Masculinities, femininities and the geographies of public and private drinking landscapes

Geographers have been slow to address issues about abstinence, drinking and drunkenness, but the importance of alcohol on the social and political agenda has underpinned recent growth in this field. Explorations of the gendered geographies of drinking are one important strand in this emerging field, but there is currently a paucity of research on women and gender (as opposed to men), and a dearth of research which looks beyond a rather narrowly specified range of public drinking environments. This paper addressed these short-comings through a quantitative and qualitative examination of different men’s and women’s alcohol consumption in private as well as diverse public drinking environments in 21st Century Britain. The paper emphasises the importance of gendered moralities in shaping gender and intra-gender differences in drinking levels, locations and motivations, and explores the connections between apparently separate public and private drinking environments.     

Gender, immigration policies and accreditation: valuing the skills of professional women migrants

Human capital is the most important form of wealth for a modern nation and countries with the most intellectual resources are achieving the highest rates of economic growth. In the drive for human capital, many industrialised countries are giving priority to policies aimed at attracting highly skilled immigrants. The number of skilled immigrants who settle permanently in these countries is not rising but there is a significant level of temporary movement of highly skilled labour from developing countries, particularly in information technology (IT), medicine, nursing and teaching. Women now account for an increased proportion of highly skilled migrants but there are still few analyses of their economic participation. Immigration selection and occupational entry policies are crucial for an understanding of the gendered experiences of migration for skilled migrants. This article draws together material from empirical work and reports/other literature on the situation facing professional women compared to men, both permanent and temporary, in the selection processes for migration and the post-arrival processes of accreditation and recognition.     

Struggles over family land? Tree crops,land and labour in Ghana’s Brong-Ahafo region

Agricultural land use in much of Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana has been shifting from the production of food crops towards increased cashew nut cultivation in recent years. This article explores everyday, less visible, gendered and generational struggles over family farms in West Africa, based on qualitative, participatory research in a rural community that is becoming increasingly integrated into the global capitalist system. As a tree crop, cashew was regarded as an individual man’s property to be passed on to his wife and children rather than to extended family members, which differed from the communal land tenure arrangements governing food crop cultivation. The tendency for land, cash crops and income to be controlled by men, despite women’s and young people’s significant labour contributions to family farms, and for women to rely on food crop production for their main source of income and for household food security, means that women and girls are more likely to lose out when cashew plantations are expanded to the detriment of land for food crops. Intergenerational tensions emerged when young people felt that their parents and elders were neglecting their views and concerns. The research provides important insights into gendered and generational power relations regarding land access, property rights and intra-household decision-making processes. Greater dialogue between genders and generations may help to tackle unequal power relations and lead to shared decision-making processes that build the resilience of rural communities.     

Gendered divisions in the new economy: Risks and opportunities

The concept 'new economy' is widely used to characterise the outcomes of contemporary restructuring processes – but in contrasting ways: by globalisation and the increasing use of communication and information technologies as well as by deregulation, polarisation, feminisation of employment and new, more flexible patterns and hours of work. These tendencies are interlinked and partly account for growing social and gender divisions. They pose problems for social sustainability but also develop differently in different economic and social formations. This paper develops a theoretical understanding of widening social divisions and their gendered form, indicates how these tendencies have developed to different degrees within the European Union and illustrates how the divisions are experienced by people in a local labour market in the neo liberal UK, where social and gender divisions are particularly wide. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Economic value of children and fertility preferences in a fishing community in Ghana

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that fertility levels in fishing communities, in Ghana, are very high, the influence of economic and cultural factors on fertility preferences in such communities has not been adequately explored. This article examines the fertility preferences of men and women living at Akplabanya, a fishing community in Ghana. Data were collected from a sample of 354 respondents. The findings of the study show that demand for labour, expectations of long term security, and gendered power relations have contributed to high fertility levels and preferences in the study area. It has been concluded that significant fertility decline in the area will only occur when fertility preferences of men have changed. Family planning programmes must therefore target both men and women. Improving economic status of women will also go a long way to bring about fertility transition in rural communities in Ghana.     

Socio-economic determinants of women’s livelihood time use in rural Bangladesh

Achieving gender well-being and equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. A close examination of female livelihood time allocation can reveal gender inequality in livelihood choices between males and females. Using the feminist political ecology framework, this paper examines how gendered knowledge, roles, and responsibilities influence female livelihood time use in a patriarchal society like Bangladesh. We use a nationally representative household survey data to create Multiple Linear Regression Model to understand the association between economic, cultural, and environmental shocks with the total time allocation toward livelihood activities by women. Our results suggest that use of ‘Purdah’ by Muslim women acts as a negative detrimental factor towards their livelihood time allocation, thus affirming the complex role of culture and gendered economic activities. Women also allocate less time toward livelihood activities during pregnancy and/or breastfeeding. We find that female livelihood time use also depends on their ability to speak in public, their autonomy in livelihood decision processes, and their ownership in business enterprises. This research suggests creating more robust and gender sensitive policies in Bangladesh that can help achieve the United Nation’s goals of Sustainable Development.

     

Living and working in urban working class communities

Much has been written on the apparent urban renaissance in UK cities and the new lifestyle arrangements, working time patterns, economic activities and the more general reordering of work and life that appears to accompany it. Certainly, recent decades have witnessed a range of economic, social and cultural changes in the lives of those living and working in cities and surrounding suburbs. Much of the attention in this work has focused on those groups for whom the changes have appeared most profound: the high-income earners returning to live in the city - the gentrifiers - or those who suffer multiple deprivations as a result of economic restructuring. Seemingly absent from many accounts of urban change are those places where, at first glance, the effects of change have been less pronounced: low-income, working class neighbourhoods where most people continue to get by, albeit in the context of a harsher, and less secure political economic context. In light of this apparent silence, this paper draws on interviews from Wythenshawe in South Manchester, to examine how low-income mothers cope, live and labour, in a rapidly changing city, as they perform paid work at the same time as ensuring the social reproduction of the household.     

Responsible adults-in-the-making: Intergenerational impact of parental migration on Indonesian young women’s aspirational capacity

In the developing economies in Southeast Asia, labour migration is increasingly seen not simply to generate income to meet short-term livelihood needs but to secure the family’s future, often by investing in children’s education. While much work has been done studying the impact of parents’ remittances on children’s wellbeing including education access, the impact of parental migration on children’s (educational) aspirations has received less attention. Viewing youth as social actors, this paper interrogates how they make meaning of their parents’ migration, and how this consequently influences their decisions to activate, delay or reshape their hopes and plans for their own educational and work trajectories. With the increasing feminisation of labour migration in Southeast Asia where gendered regimes in care and domestic work make it easier for women to work overseas, this paper focuses attention on the aspirations of young women at the cusp of adulthood from a migrant-sending area in rural East Java, Indonesia. These young women’s ‘navigational capacity’ (Appadurai, 2004) is not only shaped by tangible obstacles such as the lack of sufficient resources, but is also more subtly moulded by an emerging discourse of self-responsibilisation in the making of ‘dutiful daughters’. Drawing on conceptualisations of multiple ‘logics of aspiring’ operating within spatial contexts (Zipin et al., 2015), we show how young women unsettle, inflect and challenge the normative linear education-work transitions by expressing their desire to replace their parents in accessing labour migration as a livelihood option, and reflect on the dialectical relationship between agency and aspirations.     

Organizations, recruitment and the local labour market: the case of the Sheffield metal sectors

An examination of the relationship between large organizations and local labour markets which draws attention to the role of the extended internal labour market (EILM). This paper explores recruitment strategies in the local labour market amongst 52 major employers in the metal sectors in the Sheffield local labour market. It shows how dependence on the external labour market rather than the internal labour market varies with the different occupations recruited within the local area and that, in some occupations, the EILM plays an important role. Where recruitment difficulties are experienced there are a variety of responses, all of which have particular implications for the amount and type of labour sought from the external labour market. The paper concludes by arguing for a greater emphasis on the recruitment strategies of larger firms in employer surveys to provide new insights into the operation of local labour markets and, in particular, the operation of the EILM.     

‘Slim female records the same old story’: Newspapers,gender, and recreational fishing in Australia, 1957–2000

Recreational fishing is increasingly acknowledged as an activity that significantly impacts on marine environments. However, the cultural aspects of recreational fishing that shape its participation and practice in different geographical and historical contexts are poorly understood. In particular, the gendered nature of recreational fishing has been subject to surprisingly little scrutiny, particularly with regard to continuity and change over time. This article uses a long-running newspaper fishing column in an Australian context to illuminate women’s modes of engagement in recreational fishing, as well as the way in which a mass media platform has reflected, and at times supported interventions into, gendered cultures of recreational fishing. In doing so, it highlights the complexity and potential of newspapers as sources for understanding recreational fisheries, present and past.     

Beyond the numbers: Understanding the value of vegetation to rural livelihoods in Africa

Different types of vegetation found in local environments are of value to rural livelihoods of many African households. However, the dominant way of expressing this value, which is mainly through economic valuation studies, is potentially limiting this knowledge’s usefulness in policy and research, due to the inability to present full picture. Using literature review and insights from field work, the paper argues that realized and notional values of vegetation to rural livelihoods are socially constructed and contested, and - in addition to understanding local livelihood context, which include social difference, and ecological dynamics - a focus on social institutions as terrains of negotiation is crucial. This means that resource value in rural livelihoods can be realized through contested and negotiated access arrangements that are mediated by complex institutions at local and external levels.     

The decline of a model community-based conservation project: Governance, capacity, and devolution in Mahenye, Zimbabwe

This paper reports the results of our research, conducted from June to August 2004, on the community-based conservation project in Mahenye, Zimbabwe. Previous studies have described this project as a model example of Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program. We explore the project’s recent performance within the context of the country’s post-2000 political and economic crisis and address the implications of our findings for arguments supporting devolution of authority for natural resource management to the community level. These issues are related in that calls for devolution are at least partly contingent on the demonstrated capacity of local institutions to manage projects in the community interest despite difficult circumstances. In our research, we found that outcomes in Mahenye have deteriorated sharply from conditions described in earlier studies. We found further that local failures of leadership combined with the withdrawal of outside agencies responsible for oversight and assistance may be more to blame for this decline than the ongoing national turmoil. Our results suggest that even in apparently successful conservation and development projects, local participatory decision-making institutions are fragile and require continuing external support. Consequently, we argue for caution in promoting full devolution of authority to the community level without safeguards to maintain good governance and adequate capacity.     

The spatial patterns of mass strikes: A labour geography approach

Labour geography aims to explore aspects of workers’ agency that have not yet been at the centre of research, this includes: the links between working-class politics and local communities, the interdependence of global economic networks and working-class activities, and the spatial dimension of workers’ organisations. Although these aspects are relevant for the dynamics of mass strikes, an analysis of mass strikes has been largely absent from debates in labour geography. Rosa Luxemburg’s seminal analysis of strikes in Russia demonstrated the rapid spatial expansion of these movements without any central organisation. Similar phenomena have occurred in recent mass strikes in the emerging economies. This text shows how mass strikes in Brazil, India and South Africa can be investigated through a labour geography lens and calls for a renewed debate on how a ‘strike wave’ is defined or understood.     

Labouring geography: Negotiating scales, strategies and future directions

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.     

En(gender)ing the debate about water’s management and care - views from the Antipodes

In this paper, we map the gendered contours of contemporary water management in order to demonstrate that regimes for individual ownership of water rights, markets, and the productive use of water simply reinscribe and simultaneously submerge in their apparent gender-neutrality a normative masculinity that underpins economic globalization and fortifies existing power relations. Not only do such arrangements disadvantage reproductive values and non-consumptive users; more generally, they also lack the capacity to ensure water’s sustainable development. Consequently, new management institutions for sustainability are demanded and, in making a case for equity-enhancing and adaptive institutions that better reflect water’s materiality, its multiple values and emerging water scarcity, we argue the need to invoke the conserving and ecologically protective feminine principle. To support our reasoning, we analyse water reform processes instituted in Australia and specifically by the State of Tasmania, referring to the latter jurisdiction to illustrate the gendered nature of resource management and to underscore tensions between economic globalization and sustainability, concluding that the tensions between the two agendas are probably irresolvable. We position our work in the borderlands among gender studies, feminist geography and philosophy, and political ecology, drawing together insights about the construction of resource management, the possibilities of the feminine care ethic, and ideas about the characteristics of institutional systems that could ensure equitable allocation and sustainable use of the planet’s resources.     

On waiting,work-time and imagined futures: Theorising temporal precariousness among Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry

This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden – a country considered to have one of Europe’s most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal ‘waiting zones’ indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers’ imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting – for a return to China or settlement in Sweden – may be part of migrants’ strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories.     

Reading representations of women’s war experiences in the Changi Chapel and Museum, Singapore

In this paper, we highlight the way Singapore commemorates its involvement during the Second World War. After briefly tracing the genesis of war commemoration within the nation, we turn to one specific problematic--the gendered portrayals of the war within a particular war memorial in Singapore, the Changi Chapel and Museum. Through a reading of landscape texts, interviews with key figures, visitors and other ethnographic data, we explore the specific ways in which women have either been omitted or stereotypically represented within the site. We proceed to provide possible reasons for this, arguing how the male-centric focus of the site may be due to the perpetuation of hegemonic ideals of war as being a traditionally “male” terrain, and the fact that “silence” is often part of women’s approach to their war experiences. We also argue that gendered portrayals of the war within the site is also an unconscious product of the patriarchal nature of the Singapore state and nation-building endeavours that have placed limits on a more substantial inclusion of women’s stories vis-à-vis the men’s.     

Trade unions, coalitions and communities: Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and the international stakeholder campaign against Rio Tinto

There is a growing geographical literature on the significance of organised labour. A key theoretical and political question concerns the extent and nature of the engagement between trade unions and other groups in the broader community. The paper seeks to contribute to this debate by focusing specifically on the ways in which trade unions engage collaboratively with such interest groups over international corporate campaign issues. It draws upon a case study of the encounter between Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and Rio Tinto, one of the largest privately owned mining companies in the world. This was conducted through a loose alliance co-ordinated by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers Unions (ICEM). The campaign included the use of stakeholder reports aimed at influencing corporate shareholders. The main issues concerned the rights of indigenous peoples, environmental consequences of mining operations, and human rights in the workplace. The attempt to change these aspects of corporate culture led to union-inspired resolutions at the firm’s May 2000 Annual General Meeting, the first attempt to challenge a company through international union-led action in this manner. Although defeated, the resolutions were backed by a significant minority of leading institutional shareholders. The paper interprets this campaign in terms of broader debates over the spatiality of organised labour and the role of trade unions, at a time when increased significance has been attached to alternative political movements. It seeks to theorise the specific implications of internationally-grounded interest-based campaigns and take into account the ways in which these are both constrained by, and draw strength from, their constitution at this spatial scale.     

Gendering transnational communities: a comparison of Singaporean and British migrants in China

Studies of transnational communities and transnational labour migration have focused almost exclusively on the movement of low-skilled and unskilled workers across international boundaries. While these groups may be numerically dominant, it must be recognised that there are increasing numbers of managers and professionals engaged in work-related migration in association with the intensification of economic globalisation processes. Work which has been conducted on highly skilled migrants has largely been limited to examinations of intra-firm mobility and the workspace. This approach fails to consider the ways in which the migrants' experiences are embedded in the social, economic and political practices of the host country, but also in a specific household context. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the gendered dimensions of the life of these migrants and their accompanying family members has been somewhat under-researched.Flows of expatriates can lead to the constitution of both ‘communities of transnationals', as particular cities become foci of the activities of the ‘transnational capitalist class', as well as ‘transnational communities' which involve regular and sustained contact between individuals across national boundaries. In this paper we examine these social formations using two groups of migrants––British and Singaporean migrants to China (both mainland China and the Hong Kong SAR). We focus on the gender characteristics of these groupings, but also the gender division of labour in the creation and maintenance of these ‘communities'. The paper is based on qualitative research carried out in China, Singapore and the UK 1997–2001.     

Enter the working forest: Discourse analysis in the Northern Forest

In 1988, four states in the northeastern USA commissioned a study to address land use changes in the Northern Forest, 26 million acres of temperate and boreal forest extending from Maine to eastern New York State. Against a backdrop of economic destabilization and concerns regarding social and ecological implications of a real estate boom, the sustained deliberative dialogue catalyzed by this study has come to rely heavily on the ambiguous concept of “working forest.” To clarify political and environmental dynamics in the region, we analyzed how people respond to and seek to capitalize on the interpretive flexibility of the term working forest. We combine an analysis of socio-political discourses of working forest based on a structured literature review with an assessment of local peoples’ definitions of working forest based on a survey conducted in a pair of contrasting New York State communities. The first study site represents an amenity-oriented community (i.e. a place where the forest supports a service economy including recreation and tourism) and the other study site represents a timber-dependent community. By linking data from community-level analysis to data derived from a general analysis of forest politics, we seek to develop a more robust perspective. By comparing discourses across differently structured communities, we investigate how local forest politics are mediated by local economic development processes. Our study empirically illustrates contested and geographically uneven processes of social construction of environment and rural development in a region confronting pressures of globalization. Results indicate that timber harvesting is a heavily privileged management objective, as a logic of ‘the forest that pays is the forest that stays’ dominates. Environmental politics in the region, and perhaps more generally, increasingly conforms to a form of pragmatism in which economic opportunities structure conservation planning and investment.