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| ISBN-13: | 9780520963474 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 728 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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The Sociology of Development Handbook
By Gregory Hooks
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96347-4
CHAPTER 1
ENGENDERING DEVELOPMENT SOCIOLOGY
The Evolution of a Field of Research
Valentine M. Moghadam
Is development "good" or "bad" for women? Does development weaken or strengthen patriarchy and gender inequality? In what ways do economic processes affect women's labor force participation and social positions? How do gender relations change in the course of the social transformations brought about by development and modernization? How do women's political participation, civil society activism, and other forms of female mobilization change the course of politics or influence institutions and policies? These are among the major questions that have preoccupied feminist sociologists of development, who are situated within the broader field of women, gender, and development.
The sociology of development and the field of women/gender and development have sometimes intersected but are, in general, parallel fields of research; although gender and development sociologists are fully conversant with the mainstream literature, the reverse typically is not the case. This argument cannot be developed in the present chapter, although it is worth noting that in international policy circles, the work of feminist development researchers from sociology and the other disciplines represented in the field has tended to have some impact on debates and policy initiatives. Here, the main objective is to provide an overview of the evolution of the field of women, gender, and development, with a focus on contributions by sociologists, and to draw attention to the conceptual and empirical contributions of feminist sociologists of development.
Over the years, at least two features distinguish feminist development sociology from other streams in the development literature. First are the advocacy underpinnings, wherein most studies have approached issues and problems pertaining to women in the development process in terms not only of what is but also of what ought to be. Some studies steeped in Marxist, socialist, or world-systems analysis have offered trenchant critiques of capitalism. Others have been policy-oriented, with recommendations for initiatives or interventions to improve women's conditions. Most studies have analyzed women's participation and rights as well as the contributions of female productive and reproductive labor to economic growth, social development, and democratization. Second, feminist development scholarship is characterized methodologically and conceptually by a holistic approach that eschews positivism in favor of broad analysis and mixed methods; studies also have tended to be inter- and cross-disciplinary, approaching questions and problems from a broad perspective and within a complex framework. As such, both the focus on advocacy and the non-positivist method may be said to conform to what has sometimes been called feminist methodology.
This overview of the wide-ranging research that constitutes the field of women, gender, and development, focused on the feminist sociology of development, touches on the main issues and debates of the early years, the prescient critique of (capitalist) development and growth, the focus on state policies and institutions in connection with women's participation and rights, and elucidation of the operations of gender in development policies and projects. Also included is a brief discussion of the shifts from women in development (WID) to women and development (WAD) and finally to gender and development (GAD).
WOMEN AND GENDERED DEVELOPMENT: THE EARLY YEARS
When theories of economic development were emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, little or no attention was paid to women's productive roles. In policy circles, if women were discussed at all, it was in relation to their role as mothers, an approach that came to be known as the welfare or motherhood approach. Development was still considered to be a technical problem rather than imbued with political or ideological dimensions. Women and children were regarded as real or potential victims of the disruptive nature of development (or of modernization); the literature thus recommended that development efforts take household welfare into account and ensure that women and children benefited from social and economic change. Here, the domestic and reproductive roles of "Third World" women were emphasized, along with issues pertaining to population, health, nutrition, and literacy (see Moser 1993; Rathgeber 1990; Tinker 1990).
In the 1960s and 1970s, Third World states were engaged in modernization and economic development, launching state-owned industries, providing jobs and housing, and subsidizing food and utilities. Development specialists drew attention to the role of the state in the provision of public services such as health and education and in the development of agriculture and the rural sector. The policy field was oriented toward the achievement of "basic needs," but, on the left, the sociology of development was influenced by theories of development and underdevelopment associated with the Latin American "dependency school" and the Marxist approach to capitalism. The writings of Theotonio Dos Santos, Paul Baran, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, and Immanuel Wallerstein influenced perhaps two generations of development researchers. This is the environment that helped launch research on women and development.
In 1970, Danish economist Ester Boserup published a book that would give rise to the new field of study. Offering an ambitious historical analysis, Woman's Role in Economic Development described "male and female farming systems" and their implications for women's economic participation; explored the effects of colonialism and development on women and families; and described different patterns of women's work in rural and urban settings across world regions. A central insight drawn from her fieldwork in Africa was that modern development projects tended to favor men and marginalize women from agricultural activity, and that, by displacing women, development projects unintentionally contributed to lower food production and household poverty. Development projects failed, she argued, because they did not take women into account. Boserup's study interested some practitioners, policymakers, and advocates, with the result that the U.S. Agency for International Development opened an Office of Women in Development (Tinker 1990). Here the concern was to overturn the marginalization that Boserup had described and ensure that women were adequately integrated into the development process, especially in rural sectors. Thus was born the women-in-development (WID) approach and research community. The WID strategy focused on women as a group and sought to address the exclusion of women from the development process, emphasizing that, if development incorporated and included women's productive capacity, it would be more efficient.
Meanwhile, in sociology, concepts of "sex roles" and "women's status" — inspired in part by modernization theories — were applied toward an understanding of similarities and differences in women's social positions across cultures and countries (Abadan-Unat 1981; Giele and Smock 1977; Kagitcibasi 1982; Kandiyoti 1977; Safilios-Rothschild 1971). Janet Giele (1977) offered a useful framework that could be applied cross-nationally, and it seemed informed by feminist concepts of patriarchy and liberal notions of autonomy, equality, and choice. That study and others were occurring in the context of second-wave feminism, which was leading to the formulation of theories of women's subordination and advocacy for equality.
The entry of women into the development arena became a subject of interest to the United Nations and its programs, funds, and specialized agencies. UNESCO monitored progress in literacy and education for women and girls, and it produced reports and datasets that were used by scholars; its director-general expressed support for women's educational attainment and social participation. Issues of women in development were discussed at the first U.N. world conference on women, held in Mexico City in 1975, and became part of the U.N.'s Decade for Women (1976–85): Equality, Development, and Peace. The International Labour Organization — along with its secretariat in Geneva, the International Labour Office (ILO) — sponsored studies on the undercounting of women in rural activities and agricultural production (see, e.g., Beneria 1982). WID policy frameworks, replete with checklists, were designed to ensure women's integration in and benefits from development projects. Many U.S. universities established women-in-development programs, especially at land-grant universities, and, at Michigan State University, sociologist Rita Gallin set up a WID working papers series. Women members of the International Sociological Association (ISA) formed the Research Committee on Women in Societies, known as RC-32 and still among the largest of the ISA research committees. Several members — including Fatima Mernissi, Deniz Kandiyoti, and Hanna Papanek — also helped organize a conference at Wellesley College that produced a book on women and national development (Wellesley Editorial Committee 1977).
Across the Third World, a stratum of women was becoming educated and finding employment in the growing public sector, but many women remained illiterate and poor. Influenced by both feminist and dependency theories, some WID specialists came to criticize the focus on integration of women into what they regarded as a flawed economic process, and they formulated a line of thinking that came to be known as women and development (WAD). Here emphasis was placed on international inequalities, the persistence of poverty, and the exploitation of women in capitalist development (Beneria and Sen 1981; Fernandez-Kelly 1983). It was argued that social inequalities and the long-standing sexual division of labor rendered women subordinate and vulnerable to projects that did not take their interests into account. As patriarchy and capitalism limited the options available to women, women's advancement was not possible within established structures. WAD took issue with large governmental projects and advocated smaller-scale projects and local participation, calling in part for women-only projects to ensure participation and prevent male domination (Rathgeber 1990). Ecofeminists such as Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, and Hilkka Pietila formulated profound critiques of development and economic growth as undermining both people's welfare and the natural environment. Parallel to the WAD critique, scholars writing from within the world-systems theoretical paradigm pointed to processes such as "housewifization" that were generated by capitalist development (von Werlhof 1983; Mies 1986); to the inverse relationship between dependency and the status of women, measured in part by fertility rates (Ward 1984); and to the role of female labor, both paid and unpaid, in the semi-proletarian households of the capitalist world economy (Mies 1982; Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 1984). In a related but separate line of inquiry, radical economists and Marxist- or socialist-feminist sociologists debated the evolution of the sexual division of labor and its relationship to capitalist development and patriarchy (Barrett 1980; Folbre 1982; Humphries 1991). Both the effects of capitalist development on women and the effects of the sexual division of labor on national and global growth strategies were being studied and theorized, albeit in the absence of consensus on dynamics, outcomes, and solutions.
ISSUES AND DEBATES
A debate taking place at the time revolved around whether female labor was being marginalized or integrated into modernization and development, and if development could advance women's longer-term interests (see, e.g., Moghadam 1992a). Following Boserup and the dependency school, but in a Marxian vein, Heleith Safiotti (1978) made a strong case for female marginalization as a key feature of the capitalist mode of production, arguing that women's labor was being absorbed into the subsistence/marginal/informal sector of the economy. This was consistent with studies of the growth of the informal sector in the Third World (see, e.g., Portes and Walton 1981). In contrast, John Humphrey (1984) argued that female labor force participation had in fact increased in the Brazilian manufacturing sector as well as in the economy overall. Others began to study the growth of "world market factories" producing garments and electronics along the U.S.-Mexican border and in free trade zones in Southeast Asia (see, e.g., Elson and Pearson 1981; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983). Alison MacEwen Scott (1986) used census data and her own field research in Peru to argue against the "marginalization thesis." Susan Tiano (1987) synthesized the debates by posing the question of whether women were being integrated, marginalized, or exploited by development, and, on the basis of her research on women in the Mexican maquila industry, she concluded that all three were occurring (see also Tiano 1994).
Confirming the "integration and exploitation" thesis, studies by other feminist social scientists showed how world market factories in Latin America and Southeast Asia were drawing on cheap female labor to generate profits (Elson and Pearson 1981; Heyzer 1986; Beneria and Roldan 1987). In an influential study, Fred Pampel and Kazuko Tanaka (1986) used data for seventy countries and two time points — 1965 and 1970 — to conclude that development initially forces women out of the labor force, but at advanced levels it increases female participation. Examining changes in female labor force participation (FLFP) between 1970 and 1980 in South Korea, Sunghee Nam (1991) found support for modernization theory's prediction of higher levels of FLFP with rising educational attainment and for arguments that economic status and household need propelled women in the labor market in the context of export-led manufacturing. In a cross-national study, Roger Clark, Thomas Ramsbey, and Emily Adler (1991) argued that, though the more developed countries had higher FLFP rates, "culture" as a variable was found to be an explanation for lower levels of female employment in other regions.
Some research on women and capitalist development was premised on the Marxist notion of women as a "reserve army of labor," in that semi-proletarianized women were recruited and expelled as necessary during the course of their life cycle or that of the family. Other researchers stressed the diverse forms of female labor incorporation into the world economy: in productive and reproductive sectors alike, and as wage and non-wage workers (Safa 1995). In the formal sector, female labor seemed to be preferred because it had a lower cost than male labor; it reduced the cost of labor power overall; women could be paid less than men for their labor, whether in a factory or in home-based paid labor; and women's "nimble fingers" were deemed especially suited to the garments and electronics sectors. Ruth Pearson and Swasti Mitter (1993) highlighted the vulnerability of female labor in low-skilled information processing sectors. Policies were thus seen as infused with gendered notions of work, incomes, and household management. For example, women became the target of a new program to alleviate poverty: microlending. Research had found that poor women tended to contribute a higher proportion of their income to family subsistence, holding back less for personal consumption. They were thus deemed to be good borrowers, favored by the microfinance industry (Blumberg 1989a, 2004). Scott put it thus: "[G]ender plays a role in structuring labour markets not just as cheap labour, but as subordinate labour, docile labour, immobile labour, domesticated labour, sexual labour, and so on" (1986, 673). Not only policies but also the economic theories that underpinned them were increasingly seen as gendered, as a growing community of feminist economists found. Diane Elson (1991) and contributors illustrated the "male bias" in neoclassical economic theory as well as in development processes.
From a somewhat different perspective, ILO labor economist Guy Standing (1989) offered a new analysis of changing (gendered) production relations under post-Keynesian policy conditions. His influential paper showed that the increasing globalization of production and the pursuit of flexible forms of labor to retain or increase competitiveness, as well as changing job structures in industrial enterprises, favored the "feminization of employment" in the dual sense of an increase in the numbers of women in the labor force and a deterioration of work conditions in terms of labor standards, income, and employment status. The decline of the social power of labor and of trade unions was a contributing factor, he argued.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sociology of Development Handbook by Gregory Hooks. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Tables and FiguresIntroduction: A Manifesto for the Sociology of Development - Samuel Cohn and Gregory Hooks
I. EXPLAINING DEVELOPMENT: SOCIOLOGICAL INSIGHTS
1. Engendering Development: The Evolution of a Field of Research - Valentine M. Moghadam
2. Population and Development - Laszlo J. Kulcsar
3. Strengthening the Ties between Environmental Sociology and Sociology of Development - Jennifer E. Givens, Brett Clark, and Andrew K. Jorgenson
4. The Sources of Socioeconomic Development - Adam Szirmai
II. HUMAN CAPABILITIES: INSTITUTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT
5. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Global North and Global South - Jeffrey T. Jackson, Kirsten Dellinger, Kathryn McKee, and Annette Trefzer
6. Magic Potion/Poison Potion: The Impact of Women’s Economic Empowerment versus Disempowerment for Development in a Globalized World - Rae Lesser Blumberg
7. Land Use and the Great Acceleration in Human Activities: Political and Economic Dynamics - Thomas K. Rudel
8. Age Structure and Development: Beyond Malthus - David L. Brown and Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue
9. Development, Demographic Processes, and Public Health - Joshua Stroud, Philip Anglewicz, and Mark VanLandingham
10. Education and Development - David B. Bills
III. DEVELOPMENT DYNAMICS: SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ACCOUNTS
11. The Sociology of Subnational Development: Conceptual and Empirical Foundations - Linda Lobao 12. Sociological Perspectives on Uneven Development: The Making of Regions - Ann R. Tickamyer and Anouk Patel-Campillo
13. Migration and Development: Virtuous and Vicious Cycles - Sara R. Curran
14. Tertiary Education and Development: Strategies of Global South Countries to Meet Growing Tertiary Demand - Mary M. Kritz
15. Migrant Networks, Immigrant and Ethnic Economies, and Destination Development - Kim Korinek and Peter Loebach
IV. BUILDING STATES AND FAILING STATES: DEVELOPMENT TRIUMPHS AND DISASTERS
16. The State and Development - Samuel Cohn
17. Women, Democracy, and the State - Kathleen M. Fallon and Jocelyn Viterna
18. War and Development: Questions, Answers, and Prospects for the Twenty-first Century - Gregory Hooks
19. Neoliberalism, the Origins of the Global Crisis, and the Future of States - Richard Lachmann
20. Crisis and the Rise of China - Ho-fung Hung
21. Conflict and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa - Zoe Marriage
22. Social Movements and Economic Development - Paul Almeida
V. GLOBAL COMPLEXITIES AND LOCAL CONTEXTS: NEW PARADIGMS FOR EXPLAINING DEVELOPMENT
23. Globalization and Development - Nina Bandelj and Elizabeth Sowers
24. Transitions to Capitalisms: Past and Present - Rebecca Jean Emigh
25. Quantitative Growth and Economic Development through History - Rosemary L. Hopcroft
26. The Great Divergence: Why Did Industrial Capitalism Emerge in Europe, Not China? - Dingxin Zhao
27. Global Commodity Chains and Development - Jennifer Bair and Matthew Mahutga
List of Contributors
Index