Feminist economic geography and the future of work

Abstract

Scholars have recently begun to account for the absence of feminist analyses in the popular and academic discourse surrounding ‘the future of work’. In this article we offer a critical synthesis of emerging research from feminist economic geography to propose a series of questions about the future of work, conceptualized as both an object of intellectual inquiry and an emerging empirical reality. Feminist economic geography emphasizes difference, embodiment, and conceives of workplaces as dynamic, uneven, and untidy spaces, an emphasis which can help recenter discussions about the future of work on workers and their experience of work. Our discussion features a series of analytically rigorous, theoretically informed, and empirically rich conference papers, organized around three critical questions: Who are the subjects of the future of work? What counts as work? And where should we look? We highlight a broad concept of work developed through debates among feminist scholars across disciplinary fields as a key frame for understanding the global economy, including difference, social reproduction, and the spatial division of labor. Feminist economic geographers are pluralizing the subjects, forms, and geographies of work, which may help enhance our understanding of the future of work in economic geography.

Keywords

Feminist economic geography social reproduction subjectivity technology work

Introduction: Defining work and the future of work

The future of work has become a key phrase in popular discussions about recent and rapid transformations within employment and labour markets. It is a major area of research for the OECD (2019), is the focus of a series of ILO reports (2019), and was the topic of a conference hosted by The Economist (2019) and the cover story of an issue of The New Yorker (Kolhatkar, 2017). Technology plays a central though ambivalent role in these speculations about the future, in which work is increasingly digitally mediated and data-saturated; managed more by platforms and algorithms and less by people; and characterized by automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and new reproductive technologies. These conversations are quintessentially defined by a concern – and at times a perceptible anxiety – about the potential effects of new technologies within formal workplaces.

Academic responses to this future of work discourse have challenged this too-narrow focus on technology itself, contending that current debates ought to more centrally question the ways that technological change can deepen existing racial, gendered, and class inequalities among workers (Whitehouse and Brady, 2019). The most enduring changes originating in the present moment may be more organizational than technological, with the consequences disproportionately borne by young workers and people who are already economically and socially marginalized within formal labour markets (Ojanperӓ et al., 2018). There is some conceptual hubris in associating technology with novelty, yet anxieties around technological change and job loss have been (intermittently) ongoing since at least the industrial revolution (Benanav, 2019).

The future of work discourse circulates through popular and policy conversations, portraying automation, robotics, platforms, and algorithms in terms “characterized by the extremities of either dystopian angst or popular boosterism” (Bissell and Del Casino, 2017: 435). For some commentators, the replacement of workers and their jobs with machines promises a boon to economic productivity, narrowly defined in neoclassical economic theory as increases in firms’ output and profitability. Others claim that technological changes will create new jobs that are more highly skilled, better compensated, and safer. Some scholars have reproduced this polarization about the future of work, offering a utopic vision that this future constitutes a new post-work horizon and the instantiation of comprehensive social contracts de-linked from compulsory waged labour (Bastani, 2019; Srnicek and Williams, 2015).

This paper examines research from feminist economic geography to critically analyze the discourse of the future of work. Feminist economic geography is well-placed to intervene in the polarized discourse on the future of work reproduced through both popular and academic discussions. We connect feminist economic geography to scholarly research that has begun to account for the absence of feminist analyses in popular discussions (Howcroft and Rubery, 2019). We de-emphasize deterministic narratives about technology by widening the scope of what constitutes meaningful work, and refocusing attention on workers over the novelty of digital platforms and automation. We focus less on examining the content of these narratives and instead on how feminist economic geography may expand approaches to studying the future of work.

Feminist economic geographers push these scholarly analyses of the future of work further by maintaining a close focus on difference, embodiment, and performativity (MacLeavy et al., 2016) and on workplaces as dynamic, uneven, and untidy spaces (Ettlinger, 2004) to return the focus of these discussions to work itself. Feminist economic geographers have insisted upon the importance of interrogating race- and gender-neutral narratives of epochal transformation familiar among economic geographers through an approach emphasizing both continuity and change in the global economy (McDowell, 2009). For example, Wright’s (2006) research on maquila workers in Mexico and Mullings’ (1999) research on women data-entry workers’ coping strategies in Jamaica underscore that technological change and workforce restructuring are enacted through the reworking of subjectivities and social inequalities, particularly through colonial, gendered, and racial hierarchies (see also Werner, 2015). Feminist economic geographers have strengthened geographers’ theorizations of uneven development by accounting for racialized and gendered divisions of labour, in particular in debates on shifts to post-Fordism (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Massey, 1991). Feminist frameworks associated with a diverse economies approach continue to thrive among critical economic geographers (Gibson-Graham, 2008), providing a rich epistemology for conceptualizing difference as not necessarily – or not solely – capitalist in nature but rather as intersecting with capitalist social relations in complex, ambiguous, and non-deterministic ways.

Feminist geographers who draw extensively on social reproduction theory have furthermore challenged the normative hierarchies economic geographers use to understand work, labour, and employment (McDowell, 2015; Winders and Smith, 2019). In this theoretical field (Battacharya, 2017), broadening the concept of work to refer to a wider range of human activities is a longstanding theoretical and empirical object in feminist political economy (Federici, 2004; Mies, 1986), critical development studies (Benería, 1992; Kabeer, 1994), and feminist geography (Oberhauser, 2000). In this view, work can be understood more broadly as activities that produce goods and services for oneself and others, whether or not these goods and services reach a consumer market (ILO, 2018; Komlosy, 2018). Many of these activities are devalued, degraded, and exempt from regulatory frameworks and legal protections (McGrath and DeFillippis, 2009; Gidwani and Chari, 2004). This broad definition of work encompasses, but includes more than, productive waged labour and formal employment – categories that have historically drawn scholarly attention to white men’s work in the Global North while ignoring a more geographically and socially generalized history in which work is characterized by varying degrees of informality and unfreedom (Mezzandri, 2016). Work, broadly conceived, can therefore direct scholarly inquiry toward activities that may be paid or unpaid, and occur within or across spheres of production and reproduction through processes unfolding outside formal workplaces like factories and offices (Frederiksen, 2015; Reid-Musson, 2017).

However, scholarly appeals to reframe a wider range of activities as work can reinforce the hegemony of work itself, in which only ‘productive’ labours are socially and economically valuable (Weeks, 2011). This reproduces a pro-work ideology in which workers learn to accept more and harder work, empathize with employers to whom they feel indebted, and situate work as the central source of meaning in everyday life (Cockayne, 2020). Narratives about turning devalued jobs into ‘meaningful work’ can elide precarious and unpaid work, and “extend the reach of labour subsumption into spheres traditionally considered outside the employment relation” (Castellini, 2019: 63). The goal is not, in other words, to simply ‘re-value’ activities deemed ‘nonwork’ or ‘unproductive’, but rather to rigorously re-think what scholars may include in the category of work. A more expansive concept of work that carefully attends to difference (Werner et al., 2017) can show that the dominant rhetoric and regime of work is historically and geographically restrictive, because it excludes a wide range of activities essential for maintaining life from any meaningful analysis of labour. This expansive understanding of work may be both usefully limiting and enabling, as a way of drawing attention to workers themselves to resist deterministic narratives of technological change and to bring a greater range of practices into the foreground of analyses that engage with, for example, the mediation of reproductive labour by new digital technologies.

It is within this milieu (our summary of which is far from exhaustive) that we situate new research presented in a series of conference sessions we organized on Querying The Future of Work at the Feminist Geography Conference in Montreal in 2018 and the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC in 2019.¹ In what follows, we offer a critical synthesis of three key themes that emerged from these sessions on the subjects, forms, and geographies of work.

We provide a critical synthesis of emerging research from these conference meetings, and thus we do not here attempt an alternative theorization to the future of work discourse nor do we set out a specific research agenda. While we have engaged with technology above since it characterizes popular framings of the future of work, our aim here and in the accounts below is to deemphasize the role of technology—following critical academic accounts of the future of work—to frame that future more in terms of workers, their differences, and political and organizational change. Though technology will undoubtedly play an important role in that future, we argue that that role will not be singular, causal, or deterministic. We have chosen the topics organized under the subheadings below as a reflection of our conceptual decision to de-emphasize technology as the primary, or exclusive, driver of change in our feminist economic future of work. We conclude with a short reflection on what these analytically rigorous, theoretically informed, and empirically rich conference papers have contributed to our own thinking about the importance of feminist economic geography for intervening in popular and academic narratives about the future of work.

Who are the subjects of the future of work?

A focus on the figure of the worker can bring the future of work discourse to a livable scale, grounding scholarly inquiry in everyday places and daily life. Workers’ subjectivity was central in a set of papers presented in the conference sessions. Rather than viewing labour as a conceptual whole, these researchers emphasize how socially differentiated workers (as individuals and groups) negotiate, or are constrained by, their working and employment conditions. By bringing socially constructed differences into the foreground, these researchers examine how race, gender, sexuality, age, immigration status, and disability articulate with the more conventional category of class to grapple with important questions about workers’ agency and (collective) power.

Taylor’s (2018) research with young renters in Hackney, London, emphasizes how capital (or a lack thereof) is reproduced intergenerationally. Respondents in this research project felt a profound sense of futility about salaried work and a future in which retirement would never be possible without access to transfers of private wealth through familial ties. These respondents were, Taylor explains, negotiating the emotional consequences of their knowledge that their working lives would end only with death and not with retirement. Loomis’ (2018) research on financial coaching examines how nonprofits geared toward financial inclusion rescale an unequal financial system. This coaching encourages low-income clients of non-profits to personalize and moralize their debts, “managing [their] poverty by becoming responsible consumers of credit” (150).

Institutions and organizations that interlink diverse groups of workers (Enright, 2013) can reveal the messy power dynamics within ‘workplace inclusion’ efforts and labour market intermediaries. Analyses of workplace inclusion presented in the conference sessions include job fairs targeted toward incorporating disabled people into formal workplaces (Jampel, 2019) and work-integrated social enterprises where work tasks are adapted to match workers’ abilities (McKinnon, 2019). Lewis and Mills (2019) raise important questions about the limitations of notions of workplace inclusion, showing that LGBTQ-identified workers in Ontario face discrimination from customers, which requiresextra affective labour from these workers as a de facto condition of their employment. Veronis (see Huot and Veronis, 2018) researches how volunteer work and paid employment in the non-profit “settlement sector” in Canada is a way for immigrants and refugees to create community for themselves through these organizational spaces. Dimpfl (2019) examines adjunct university instructors’ organizing to consider the possibilities for building solidarity across job categories within institutional spaces, importantly by challenging adjuncts’ over-identification with precarious workers located throughout the university. This research cautions against the danger of more highly-educated (yet precariously employed) academic workers appropriating the struggles of already-marginalized university workers, insisting on the value of collective power along with the “difficult work of cross-class, cross-sector organizing” (Dimpfl, 2019).

These papers illuminate workers’ subject formation and collective agency through institutions, organizations, and intermediaries. One might ask here who is not a subject of the future of work, if work is broadened beyond waged work and formal employment. Given that the future of work discourse often overlooks workers themselves and thus fails to consider socially constructed differences (Spencer, 2018), the above-cited papers offer a fundamental challenge to popular rhetoric that ignores or obscures questions about inequality, identities, and experiences of work.

What counts as work? Social reproduction theory and feminist economic geography

Feminist geographers have repeatedly called for a more fulsome account of what may be called ‘life’s work’: the un- and under-paid work of maintaining everyday life outside the formal workplace (Mitchell et al., 2004; Strauss and Meehan, 2015). These geographers have drawn extensively from, and built upon, theorizations of social reproduction developed among feminist political economists (Teeple Hopkins, 2015). The need to recognize the home as a place of work, broadly conceived, has been central to feminist social reproduction debates since the 1970s to extend conceptualizations of labour and value into the sphere of the family and domesticity (Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Edholm et al., 1977; Laslett and Brenner, 1989).

Work within the home is a realm that is historically feminized through interlocking constructs of gender and race (Nakano Glenn, 1992). Here, we highlight papers presented in the conference sessions that draw from these rich debates on social reproduction.

Three papers highlight how digital technologies are intensifying home-based work. Maalsen (2019) reveals the hidden labour of shared housing arrangements, from actively curating online housemate profiles on sharing platforms to the technological ‘disruption’ of managing domestic tasks through digital applications. Goyette (2019) examines how Airbnb reinscribes the home as a place of work, a financial asset, and a site of value creation, which resonates with 19th and early 20th Century forms of renting as a livelihood strategy pursued mainly by middle- and working-class women. Black et al. (2019) study online craft blogging as a gendered form of precarious work, which can paradoxically integrate but also fragment bloggers’ identities as workers and mothers (see also Worth, 2016). This research shows that while the work of crafting and blogging are precarious, so are bloggers’ identities that become precarious as they are pulled between creative impulses and the demands of producing digital content and material products. Although bloggers in this study often entered this form of self-employment as a way to generate income from their artistic pursuits, for many their businesses are reliant on maintaining an online presence based on their image as mothers which places further pressures on their work/home life.

Another three papers focused on the reorganization of the form of reproductive labour most frequently discussed by feminist geographers – care work (England, 2010) – outside the home in caring institutions and private businesses. In a study on caring labour in the context of ‘death work,’ Giesbrecht (2018) interrogates the shifting, gendered spatiality of work/nonwork. Giesbrecht shows that once death moved outside the home over the latter half of the 19^th century, the work of caring for the dead from women’s unpaid care within the home to a paid commercial service operated primarily by men. Now, Giesbrecht underlines, death doulas are moving this care work back into the home, in stark contrast to the gendered spatiality of the funeral industry. Goldar Perrote and Walton-Roberts (2020) directly engage the discourse on the future of work, arguing that a technologically-mediated future of work is already here, as seen in the heightened role of robotics in the aged care sector in Japan. They draw attention to what kinds of care work cannot (yet) be fully automated, linking this work with a global care chain migration of workers specifically trained to work alongside robots in aged care institutions. Highlighting that both robots and human workers perform an impression of caring, they consider the possible role for care robots to protect human workers from physical risks and workplace hazards while on the job. Technologies of caring associated with optimizing work process efficiency serve to further under-value care work within institutional contexts, as in the case of nursing where clinical work is more visible and highly-valued than care work (Henry, 2018). How work is measured is a function of “what we value”, Henry (2018: 348) argues, and so “a feminist politics of measure can make visible the absolutely necessary labour and relations of social reproduction”.

Taking social reproduction into account, as these papers indicate, is not solely a question of which sites (like the home) or forms of devalued work (such as caring) matter, but rather requires an interrogation of conceptual binaries by examining how work is organized within and between places. At stake in this project, as Andrucki et al. (2017: n.p.) emphasize, is the refusal of any convenient distinctions that separate “labour and care, the human and non-human, and the heteronormative sex/gender binary”. Sketching out how feminist economic geography can reframe social reproduction debates is a task that remains important for theorizing the future of work beyond accepted categories, but one that falls beyond the scope of our discussion in this piece (Strauss and Meehan, 2015).

Where should we look? Geographies of work beyond the core

An important thread in the conference sessions focussed on conditions of precarity and informality. These papers focused on dynamics of workplace and labour market change – not exclusively technological ones – through themes of migration, urban governance, debt relations, and women’s labour activism. Muñoz (2016) points to regimes of informality in Cancún, Bogotá, and Los Angeles, showing how city governance has produced distinct changes in the management of public space, street vending, and economic life in each setting. Street vending, Muñoz underscores, may not be a ‘last resort’ for workers excluded from formal employment, but a strategy for vendors to manage their own legal and physical risks without compromising their autonomy or agency as informally self-employed business owners and a way to maintain affective ties across transnational migration routes. In a congruent approach, Mukherjee (see Mirchandani et al., 2019) highlights that low-waged service work in Bangalore’s high-technology sector has an essential role in both India’s tech sector and in production networks extending into the Global North.

Three papers extended this insight to draw links between rural-urban migration in India and women’s employment in public and private sectors, including Chaudhary’s (2018) research on police officers and Rani’s (2018) on bus drivers in Delhi. The mobility inherent in these workers’ jobs mirrors migration patterns by which many women come to access these more typically male forms of employment. Balakrishnan (2018) explores women’s protests in the context of historically men’s unionized work in Kerala tea gardens, and Mohan (see Chaudhry and Mohan, 2011) examines how rural agricultural labour relations have been shaped by constructs of gender and matrimonial ties. These contributions point to the complex relationships between various kinds of work (formal and informal, unionized and nonunionized) and gender, class, and caste in this context.

The above-cited papers indicate important questions of scale for understanding labour market change from localized experiences, outside the conventional bounds of labour research. Mullings (2019) emphasizes the possibilities of an intellectual project to create a transnational decolonial feminist theory of work beyond normative geographical imaginaries that position the Global North at the centre. This project would crucially push scholarly thinking to consider how work, technology, and subjectivity perpetuate colonial violences and silences that differentiate between the human, non- or less-than human, and more-than human. Other contributors cited related theoretical literatures including transnational feminist perspectives (Mohanty, 2003), geopolitics and global intimacy (Lowe, 2015; Pain and Staeheli, 2014), postcolonial thought (Pollard et al., 2009), and racial capitalism (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Pulido, 2017) with which economic geographers have only begun to substantially engage (Strauss, 2020: 155).

Conclusion: Economic geography and the future of work

Popular discussions about the future of work have often avoided the specific realities faced by workers, and thus have largely ignored racial, gendered, and geographical forms of difference. The phrase ‘future of work’, the contributions examined above reveal, is inherently unstable, with no coherent or essential meaning in popular or academic discourse. It remains unclear what this discourse will mean for workers, and so theorizing this future more expansively than popular narratives permit is an important theoretical and political task for economic geographers. This Exchanges article shows how feminist economic geography’s concepts, themes and questions can investigate the future of work in economic geography through a broader understanding of work, workplaces, and workers. If understood in its broadest sense - in terms of conceptualizing what work will look like in the future - we show how feminist economic geography is well-positioned to offer critical approaches to inform how we understand this future. This broad concept of work enables a more expansive understanding of workers’ experiences beyond deterministic technological change, and highlights how technology can alter reproductive labour, informal employment, and workers’ subjectivities as the above-highlighted conference papers have addressed.

Inspired by and grounded in the insights of scholars who participated in the conference sessions, we identified a series of central themes grounded in decades of feminist economic geography research - on subjectivities and difference, on what counts as work, and on global articulations of work and labour. Alongside other critical academic discussions, this synthesis reveals a broader, more inclusive, and more complex understanding of the future of work than the understanding put forward by popular discourses, focussing variously on migration, caring, transportation, agriculture, marriage, housing, provisioning, and many other relationships and spaces of work. Technology - a prevalent and central feature of popular discussions of the future of work - fell into the background in the conference papers, not due to its insignificance (many situated technology’s importance in various ways) but because its role is conceptualized as not singular, deterministic, or causal in this future of work. Feminist economic geography themes as identified here, offer conceptual and methodological approaches beyond ones situating technological change as the driving force behind economic transition (characteristic of popular future of work discourses), approaches grounded in the experiences of workers themselves.

By broadening the scope of what counts as work, and examining who performs informal, reproductive and migrant labour, research can reveal continuities in reproductive bases of the economy, challenging narratives of the disappearance of work due to technological change. Sectors and workplaces where automation have made little inroads (for example, various parts of primary agriculture) are worthy of attention within research on the future of work precisely because they can point to historical continuities in how labour is organized and the less-than-human basis through which this labour is organized (Mullings, 2019). When looking at processes of informalization and precarization as a result of data- and platform-mediated labour, it is important to take into consideration whether such phenomena are ‘new’ and for whom (Goyette, submitted; Muñoz, 2016). Indeed, much of what is meant by ‘future’ infers that it is ‘new’, centering the global North as the assumed core in geographies of work and labour. Undoubtedly, much of the future facing workers today will be technologically mediated through, for example, the intensification of digital labour platforms that have perpetuated globalization’s ‘race to the bottom’ and contribute to the ongoing depoliticization of work that undermines workers’ collective action (Ettlinger, 2017; Simms, 2019; Wood et al., 2019). We maintain, however, that the role technology will play in this future will be uneven, difficult to predict, and anything but unilateral or deterministic. Looking to past inequalities and unevennesses and how they reproduce themselves over time and space will be just as, if not more, important in understanding that future than examining novelty and technological change. Feminist economic geographers’ epistemological toolbox, which is necessarily informed by other areas of academic thought as discussed above, is especially suited to theorizing this future through engagements with the three areas of research we outlined in the preceding sections.

Balancing the study of work with rigorous interrogation of discourses around technology and ‘new’ epochal transitions will be key for this intellectual project. We conclude here by suggesting a pluralization of the study of work as an object for further engagements from feminist economic geographers, to connect the past to the present from the vantage point of workers. This pluralization can point to a way forward for geographers to think about non-deterministic futures of work globally, beyond conceptual binaries, and in excess of theoretically limited and geographically restrictive categorizations of work and workers.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Emily Reid-Musson

Note

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