Remapping Gender in the New Global Order

Marjorie Griffin-Cohen, Janine Brodie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135988975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

This book analyses changes in gender relations, as a result of globalization, in countries on the semi-periphery of power. Semi-periphery refers to those nations which are not drivers of change globally, but have enough economic and political security to have some power in determining their own responses to global forces. Individual countries obviously face challenges that are to some extent unique, although the prescriptions for economic and social restructuring are based on a common competitive logic.

Remapping Gender in the New Global Order draws on examples from four countries on the semi-periphery of power but still located in the top category of the UNDP's Human Development Index. At one end is Norway, one of the world's richest and most developed welfare-states, and, at the other, is Mexico, a country that is considerably poorer and more susceptible to the power of the United States and international agencies. Australia and Canada, the other two semi-peripheral countries examined, are in the middle. Also included are comparisons with the epicentre of the 'core' base of power – the United States.

The individual chapters focus on the effect on specific groups of people, including males and indigenous groups, the mechanisms people use to both cope with dramatic social changes, and the strategies and alliances that are used to affect the course of changes. It covers topics that range from implications of labour migration on care regimes to globalism's effect on masculinity and the 'male breadwinner' model.

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Remapping gender in the new global order

Marjorie Griffin Cohen and Janine Brodie

Globalization appears unstoppable, according to The Economist, despite the collapse of the Doha round of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) trade liberalization negotiations in 2006. After five years of serious and difficult negotiations, the inability to reach an agreement among the world’s wealthiest countries was severely criticized by the champions of globalization, not least because it slows the march toward their vision of a fully integrated global economy. What is worse, according to globalization’s supporters, it is unlikely that new global trade talks will begin any time soon. But despite this pessimism, almost no one considers the failures at Doha as a substantial deviation from either accelerating global trade or the neoliberal policies that structure it. According to The Economist, ‘the seas of world trade are calm’, and trade continues to grow faster than world GDP (29 July 2006:11). Trade liberalization certainly is not the only marker of globalization’s success, but it is a touchstone for a global adherence to its philosophical underpinnings. Economic globalization shows no sign of abating in the restructuring of either domestic or international institutions.

Although globalization is most commonly associated with the creation of global production process and markets, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, this epochal shift in the international political economy is far more complex, multidimensional and multilayered, profoundly affecting governmental policies, political activism and the daily lives of women and men across the globe. In the process, the terrains of all manner of political and social relations, as the title of this book suggests, are being ‘remapped’ – new networks and connections are being established, albeit often in contradictory and unequal ways. To better grasp the extent of this remapping, it is useful to draw on Beck’s distinction between globality and globalism because this conceptual distinction recognizes the dramatic social changes that define this globalizing era while leaving open to analysis and activism the pressing question of how these changes are and should be governed (2000).

In brief, globality refers to contemporary transformations in social, political and economic organization that have fundamentally altered our shared experience of time and space as well as self and community. Globality focuses our attention on, among other things, the global movement of people, goods and services, the reshaping of local communities and households by global forces, the increasing porousness of national boundaries, the critical importance of transnational social problems and political movements, and the emergence of the planet as a relevant space for political action. As Beck explains, the concept of globality underlines the increasingly inescapable conclusion that, in the contemporary era, ‘all interventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world’ (ibid.: 11, 15). Local, regional and national terrains, in other words, are being remapped by the many and varied forces of globality.

Globalism, in contrast, refers to the ascendancy of a common transnational worldview and philosophy of governance. In the contemporary era, the term globalism is often used as a shorthand for neoliberal globalism, since there is not a unified worldview that stands in opposition to it. Sometimes also called the ‘Washington Consensus’, neoliberal globalism is an experiment in transnational governance that prioritizes economic growth and the creation of markets over all other goals and institutions of government. Through the dictates of international financial institutions, trade agreements, structural adjustment and poverty reduction strategies, and the actions of national governments themselves, neoliberal globalism enforces privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization, commodification, individualization and the erosion of collective provision, especially in the social policy field (Brodie 2003). Globalism thus remaps social and political relations in different ways, shifting axes of power away from citizens, governments and democratic decision-making to corporate actors, market mechanisms and the logic of supply and demand. This remapping, contrary to the smug assurances of neoclassical economists, is not gender-neutral. As the chapters in this book underline, neoliberal globalism has reconfigured processes of both production and social reproduction, and, in the process, has profoundly changed the ways in which women and men sustain themselves and their families, form alliances and political strategies and are represented in public policies.

This shift to neoliberal approaches to economic and social policy also has enormous significance for equality-seeking groups. Many of the successes of the North American and European feminist movements in the second half of the twentieth century were premised on the idea of a strong welfare state. The welfare state’s foundational commitment to the idea of universal citizenship equality provided individual women and a nascent women’s movement with the political space to pronounce themselves as more than dependents, wives and mothers. Women made claims to citizenship equality and demanded that the state intervene to reduce gender-based discrimination in markets, erase bastions of male privilege, and expand the basis of entitlement for women to economic, social and political programmes (Sainsbury 1999). As a result of decades of sustained feminist activism, most industrialized countries now have formal legal language about gender and racial equality, particularly with regard to anti-discrimination in labour markets and in public policy. But the formal language of equality has not prevented the deterioration of gender equality in the contemporary reconstruction of economic institutions and public policy. And, it has not eliminated growing inequalities among women located along such other lines of social differentiation as race, class and ethnicity. With the ascendancy of neoliberalism, many of the ideals and programmes of equality-seeking groups have been undermined by privatization, government cut-backs of social programmes, the introduction of market principles in the management and delivery of social services, and a general ethos that prefers individual to collective solutions to social issues.

The past ten years have occasioned continual debate about globalization, usually focusing on its definition, its causes, its dimensions and whether it is truly a distinct phase in world relations that is different from previous eras (Bonoli et al. 2000). These debates are significant for a clear sense of the nature of change that is affecting virtually every section of the globe. This book engages in these debates, focusing in particular on the remapping of gender inequalities and gender orders in the contemporary era. But this book is distinct from others on globalization in that it deals with issues that are not normally at the centre of discussion. The chapters focus on the ways that the forces of globality and globalism are embedded in daily lives and in gender relations in varying circumstances. Individual countries obviously face challenges that are to some extent unique, but the prescriptions for economic and social restructuring are largely based on a common competitive logic. This means that the ways that people deal with their everyday problems of feeding and reproducing themselves not only change, but are substantially affected by forces outside the nation. The responses within nations are sometimes political and associated with national goals and ideals, but they are also personal, as people devise strategies to confront or adjust to change.

This book also focuses on changes in gender relations in countries on the semi-periphery of power. The concept of the semi-periphery as a site for examination will be fully explained in the next chapter (see Cohen Chapter 2). Semi-periphery refers to those nations which are not drivers of change globally, but have enough economic and political security to have some power in determining their own responses to global forces. This book takes examples from four countries on the semi-periphery of power, but still located in the top category of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index, to examine the ways that gender relations change in this globalizing era. At one end is Norway, one of the world’s richest and most developed welfare-states, and, at the other, is Mexico, a country that is considerably poorer and more susceptible to the power of the United States and international agencies such as the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).¹ Australia and Canada, the other two semi-peripheral countries examined, are in the middle. Comparisons will also be made with the United States (US), since this is the epicentre of the ‘core’ base of power. As the following chapters demonstrate, the impact of globalization on gender relations in these countries is often quite similar but the responses vary considerably.

Remapping gender on a global order

Feminist critiques of globalization have met with stiff opposition from the supporters of neoliberal globalization who tend to see what they perceive as a natural and inevitable process as unfairly characterized by inflamed rhetoric, muddled thinking, insufficient understanding of economic processes, and just plain wrong-headedness. Jagdish Bhagwati is probably the best example of a well-known economist who meets feminists head on. His claim is that ‘globalization is on balance socially benign’ while being responsible for enormous economic progress worldwide (2004:30). He attempts to prove that the economics of globalization does have a human face specifically by showing that it has beneficial effects on women’s rights, poverty, child labour, employment standards and wages, democracy and the environment (ibid.: Part II).

Bhagwati’s argument that women (and other disadvantaged groups) are beneficiaries of globalization ultimately rests on the notion that discrimination of any type will be eliminated when competition is intense and global. This is based on the classical economic theory that asserts that when competition is ‘perfect’ any act of discrimination on the part of an employer will ultimately cost the employer money. As employers compete with each other for workers, the employers who discriminate against women will either have to pay more for male workers or ultimately be forced to hire women on the same basis as men. In theory, this is correct.² Classical economic theory is founded on models where all markets are perfect. There is no unemployment, no entity can control any prices, no monopolies exist, and correct prices ensure that all resources, including labour, will be paid the price that is appropriate for its contribution to the production process.³ It assumes that all labour will be paid a wage that reflects its level of productivity. Bhagwati’s argument is that in a competitive system, discrimination becomes impossible because ‘faced with increased competition, firms that were happy to indulge their prejudice will now find that … the price paid for prejudice will become unaffordable’ (ibid.: 76). Under these circumstances the only explanation for different wages for males and females would be differences in productivity.

It is important to understand the theory behind this claim that women and other marginalized social groups will inevitably benefit from globalization because this theory is the basis for the entire structure of the institutions that have been erected to ensure the global dominance of neoliberal economic thinking and structures. The point that feminists have made is that there is a fundamental contradiction between this idea of the ultimate positive outcomes of neoliberal globalism with the methods that are essential to pursue it and the policies and institutions that have been developed to improve women’s economic, social and political circumstances in northern and western countries.⁴ The problem, of course, is that while ‘perfect competition’ is a useful concept in theory, there are few examples of perfect competition in practice and especially in the current configuration of global markets. International trade is now dominated by relatively few mega-players in each industry, and tremendous unemployment and poverty, especially in the South, forces workers to accept low wages and deplorable working conditions or, indeed, to migrate to other countries to find any form of waged work. The claim that markets, by themselves and without strong government controls, will eliminate poverty and inequality defies intuition. But more importantly, it is an idea that runs counter to experience of the vast majority of women across the globe, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate.

Bhagwati specifically discounts the work of feminist critics of globalization who focus on the conditions and institutions that expand global care chains, the exploitative nature of export processing zones, and the constraints placed on poor countries through the directives of international financial institutions such as the IMF. The issue of global care chains involves women migrants from poor countries, who must leave their children in the care of others, to care for households in wealthy countries (Hocshchild 2001, Arat-Koc 1989). Usually these migrant workers are not accorded full citizenship rights in the host countries and often are subjected to oppressive work-related conditions. At the very least, they must be considered disadvantaged when they must sacrifice normal family ties in order to make a living in distant places. Bhagwati discounts the information gained from interviewing women in these circumstances as not convincing proof of a problem, but even if proper samples were taken, ‘as long as the choice to migrate had been made voluntarily’, according to Bhagwati, the psychic and economic gains outweigh the costs. ‘The idea of a global care chain as a chain that binds rather than liberates’, he insists, ‘is almost certainly a wrongheaded one’ (ibid.: 77–8). What is happening as care chains expand, according to Bhagwati, is a validation of care work. As women have gone into the workplace, the demand for childcare and the price of childcare has risen. This means the social value of childcare becomes more manifest and visible. This last point is not entirely untrue in a market economy, but not so the notion that ‘the migrant female worker is better off in the new world of attachments and autonomy; the migrants’ children are happy being looked after by their grandmothers, who are also happy to be looking after the children; and the employer mother, when they find good nannies, are also happy’ (ibid.: 78).

As will be seen in Chapter 3 of this volume, which examines migration for care work in Norway, the politics of care work is considerably more complex than the chain of happy women that Bhagwati depicts. Migration may be a partial solution to g...

Table of contents

• Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• 1 Remapping gender in the new global order
• Part I Changing gender landscapes of globalization
• Part II Remapping gendered spaces
• Part III Surviving and resistance
• Index