Title: The political economy of the household: Neoliberal restructuring, enclosures, and daily life
Abstract: ABSTRACT ABSTRACT By centralizing the material foundations of daily life, the burgeoning 'Everyday IPE' literature has the capacity to make significant advances in achieving a more integrated political economy approach. The literature's theoretical framework, however, needs to be expanded to be able to adequately address the ways that households and reproductive relations are impacted by the global economy. Addressing this gap, this article attempts to carve out a heuristic space that can more clearly establish variations in the social and economic purpose of households over time and understand how these shifts have been shaped by, and shape, the social relations of capitalism. It then brings this framework to bear on the case study of Canadian neoliberal restructuring, demonstrating that through labour market and welfare restructuring, and the promotion of private and individual social reproduction strategies, the neoliberal state's aggressive reordering of people's daily lives extends too, into the household and spheres of reproduction. KEYWORDS: Neoliberalismfeminist political economysocial reproductiondaily lifeprimitive accumulation ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to Isabella Bakker, David McNally and Sébastien Rioux, for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks as well to the editors of the journal and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful suggestions throughout the revision process, as well as to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research funding. Notes 1. This is an imperfect designation since admittedly there are differences within what I am referring to as 'Everyday IPE'. I am using this shorthand in order to refer to many of the theorists and ideas associated with an IPE perspective that centralizes the lived realities of global capitalism. Writers in this tradition make a conscious break from structural functionalism common to much Marxist IPE, and are interested in revealing the manifold ways in which everyday actors and actions shape the global economy in its multiple spatial dimensions. See, for example, Langley (2008) Langley, P. 2008. The Everyday Life of Global Finance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Hobson (2007); Nadesan (2008); and Davies and Niemann (2002) Davies, M. and Niemann, M. 2002. 'The Everyday Spaces of Global Politics: Work, Leisure and Family'. New Political Science, 24(4): 557–77. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. 2. As David McNally (2002) argues, wherever systems of class differentiation have developed, male-dominated kinship networks have become the form in which private property is accumulated and transmitted across generations; there is indeed no record of a class-divided society which is not also male dominated. Thus, while Mary Hartman and others who document the spatial and temporal ruptures in the gender division of labour are right to do so, we must also acknowledge that the absence of a gender division of labour did not necessarily signify the absence of patriarchy in society. 3. Bakker (2003: 66) has described these contradictory and complex gender relationships as involving both an intensification and erosion of gender difference. She notes that 'while neo-liberalism promotes, and indeed, depends upon a feminization of the workforce, it also exposes more women and men to market forces, in the process producing a similarity of experience for some of them'. 4. These basic changes in daily life are part of the broader transformation associated with the intensification and extension of exchange relations and the mediation of social relations by money documented above, which, as Stephen Gill (2003) points out, is a process largely shaped by the discipline of capital. He refers to the structural and behavioural power of an increasingly transnational capital to compel individuals, social groups and states to act in ways conducive to the extension and deepening of capitalist markets as 'disciplinary neoliberalism'. Noting the sense in which the discipline of capital has not been exclusive to neoliberalism but rather part of the longue durée of capitalism since its origins, I link these processes to enclosures. 5. For a comprehensive analysis of the US context, see Chang (2000) Chang, G. 2000. Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy, Cambridge: South End Press. [Google Scholar]. For the Canadian context, see Oxman-Martinez et al. (2004). 6. While beyond the scope of this paper to explore comprehensively, it is important to note that growing household indebtedness has been linked to a broader wave of 'financialization of everyday activities' that has taken place over the past few decades in Anglo- and European countries whereby the micro-level actions of individuals are increasingly linked to the global financial structure (Langley, 2008 Langley, P. 2008. The Everyday Life of Global Finance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]).
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-11-10
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 104
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