<p>The principal purpose of this thesis has been to analyse the importance of women´s waged work with handicrafts for the household economy in the Swedish countryside during a period of rapid industrialisation and growth. The point of departure for the analysis has been a theoretical and methodological frame of interpretation on three levels. The levels that have been studied are the national institutional level of society, the level of the local society and the household level.</p><p>This thesis has shown that women’s ways of providing for themselves cannot be explained with reference to any one factor. The explanation for the gender division of labour must be seen as the result of the interplay of several different factors on different levels. By investigating how the conditions for making a living looked like on the three different levels, the thesis has shown that, together, factors on the national institutional and the local societal levels, as well as on the individual household level, affected women’s work and how it can be understood.</p><p>The thesis has described how the ideal of the breadwinner has changed during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. By studying a traditional form of female wage work – handicrafts – during a period when women were not expected to be gainfully employed, the thesis has shown that this transition was a slow process that manifested itself differently on different levels and that the old agrarian gender order survived for a long time despite the fact that people’s means of making a living had changed in a fundamental way. Women’s handicraft work was a continuing feature during this transitional period.</p>

This thesis seeks to understand and explain gendered everyday life in the village of HatNyao in Northwestern Laos, specifically in relation to rubber cultivation, by using an ethnographic approach and methods. The ‘rubber boom’ is changing the landscape of Northern Laos, and in the process is reshaping gendered everyday life. Gender relations in the village of HatNyao are undergoing various transformations whereby previous gender structures start to erode. Additional changes will probably continue to occur, largely due to increasing labour shortages. Gendered everyday life in HatNyao is therefore ‘bending’ with the changes associated with rubber cultivation, as well as in relation to different spaces of the everyday and household diversity. The concept of ‘paradoxical gendered spaces’ is invoked to capture the ways in which the dimensions and activities of the everyday vary with, in particular, ethnicity and age. Most households in HatNyao have improved their living conditions due to rubber cultivation. Nevertheless, inequalities are increasing within the village: better-off households have improved their situation, while for others it has been more difficult to adapt to the new conditions of everyday life and rubber cultivation. As the number of villages introducing rubber in Laos is increasing, alongside the number reaching the crucial tapping stage, it is essential to understand how rubber cultivation in smallholder communities interacts with gender relations and the division of labour. There are thus both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes from introducing rubber in Laos, since it depends on the context, as well as on the diverse spaces of the everyday.

The principal purpose of this thesis has been to analyse the importance of women´s waged work with handicrafts for the household economy in the Swedish countryside during a period of rapid industrialisation and growth. The point of departure for the analysis has been a theoretical and methodological frame of interpretation on three levels. The levels that have been studied are the national institutional level of society, the level of the local society and the household level. This thesis has shown that women’s ways of providing for themselves cannot be explained with reference to any one factor. The explanation for the gender division of labour must be seen as the result of the interplay of several different factors on different levels. By investigating how the conditions for making a living looked like on the three different levels, the thesis has shown that, together, factors on the national institutional and the local societal levels, as well as on the individual household level, affected women’s work and how it can be understood. The thesis has described how the ideal of the breadwinner has changed during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. By studying a traditional form of female wage work – handicrafts – during a period when women were not expected to be gainfully employed, the thesis has shown that this transition was a slow process that manifested itself differently on different levels and that the old agrarian gender order survived for a long time despite the fact that people’s means of making a living had changed in a fundamental way. Women’s handicraft work was a continuing feature during this transitional period.

Significant associations between self-reported “whole units” of work and self-reported mental task requirements as well as personal outcomes are well known. Also of interest is, however, whether a significant association also exists between the underlying objective assignment of tasks, i.e. the division of labour, and self-reported mental requirements. Such an association would represent a concrete starting point for job design or redesign. We analyzed this question for retail sale jobs as an example of the numerous human service jobs, which usually consist of customer- and object-centred tasks. The study (N = 558 employees) evaluated the potential association between documented assignments of customer-centred and goods-centred activities and employees’ perceived mental requirements, skill utilisation, and learning on the job, as well as mental difficulties. A significant association of moderate effect size between the objective division of labour and self-reported mental job requirements was shown. Theoretical and practical consequences of this association are also discussed.

How were work identities of female and male shop assistants in the clothing departments at NK constructed, and how did this change over time? The starting point of this thesis has been that identities are contextually constructed. Focus has been set on trying to understand how the process of ‘making’ identity has been done in a historical perspective for shop assistants in clothing departments at the department store NK, AB Nordiska Kompaniet, in Stockholm. Shared narratives are crucial in the process of making collective identities. This thesis analyses narratives on relations between shop assistants and the company, the trade union and the commodities that were sold. The results show that the constructions of work identities, besides from being an ongoing process, have been characterized by a constantly ongoing struggle about expectations on their nature. The perspective is both discursive and materialistic. NK had approximately 2000 employees. All these people could not have personal relations to each other. To create an imagined community and a sense of collective identity, common narratives were important. The employees were in the company’s internal narrative named the ‘NK-ists’. It was said to be important to work in the ‘NK- spirit’. Narratives outside the NK-collective did effect the imagined community within, sometimes causing the collective to join closer together and sometimes dividing it. Work identities and the gendered division of labour are connected. Notions of gender and of what kind of work that is considered to be suitable to men or women at different times and in different places colour the narratives that construct work identities. The narratives dealt with in this thesis originate in existing events and in myths about the department store NK, and the shop assistants working at NK had to relate to these. The employer had picked one group of employees for whom this was especially true: the shop assistants. They were told: “You are NK”.

No description available.

Home-based work employing information and communications technologies (telework) is held up in contemporary academic literatures, policy formulations and the popular media as the cure to a panoply of contemporary problems, particularly the difficulties of combining caring responsibilities and careers. This thesis takes up the question of how teleworkers talk about and practise home-based business. It pivots on the exploration of the simultaneity of parenting, partnering and paid work for home-based business people. The 'teleworking tales' of eleven home-based entrepreneurs form the heart of the thesis, as they discuss their negotiation of 'home' and 'work' where the usual temporal and spatial boundaries between these arenas are removed. While previous studies assume that telework is 'family-friendly', most do not investigate the perspectives of other family members on the effect of home-based business on their households and relationships. This thesis speaks into this silence in the literature by contextualising telework within family relations, including as participants the partners, children and child care workers of the eleven home-based businesswomen and men, interviewing thirty people in all. Three strands of analysis regarding discourses of the organisation, domesticity and entrepreneurship were pursued in relation to these 'teleworking tales'. It was found that these 'tales' were told differently by teleworking women and men, the women focusing on the untenable nature of continued organisational employment as women and mothers, while the men established home-based businesses because of declining employment security and redundancy. In the midst of these constituting relations, the discursive injunction to be a 'fit worker' and a 'good parent' had different implications for the women and men; where as the women negotiated home-based entrepreneurship through domesticity, the men navigated their way around domesticity in order to maintain a singular focus on their businesses. The effect of the cross-cutting axes of domesticity and entrepreneurship significantly curtailed the opportunity for teleworking to represent a new crafting of the relationship between 'home' and 'work' as teleworkers negotiated the simultaneous demands their families and businesses made upon them. It was also the case that home-based businesses were a source of pleasure and of productive forms of power which encouraged home-based entrepreneurs to watch over and discipline themselves. The research unfolds as both a warning and a promise with regard to the 'choice' to telework, in terms of what is 'chosen' and how that is 'controlled'. It is particularly a contribution to current debates regarding the complex patterning of gendered and familial practices which continually fragment the freedoms promised by the discourse of entrepreneurship.

Após centenas de anos de exploração dos recursos naturais, a Terra começa a mostrar as consequências de seu uso descontrolado. Nas últimas quatro décadas o homem tem voltado seus olhos para a causa ambiental de forma mais intensa e conciliadora. Como resultado dessa nova maneira de pensar, a sociedade e a indústria, que se veem obrigadas a se adaptar às novas tendências de mercado e novas formas de produção. Produzindo melhor e consumindo menos, fecha-se uma cadeia de produção estruturada. Mas, por mais que se invista em tecnologia, um problema sempre existirá: o resíduo, incluindo-se nesta categoria, também os rejeitos produzidos pelas atividades humanas. O tratamento de resíduos é uma questão de difícil solução mesmo à longo prazo. As cooperativas de reciclagem se apresentam como uma nova forma de empreendimento, inserido em moldes mais modernos, baseados nos princípios da Economia Solidária, existente em países da Europa e América Latina, com destaque para o Brasil. É nesse cenário que se encontra o objeto de estudo da pesquisa: a mulher catadora/recicladora. Estatísticas apontam que em muitos estados do país elas chegam a 65% dos trabalhadores. Muitas dessas cooperativas são administradas por mulheres, quando não, frequentadas majoritariamente por elas. O objetivo geral desta pesquisa é analisar como se configuram as relações de gênero e divisão sexual do trabalho, partindo da visão das dirigentes das cooperativas. Questões semiestruturadas, com abordagem qualitativa foram elaboradas e aplicadas à nove líderes de associação de catadores da região metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro e do Vale do Paraíba Fluminense (Resende). As entrevistas foram filmadas para a elaboração de um documentário acadêmico, também produto desta pesquisa. Foram encontradas na pesquisa, convergências em relação à divisão sexual do trabalho, partindo de princípios sexistas onde os homens deveriam se encarregar do trabalho mais pesado e as mulheres do trabalho mais fino, como a triagem. No entanto, a realidade apontada pelas entrevistadas nos remete à naturalização do trabalho multitarefa, onde elas se incubem de realizar todos os procedimentos, estando ou não na presença de homens na cooperativa. / After hundreds of years of exploitation of its natural resources, the earth starts to show the consequences of being uncontrollably used. In the last four decades, man has turned his attention to the environment in a more concerned and responsible way. As a result, society and industry are forced to adapt to the new market trends and modes of production. Improved production and reduced consumption are structuring the new production chains. However, in spite of all tecnological advances, there will always be the problem of waste. Disposal of waste presents a challenge in the long term. Recycling co-operative societies, found in many countries in Europe and Latin America, and particularly in Brazil, are enterprises based on the principles of solidarity economics. The object of this research are the women working on such enterprises, the female collector/recycler and her environment. Statistics show that, in many states in Brazil, they may compose up to 65% of workers and often run the co-operatives themselves. The broad goal of this paper is to examine how gender issues, such as divison of labour are perceived by women running the co-operatives. Leading women from several collector co-operatives active in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro and of the Vale do Paraíba region were asked to answer a series of semi-structured questions. Interviews were filmed and edited into a short documentary. Results showed a persistent trend of sexual division of labour where men were responsible for tasks requiring strengh , such as carring heavy loads and women were responsible for tasks requiring concentration and precision, such as sorting out materials. However, there was evidence of a growing tencency of women carrying out all activities, regardless of the presence of men.

MGS / Institute for Gender and Youth Studies

Daraus leitet sich folgende Forschungsfrage ab: Hat die Intensität der religiösen Überzeugung einer Person Einfluss auf eine ungleiche Arbeitsteilung im Haushalt? Die Basishypothese dieses Aufsatzes besteht in Folgendem: Je religiöser sich eine befragte Person einschätzt, desto häufiger werden in einem partnerschaftlichen Haushalt als weiblich konnotierte Haushaltstätigkeiten von der Ehefrau bzw. Lebenspartnerin ausgeführt. Auf die methodischen Implikationen wird später ausführlich eingegangen. Aus der Basishypothese werden nun empirisch prüfbare Hypothesen gebildet, die weiterführend eine Grundlage für die Prüfung von Interaktionseffekten bilden. Damit soll herausgefunden werden, in welchem Umfang Religiosität mental vernetzt ist, also nachweisbare Wirkungen moderiert und damit als eine zentrale Variable in der Verarbeitung sozialer Bedingungen angesehen werden kann.