Women increasingly make up a significant percentage of the labor force throughout the world. This transformation is impacting everyone's lives. This book examines the resulting gender role, work, and family issues from a comparative worldwide perspective. Working allows women to earn an income, acquire new skills, and forge social connections. It also brings challenges such as simultaneously managing domestic responsibilities and family relationships. The social, political, and economic implications of this global transformation are explored from an interdisciplinary perspective in this book. The commonalities and the differences of women’s experiences depending on their social class, education, and location in industrialized and developing countries are highlighted throughout. Practical implications are examined including the consequences of these changes for men. Engaging vignettes and case studies from around the world bring the topics to life. The book argues that despite policy reforms and a rhetoric of equality, women still have unique experiences from men both at work and at home. Women, Work, and Globalization explores: Key issues surrounding work and families from a global cross-cultural perspective. The positive and negative experiences of more women in the global workforce. The spread of women’s empowerment on changes in ideologies and behaviors throughout the world. Key literature from family studies, IO, sociology, anthropology, and economics. The changing role of men in the global work-family arena. The impact of sexual trafficking and exploitation, care labor, and transnational migration on women. Best practices and policies that have benefited women, men, and their families. Part 1 reviews the research on gender in the industrialized and developing world, global changes that pertain to women’s gender roles, women’s labor market participation, globalization, and the spread of the women’s movement. Issues that pertain to women in a globalized world including gender socialization, sexual trafficking and exploitation, labor migration and transnational motherhood, and the complexities entailed in care labor are explored in Part 2. Programs and policies that have effectively assisted women are explored in Part 3 including initiatives instituted by NGOs and governments in developing countries and (programs) policies that help women balance work and family in industrialized countries. The book concludes with suggestions for global initiatives that assist women in balancing work and family responsibilities while decreasing their vulnerabilities. Intended as a supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and/or graduate courses in Women/Gender Issues, Work and Family, Gender and Families, Global/International Families, Family Diversity, Multicultural Families, and Urban Sociology taught in psychology, human development and family studies, gender and/or women’s studies, business, sociology, social work, political science, and anthropology. Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners in these fields will also appreciate this thought provoking book.

Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families. With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant communities have changed. Children have now joined their parents. Male domestic workers are present in significantly greater numbers. And, perhaps most troubling, the population has aged, presenting new challenges for the increasingly elderly domestic workers. New chapters discuss these three increasingly important constituencies. The entire book has been revised and updated, and a new introduction offers a global, comparative overview of the citizenship status of migrant domestic workers. Servants of Globalization remains the defining work on the international division of reproductive labor.

Where does our food come from? Whose hands have planted, cultivated, picked, packed, processed, transported, scanned, sold, sliced, and cooked it? What production practices have transformed it from seed to fruit, from fresh to processed form? Who decides what is grown and how? What are the effects of those decisions on our health and the health of the planet? Tangled Routes tackles these fascinating questions and demystifies globalization by tracing the long journey of a corporate tomato from a Mexican field to a Canadian fast-food restaurant. Through an interdisciplinary lens, Deborah Barndt examines the dynamic relationships between production and consumption, work and technology, biodiversity and cultural diversity, and health and environment. A globalization-from-above perspective is reflected in the corporate agendas of a Mexican agribusiness, the U.S.-based McDonald's chain, and Canadian-based Loblaws supermarkets. The women workers on the front line of these businesses offer a humanized globalization-from-below perspective, while yet another "globalization" is revealed through examples of resistance and local alternatives. This revised and updated edition highlights developments since the turn of the millennium, in particular the deepening economic integration of the NAFTA countries as well as the growing questioning of NAFTA's consequences and the crafting of alternatives built on foundations of sustainability and justice.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Pinder explores how globalization has shaped, and continues to shape, the American economy, which impacts the welfare state in markedly new ways. In the United States, the transformation from a manufacturing economy to a service economy escalated the need for an abundance of flexible, exploitable, cheap workers. The implementation of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), whose generic term is workfare, is one of the many ways in which the government responded to capital need for cheap labor. While there is a clear link between welfare and low-wage markets, workfare forces welfare recipients, including single mothers with young children, to work outside of the home in exchange for their welfare checks. More importantly, workfare provides an “underclass” of labor that is trapped in jobs that pay minimum wage. This “underclass” is characteristically gendered and racialized, and the book builds on these insights and seeks to illuminate a crucial but largely overlooked aspect of the negative impact of workfare on black single mother welfare recipients. The stereotype of the “underclass,” which is infused with racial meaning, is used to describe and illustrate the position of black single mother welfare recipients and is an implicit way of talking about poor women with an invidious racist and sexist subtext, which Pinder suggests is one of the ways in which “gendered racism” presents itself in the United States. Ultimately, the book analyzes the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in terms of welfare policy reform in the United States.

With thirty-two original chapters reflecting cutting edge content throughout developed and developing Asia, Women of Asia: Globalization, Development, and Gender Equity is a comprehensive anthology that contributes significantly to understanding globalization’s transformative process and the resulting detrimental and beneficial consequences for women in the four major geographic regions of Asia—East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Eurasia/Central Asia—as it gives "voice" to women and provides innovative ways through which salient understudied issues pertaining to Asian women’s situation are brought to the forefront.

Unpacking Globalization examines the experiences of people living with the forces that are transforming economic systems, culture, gender relationships and governance. The book offers interdisciplinary analysis of the well-being of women and men as they cope with the changes of globalization. Through theory, case studies, and data, several themes emerge indicating that from the household to the continental level, change is leading to new awareness and new survival strategies for both women and men. The contributors to the volume come from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. They present analysis of global changes and historical background from diverse perspectives and offer case studies on social security, gender, and macroeconomy. They employ feminist theory as well as detail the experiences of current and future women entrepreneurs. An exciting interdisciplinary text, Unpacking Globalization can supplement women's studies, anthropology, sociology, and economic development courses.

Two social scientists chart the consequences of the global economy on women across the world, revealing the underground economy that has turned many poor women into virtual slaves.

Based on fieldwork in ten Asian countries, this book examines cross-national patterns and the impact of globalization, state policies, individual autonomy, and social factors on various women's international migration.

High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy is an ethnography of globalization positioned at the intersection between political economy and cultural studies. Carla Freeman’s fieldwork in Barbados grounds the processes of transnational capitalism—production, consumption, and the crafting of modern identities—in the lives of Afro-Caribbean women working in a new high-tech industry called “informatics.” It places gender at the center of transnational analysis, and local Caribbean culture and history at the center of global studies. Freeman examines the expansion of the global assembly line into the realm of computer-based work, and focuses specifically on the incorporation of young Barbadian women into these high-tech informatics jobs. As such, Caribbean women are seen as integral not simply to the workings of globalization but as helping to shape its very form. Through the enactment of “professionalism” in both appearances and labor practices, and by insisting that motherhood and work go hand in hand, they re-define the companies’ profile of “ideal” workers and create their own “pink-collar” identities. Through new modes of dress and imagemaking, the informatics workers seek to distinguish themselves from factory workers, and to achieve these new modes of consumption, they engage in a wide array of extra income earning activities. Freeman argues that for the new Barbadian pink-collar workers, the globalization of production cannot be viewed apart from the globalization of consumption. In doing so, she shows the connections between formal and informal economies, and challenges long-standing oppositions between first world consumers and third world producers, as well as white-collar and blue-collar labor. Written in a style that allows the voices of the pink-collar workers to demonstrate the simultaneous burdens and pleasures of their work, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy will appeal to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, women’s studies, political economy, and Caribbean studies, as well as labor and postcolonial studies.