactory set of chapters in the volume.
So what is the slight tweak needed to bring all these contributions into sharper focus? It is simply to abandon the narrow and over-specific association of a situation in which 'capital seeks not a social contract with labour but a contingent and provisional contract, a contract where nothing is guaranteed for the worker or would-be worker other than the hope or possibility of work but not necessarily a sustaining wage or a life that can be planned into the future’ with ‘post-Fordism’, in contrast with an earlier ‘Fordist’ dispensation. Along with ‘workers who invest in their own human capital, contract out their own labour and take on the risks and costs of such investments and of contracting themselves, as well as the risks and costs of their whole lives and lifetimes’, this is simply the realization of the end-point of the evolution of labour under the regime of competition between capitalists on a global scale, as envisaged by Marx in the first volume of Capital: first, the tendency of capital to ‘view each process of production in and for itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes’, and, by extension, without concerning itself with the potential this offers for a living wage or household survival; and second, the consequential requirement that the ‘possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production’, calling for ‘the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity taken up in turn (Marx, 1976: 616-18). And as fascinating as ‘mumpreneurs’ and ‘mommy bloggers’ may be, from this perspective it is Benjamin's deskilled, casualised and task-governed care workers, nurses and teachers who show the direction of travel – along with their counterparts in distribution warehouses, food delivery, and task-based ‘zero-hours’ professional services. Such workers may commit to an endless variety of sexual contracts, temporary or permanent, or none at all.
References
Adkins, Lisa, and Maryanne Dever (2014). 'Housework, Wages and Money’, Australian Feminist Studies, 29 (79), 50-66.
Allon, Fiona (2014), 'The Feminisation of Finance', Australian Feminist Studies, 29 (79), 12-30.
Benjamin, Orly (2016). Gendering Israel's Outsourcing: The Erasure of Employees' Caring Skills. Palgrave Macmillan.
Da, Zhi, Wei Yang and Hayong Yun (2016). 'Household Production and Asset Prices', Management Science, 62,2, 387-409.
Ekinsmyth, Carol (2011). 'Challenging the Boundaries of Entrepreneurship: The spatialities and practices of UK "mumpreneurs"', Geoforum, 42, 1, 104-114.
Ekinsmyth, Carol (2014). 'Mothers' business, work/life and the politics of "mumpreneurship"', Gender, Place & Culture, 21, 10, 1230-1248.
Federici, Silvia (2012). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press.
Federici, Silvia (2013). 'Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with Silvia Federici' (by Marina Vishmidt), Mute, 7 March, at http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici, accessed 22 July 2017.
Hayes, Lydia (2017). Stories of Care: A Labour of Law. Palgrave Macmillan.
Luckman, Susan (2015). Craft and the Creative Economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital, Vol. I. Penguin/Verso.