Globalization, the `new economy' and working women

Abstract

This paper arises out of research on the New Zealand designer fashion industry. An unexpected success story, this export-oriented industry is dominated by women as designers, employees, wholesale and public relations agents, industry officials, fashion writers and editors, in addition to women holding more traditionally gendered roles as garment workers, tastemakers and consumers. Our analysis of the gendered globalization of the New Zealand fashion industry exposes a number of disconnections between women's positions in this industry and the literatures on globalization, clothing and fashion. We argue that the New Zealand designer fashion industry not only embodies new ways of working associated with the movement of first world women into the labour force, but its very success is underpinned by these changes. Our conclusion is that more work is needed to explicate links between globalization and first world women's entry into the labour force.

Craft and the Creative Economy

“…The shift to precarious employment has for some time now often been referred to in gendered terms, the 'feminisation' of the labour market, as precarious casualisation, contract-based and otherwise insecure employment models extend into sectors of the economy previously dominated by more secure, tenured (largely) male full-time employment (Adkins and Jokinen 2008;Allen and Wolkowitz 1987;Dawkins 2011;Gray 2003;Larner and Molloy 2009;Morini 2007;Phizacklea and Wolkowitz 1995 7 ). The associated growth of the demand on individuals to engage in 'self-branding' practices extends this even further: 'As the lines and boundaries between working and non-working life break down, it becomes more and more difficult to find ways to assign monetary value to the jobs being done' (Hearn 2008a, p. 496).…”

Post-crisis, post-Ford and post-gender? Youth identities in an era of austerity

“…In this section, I briefly consider the dominant account of an economic transformation, based on the growth of knowledge industries, and critically assess parallel claims about the declining significance of class and gender. The dominant rhetoric in those boom years in disciplines interested in the economy in general and labour market changes in particular, was about the 'new' knowledge Journal of Youth Studies 575 economy (Carnoy 2000, Perrons et al 2008, about affective labour (Hardt 1999, Larner and Molloy 2009, McRobbie 2011, and about living on air, a term coined by Leadbeater (1999), to capture the dominance in the economy of new jobs in which cerebral attributes were more significant than physical strength as high-status service sector employment in the financial sector, in the creative industries, in research, development and education replaced the manufacture of goods as the leading edge sector. US economist Robert Reich (1992) identified symbolic manipulators and analysts as the key portfolio, risk-embracing workers in the new economy.…”

Radical Entrepreneurs: First Nations Designers’ Approaches to Community Economic Development

“…The nature of the fashion industry as one of the “knowledge‐rich enterprises” or “experience economies” of the NE requires us to examine the role of place in new ways (Löfgren and Willim :1; Larner et al. ; Larner and Molloy :37).…”