Social Reproduction Research Articles

Social reproduction and contestation of racialized Roma exclusion: The role of civil society organizations in the Czech Republic

ABSTRACT Anti-Roma racism remains a persistent concern in numerous European countries. Despite sustained efforts by both the European Union and national governments over the past two decades to promote Roma inclusion, the effectiveness of these integration policies has largely been perceived as inadequate. This has been evident in the widespread exclusion experienced by Roma communities. Focusing on the Czech Republic, this article moves from examining state policies to the actions of civil society. In this context, the article explores the role played by Czech civil society organizations (CSOs) in both challenging and perpetuating racialized Roma exclusion. Building on Bourdieu’s concept of social habitus, this article expands it to a racialized social habitus framework. Through online interviews with CSOs and ethnographic fieldwork in four Czech cities, it explores the complex interplay between integration policies, civil society, and the racialized exclusion of the Czech Roma. The article illuminates how these organizations simultaneously contest and reinforce racialized perceptions of the Roma, thereby enriching scholarly dialogue on the complex dynamics of race and racism within civil society.

Becoming and unbecoming academics: Classed resources and strategies for navigating risky careers.

Academics influence not only knowledge production but also selection to the labour market and policy development. They have power. Despite the sociological attention paid to class in higher education, few studies have examined the way in which class interferes with the careers of those navigating from being students to becoming scholars. Building on Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, this study examines how class influences different groups' experiences of becoming academics. Based on 60 interviews with Norwegian scholars in their early to mid-careers, the analysis identifies the kind of classed resources that are in play in the unequal access to academic positions. Beyond more classical resources, such as financial, cultural, and psychological certainty, the interviewees point to the significance of an early familiarity with the rules of the game and strategic navigation of the academic system. We use these findings to discuss and nuance Pierre Bourdieu's perspectives on the role of incorporated, practical consciousness and disinterestedness in class reproduction in the academic world. This theoretical contribution facilitates the combined analysis of the implicit and the explicit ways that dominant classes preserve their position in the hierarchy, which the study demonstrates as key to social reproduction in academic careers.

The Strategic Plan of the Working Day

“The Working Day” chapter of Capital makes sense today as an illustration of collective struggle over the sale of labor power by the hour. The historical materials in the chapter are instructive if read under the tutelage of Gertrud Kugelmann, considering the advice Karl Marx offers to her on where to start. A reassessment of Marx’s writing process is possible via his various plans in letters, his comments on method, the various sources used, and evaluating the role they have in Capital volume 1. Several scholars read Marx on commodities that “speak” but may sometimes miss idioms in English translation. Reading the German text can help us when searching for theoretical and political strategies for contemporary emancipation. With implications for replies to critics of Marx on slavery, my case is that the staging in Capital offers diagnostic potential where attention to the Parliamentary Blue Books might generate new research agendas, addressing current problems of time, social reproduction, climate, and class struggle. JEL Classification: B14

Trapped in Flexibility: How Does Precarious Work Affect Gender Wage Gap in China?

Rapid expansion of precarious employment carries risks of exacerbating the gender wage gap in China. This article finds an inverse relationship between flexibility and security in the labor market, disproportionately affecting women workers. Drawing from the Marxist-feminist theory of social reproduction, the study conceptualizes China’s social reproduction regime as developmentalist, characterized by ongoing tension between economic development and social reproduction. Promoting precarious work, which reflects the operational logic of the developmentalist social reproduction regime, is essentially transferring social reproduction cost from capital to labor. This cost is predominantly shouldered by precarious workers, particularly women, resulting in a widened gender wage gap. Using the China Labor-force Dynamic Survey, the study finds empirical support for the theorization that the gender wage gap among precarious workers is significantly larger than among non-precarious workers. The article proposes policies addressing the gap by shifting the cost of social reproduction from labor back to capital. HIGHLIGHTS Gender wage gap is wider among precarious workers in China. Marxist-feminist theories help us to better understand GWG in precarious work. Women in precarious work face income loss risks and heavier domestic responsibilities. Developmentalist social reproduction regime seeks to balance growth and reproduction. The cost of social reproduction should be shifted back to capital.

School District Housing Buyers and Educational Investment Returns: A Case Study of X District in Shanghai

As a dual carrier of educational resources and economic assets, school district housing has become an important tool for family educational investment and social class reproduction. This paper takes Shanghai's X District as an example to explore, from a sociological perspective, the purchasing behaviors of different groups regarding school district housing and their educational investment returns. It reveals the key role of school district housing in the accumulation of cultural and social capital. The study finds that high-income families, the middle class, and the working class in X District exhibit different demand tendencies when purchasing school district housing, reflecting goals of obtaining high-quality educational resources, expanding social capital, and achieving upward social mobility, respectively. The phenomenon of school district housing exacerbates the imbalance in the distribution of educational resources and limits social mobility.

Plugging in at school: Do schools nurture digital skills and narrow digital skills inequality?

Information and communication technology (ICT) have become indispensable in contemporary schools in post-industrialized countries. Whether schools have succeeded on vesting students with the needed digital skills important in today’s highly digitalized societal landscape however remains unclear. In this paper, we examine whether school resources in terms of ICT infrastructure, use of ICT in education, and availability of technical expertise are pertinent to students’ digital skillfulness. We also investigate whether such school ICT resources are unevenly distributed among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds, and whether students of different socioeconomic backgrounds unevenly benefit from these resources. In doing so, we illuminate school ICT resources’ role in the process of intergenerational transmission of inequalities. To test our expectations, we employ ICILS 2018 data on 14,183 students in 751 schools across seven OECD countries. Our findings indicate that schools indeed play a meaningful role in nurturing digital skills, namely through students’ use of ICT in educational tasks. We also find that students from more advantageous socioeconomic backgrounds more often attend well ICT-resourced schools, pointing at the uneven distribution of school ICT resources in a way that reflects social reproduction. Alongside that, the availability of technical expertise in schools seems particularly fruitful for low-SES students’ digital skills development. This evinces that schools compensate for limited ICT skills socialization in the family, pointing at social mobility processes.

From the Womb to the Borders: The Politics of Carcerality in Social Reproduction

ABSTRACT Over the last several years, several reforms have been implemented in Sweden, specifically targeting women and children in what the state has named as “vulnerable areas”. The reforms have been presented as feminist measures that will secure the integration of “foreign-born women” and reduce everything from criminality to poverty. This article explores the public debate on the relationship between families and crime, the reform of the supplement to family with more than one child and family planning. The article discusses how racialized mothers and their children are defined as a threat to the nation, its welfare and its national security. Inspired by feminist research on the relationship between social reproduction and the carceral state, I argue that analysis of the current political conjuncture in Sweden needs to take into consideration how policing in the streets and at the nation’s borders is entangled with policing in the sphere of social reproduction.

Crazy Fun or Crazy Exploitation? Cultural and Social Reproduction in the Elite Party Scene

Crazy Fun or Crazy Exploitation? Cultural and Social Reproduction in the Elite Party Scene

Confidence as capital: pageantry and social reproduction

Pageantry has historically rewarded women who pursue normative standards of beauty. With neoliberal feminism focusing on women’s empowerment, United States pageantry is marketed to women as a space that awards well-rounded competitors with scholarships and other monetary rewards. Using the frameworks of neoliberalism and embodied capital, we investigate how pageant participants conceptualize confidence in the pageant context. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with pageant stakeholders, we conclude that participants perceive confidence as a resource gained from competing on the pageant stage and a trait that is necessary for competing in pageants. Confidence is embodied capital obtained through self-investment that helps women construct and maintain the ideal pageant femininity. However, confidence is mostly available to middle-class and wealthy women, resulting in reproduction of the class and gender systems. These findings also reveal that pageantry instills and rewards neoliberal principles and postfeminist sensibility, specifically the notion that women’s social mobility in the U.S. is connected to individual effort and investment through capitalism. As such, the values of pageantry overlook systemic barriers to achievement for marginalized women.

Anti-colonial raced capitalism in Malaysia: Contested logics, gendered repertoires

Abstract This paper offers a non-Eurocentric account of raced capitalism in Malaysia, articulated as a developmental state project that has navigated the contested racial logics of British colonialism and Japanese imperialism. By historicising Malaysia’s experience, I provide a reading of the Malaysian developmental state as a project that has taken the form of anti-colonial raced capitalism. This is not meant to valorise raced capitalism as anti-colonial, but to suggest that decolonisation must also confront hegemonic elements engraved on the anti-colonial register of nationalised raced capitalism. In bringing a feminist critique to anti-colonial projects that leave capitalist relations uncontested, the paper makes three contributions. First, it recentres race and colonialism in its analysis of the developmental state, offering anti-colonial raced capitalism as a language that speaks to similar projects that enable, legitimise, and obscure new forms of racial/gender domination with counter-hegemonic frames. Second, it brings back politics to anti-colonialism, reestablishing it as a political space with competing visions, imaginations, and agendas, shaped by the geopolitics of empires. Third, it features gender, social reproduction, and the household as key sites to ground the politics of anti-colonialism, enacting the scaffolding for gendered understandings of raced capitalist development on the periphery of the global economy.

Corrigendum to Social reproduction and public finance: A comparative study of TIF in California and Chicago

Corrigendum to Social reproduction and public finance: A comparative study of TIF in California and Chicago

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS

The article is intended to analyze the cyclicality of the development of construction, caused by fundamental qualitative changes in the basic generations of equipment, machines, technologies, vehicles and large structures in the leading sectors of the economy, i.e. industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution created the organizational-economic, scientific-technical and institutional prerequisites for a conceptual rethinking of the principles and norms of construction and brought to life the pre-monopolist-industrial model of the construction sector (Construction 1.0). Its main feature was the active use of metal elements (cast iron, wrought iron, steel), glass, concrete and reinforced concrete in construction production. The industrial-extensive model of Construction 2.0 covers the period from the beginning of the 20th century. until the end of the 1960s and coincides with the Second Industrial Revolution. This model is distinguished by large-scale processes of territorial and spatial concentration of construction based on the accumulation of means of production, labor and capital investments in large construction organizations and complex processes of industrialization of the construction sector. From the first half of the 1970s to the first half of the 2000s, the energy-efficient construction model (Construction 3.0), brought to life by the Third Industrial Revolution, prevails in the world. This period is characterized by the systematic orientation of construction production to the optimization of thermal energy provision of objects, the rationalization of the processes of using energy resources at all stages of the construction and production process, and the minimization of the level of consumption of energy and material resources. Today, marked by the unfolding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is characterized by the global development of an ecosystem-type green construction model (Construction 4.0) – an environmentally responsible and resource-saving process of social reproduction of construction products. This model is based on deep integration of green and digital transition technologies and is ensured by large-scale digitization of construction works.

Indigenous Perspectives on Dismantling the Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Rural Sociology☆

AbstractRural Sociology has failed to incorporate Settler‐colonialism and Indigenous theory in studying rural social relations. This presents a serious gap in the discipline's conceptualization of land as the foundation of social reproduction. Indigenous theory provides rich insights about humans' relations among themselves and with the more‐than‐human that inform our understanding of Settler colonialism as a driver of social formation, and human–environmental interactions more generally. This paper, written by four Indigenous environmental social scientists and one Settler rural sociologist, invites the discipline to engage Indigeneity and Settler colonialism in methodologically, theoretically, and ethically appropriate ways.

Gendered industry and feminization of the labor force: A social reproduction analysis from China

Gendered industry and feminization of the labor force: A social reproduction analysis from China

Race, space, and social reproduction: The spatial organization of racialized labour in Italian food agriculture

This article addresses the question of migrant workers’ exploitation from a feminist political economy and critical race perspective. Overall, my analysis promotes a reinterpretation of workers’ exploitation beyond a narrow focus on labour and production, and towards a consideration of the active social differentiation and reproduction of the work force. Based on my analysis of Black African workers’ conditions in the Italian ‘tomato district’ of Northern Puglia and Basilicata, I argue that recent anti-gangmastering reforms have recalibrated existing tensions between formalizing and informalizing workers’ conditions, tensions that serve the double end of ensuring capital accumulation in agri-food production, while forcing racialized workers to take care of their social reproduction. Formalization, I argue, tends to drive a wedge between ‘productive labour’ and unpaid, ‘unproductive’ work, thus removing responsibility away from firms and state agencies to provide much-needed workers’ welfare. Informalization, I argue, represents a particular racializing dynamic of externalizing the cost of social reproduction to the workers and their extended social networks, who, in this manner, indirectly subsidize parallel circuits of accumulation.

The travelling and embedding of discourses on quality in early childhood education and care

ABSTRACT The present article is a meta-ethnographic analysis of 15 first-order ethnographic studies with a focus on quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The aim of the study is to investigate how neoliberal policy discourses on quality in early childhood education and care travel between global and local contexts and how they become embedded in local preschool practices. Central concepts in the analysis are institutional strategic responses, social reproduction and change in relation to how neoliberal discourses on quality become embedded in local preschool practices. The findings show how neoliberal policy discourses on quality are transformed and embedded in local preschool practices with different results and responses. The analysis uncovers five strategic, institutional responses: Acquiescence, Avoidance, Manipulation, Compromise, and Defiance. Acquiescence and Avoidance show patterns of social reproduction and Manipulation, Compromise, and Defiance reveals a potential opportunity for social change.

Understanding right-wing populists’ anti-abortion politics in Turkey: The symbolic violence of the state

This study investigates how symbolic violence is shaping anti-abortion stances associated with legitimising right-wing populist policies. The prominent questions are as follows: What are the institutional and politico-administrative mechanisms that are impacting anti-abortion politics in terms of material and symbolic violence? How and to what extent does anti-abortion politics influence the interplay between symbolic and material state violence? The study argues that reproduction-centred policies and material and symbolic violence have intensified through anti-abortion politics in the discursive context of the social reproduction crisis in Turkey. It explores the institutional actions and the legitimation mechanisms of anti-abortion policies in relation to the penetration of right-wing populist politics after the authoritarian turn of 2010. This qualitative case study uses critical discourse analysis. It interprets the public speeches of representatives of the government and documentary data concerning the ruling party’s programmes, development plans and relevant legislation. The research provides a gendered perspective on the anti-abortion policies that anchor right-wing populism in terms of the crisis of social reproduction. It also contributes to critical state theory and pre-existing feminist scholarship on right-wing populism.

Census Tract and Neighborhood Racial Change and the Locational Decisions of Financial Services in Metro Detroit

Scholarship on the geography of US retail financial services consistently finds racialized patterns in the locations of traditional (e.g. banks, credit unions) and higher-cost or alternative (e.g. payday lenders, check cashers) financial services. While scholars tend to offer explanations based on spatial void and market segmentation hypotheses, we theorize these racialized patterns as consistent with a social reproduction of investment and divestment. We use a novel, longitudinal dataset that follows census tract- and neighborhood-level changes in racial demographics and financial services in Detroit during the pre- and post-Recession periods. Changes in the locations of financial services follow changes in racial demographics, which occur in addition to the well-documented practice of targeting or avoiding tracts and neighborhoods based on their racial majority. These racialized patterns are heightened in the post-Great Recession period.

Infrastructures of Social Reproduction: Migrant Survival and Economic Development at the Thailand-Myanmar Border

International migration literature has shown that infrastructures consisting of people and institutions sustain migration and help migrants cope in new environments. However, analytic focus on these infrastructures is often limited to the migration process and its impact on migrants. This article extends the growing literature on migration infrastructure by analyzing its socially reproductive capacities in the context of economic development in Thailand. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from the Tak border zone, I show how the social and humanitarian dimensions of migration infrastructure that grew from war displacement, labor migration, and migrant survival efforts became essential to economic development aims of the Thai state. Through this case, I illustrate a process of infrastructural co-optation by which the state harnesses grassroots and humanitarian actors’ capacities for childcare, education, and healthcare to advance such aims. Authorities spatially contain migrant workers with limited rights and social protections while loosely engaging with parts of the border's infrastructure, which keeps noncitizen workers alive and available for low-wage jobs. The findings show that aspects of migration infrastructure are co-optable, with impact beyond the migration process and for non-migrants.

Social Reproductive Labor and Uto/Dystopia: An Analysis of Leila, Midnight Robber and Woman World

ABSTRACT Contemporary science fiction and speculative fiction with utopian/dystopian aspects from South Asia and the Caribbean have rarely been studied in tandem. Furthermore, no scholarly work has analyzed such texts produced under conditions of contemporary capitalism in the light of social reproduction theory which considers social reproductive labor that rejuvenates labor power. I study Leila (2017) by the Indian writer Prayaag Akbar, Midnight Robber (2000) by the Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson, and Woman World (2018) by the diasporic Indian writer Aminder Dhaliwal to connect social reproductive labor and utopianism and argue that social reproductive labor rejuvenates the labor power of utopian agents in social reproductive spaces such as homes, schools, hospitals, gardens etc. resisting dystopian conditions, nurturing hope, and rejuvenating utopian thinking. I question how utopianism is related to social reproductive labor in postcolonial contexts of the Global South, and propose that 1) dystopian scenarios are brought about by control of social reproductive spaces and 2) progress/betterment is actualized with renewal and rejuvenation via social reproductive labor. I contend that relating twenty-first-century utopianism to social reproduction is a valuable and novel approach, especially in postcolonial contexts where conditions of labor have been determined by complex histories of colonialism, enslavement, and indentured labor.