Social Reproduction Research Articles

Technology of State Regulation of Regional Economy: A Systematic Approach

The article is dedicated to the examination of the issues pertaining to the development of a framework for the regulation of the regional economy at the state level. The object of the research is the process of state regulation of the regional economy. The focus of this research is an examination of the interrelationships between the state and regional economic development, with a particular emphasis on the role of state regulation in fostering regional economic growth. The purpose of the study is to form the technology of state regulation of the regional economy based on the criterion of synergy arising as a result of the interaction of legislative, executive, and control and supervisory activities by public authorities. The article elucidates the manner in which the technology of state regulation of the regional economy is constituted. It encompasses a number of structural elements, including state institutional policy, state regulatory policy, legislative activity, executive activity, control and supervisory activity, regional economic policy, and the economic environment. These elements function in concert to reconcile interests and enhance social reproduction and sustainable economic development. Such an approach to state regulation of the regional economy will expand the opportunities of the federal center to positively influence economic dynamics at the regional level, which will minimize the amplitude of fluctuations in the level of GRP and smooth out regional differences in economic and social development.

African students consuming the Chinese higher education market: the role of pre-mobility capital(s) in transnational social reproduction strategies

ABSTRACT Despite the sharp growth in numbers and geopolitical significance of African students in China, studies focusing on Sino-African student mobility remain relatively limited. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 self-financed students from five different African countries, we employ Bourdieu’s central concept of capital(s) to explore the decision-making process of student migrants studying at a vocational college in southeast China. Though traditionally elite and upper-ranked universities are endowed with a high level of symbolic value, our study shows that the motivation to study abroad is significantly mediated by access to pre-mobility capitals(s). In considering students as consumers of the Chinese higher education market, the research broadens the mobilities optic within the Global South by documenting the transnational reproduction strategies of the African middle – and working-classes in contemporary times.

Platforms mediating domestic care work as service gigs in European cities: Reorganisation of social reproduction through marketisation

In European cities, lean labour platforms increasingly mediate domestic service gigs related to social reproduction, such as food delivery and cleaning tasks on-demand. This fast-growing type of platform depends on spatial proximity and the population density of cities, economic relations enabled by digital technologies and embodied gendered and racialised norms. At the same time, platforms are linked to the crisis of social reproduction and to a constant supply of people in precarious positions looking for income. The paper tackles the question how platform-mediated service gigs related to grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning change caring relationships. This comprises considerations of the dimensions of marketisation and the transformation of reproductive work symbolically, materially, and socially and is presented with a feminist perspective pointing to social reproduction as an essential but devalued part of everyday life. These endeavours are explored with findings from various case studies dealing with food delivery and cleaning platforms in Austria and Germany and are discussed with reference to relational care ethics. Put forward here is a reflection on the ways in which digital mediation of domestic care work relies on gendered and racialised norms – and how this dependence intensifies structural inequalities inherent to social reproduction.

The Asian American Contract: On Useful Labor and Social Reproduction in Severance and Minari

This article examines the central role that the work contract plays in the production and reproduction of Asian diasporic worlds. In light of the history of Asian indentured contract labor in the Americas, the article proposes that the “Asian American contract” emerges as an affirmation of the exchange of useful labor for a sense of belonging and world for the Asian American subject—even when this exchange comes at the expense of life. Through readings of Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) and director Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari (2020), the article demonstrates how the contract ultimately transforms Asian Americans’ reproductive labor—their childbearing and child-rearing—into their social reproduction as a racialized class of useful, compliant workers.

ESG-трансформация российских регионов: теоретические аспекты

The paper considers the theoretical aspects of sustainable development and ESG transformation of Russian regions. The research substantiates a systematic approach to the balanced development of regions as socio-ecological and economic systems. The concept of sustainable development and regional ESG transformation correlates to the concept of regional economic security, economic growth, human and social capital development. In our opinion, a systematic reproductive approach is the most productive in solving many problems of regional socio-economic development. Moreover, it could consider the following issues of regional ESG transformation: a six-stage scheme of social reproduction: «science – production – distribution – exchange – consumption – utilization»; natural-economic-institutional-social reproduction chain. One of the aspects of the reproductive approach is the concept of sustainable development and the ESG agenda. However, in terms of economic theory and philosophy, four types of «transformational connections» can be distinguished: interaction, relationships, institutions, and management decisions. The regional sustainable development, the achievement of high indicators of its socio-economic development is presented as a balanced interaction of three components: economy, social sphere, and ecology. Russian scientists consider regional ESG transformation in terms of economic security, regional economic growth, and increasing its attractiveness, development of technological potential, improvement of the institutional environment, and competencies of managers at all levels in the field of sustainable development and ESG.

Ambivalent egalitarians? Pietists and the pedagogy of the “Pariah” in modern South India during the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT The pedagogy of the colonising British in nineteenth-century India was critical of traditional Indian education for various reasons. The proselytising pedagogists who viewed the cultural practice of caste as a major stumbling block to their evangelising mission continued to confront the practice, which appeared to have stood on a footing of social equality based on professional attributes. The colonial and missionary agencies often claimed that traditional Indian education revolved around the notion of social reproduction that emboldened caste-centric professions. Consequently, the colonial pedagogists, who were rooted in the principles of pietism, a Protestant movement in seventeenth-century Germany, introduced a new form of education for mind, heart, and hand. In India, the pietist pedagogy since the eighteenth century sought to replace traditional Indian education with Anglo-vernacular-religious education. It also created a controversial discourse of equality among Pariah, a generic term used to refer to all those who were believed to have been excluded from school education. This article shows how pietist pedagogists, widely known for their sense of religious supremacy and racialised pretensions, blended education and the pietist idea of equality before God to “refine” the subaltern social groups. In this way, the colonial pietist pedagogists acted as ambivalent egalitarians in the field of schooling.

Class and Gender in Older People Care in Rural Yogyakarta

This article explores care arrangements for older people in rural Yogyakarta, comparing and contrasting the experiences of older people in three agrarian classes: significant landowners, petty commodity producers and ‘classes of labour’. The study was conducted in two villages in Kulon Progo and Sleman Regencies. Qualitative interviews, observations, life histories and information on the changing social and economic contexts are used to analyse older people’s roles in social reproduction, the dynamics of intergenerational dependency, and the practicesof older-people care. We found great variation in the age at which engagement in productive and reproductive work declines and people enter the state of dependency. Older people may be receivers, or providers of care for younger dependents. As older people live longer, complex tri- and even quadri-generational care arrangements become more common. Class, gender and intergenerational relations shape care relations and practices. State and community programmes for older people, when functioning properly, can be of great importance to poorer households,even though the access is uneven and they do not always match older people’s care needs. Commodified (purchased) care provision is found in some relatively prosperous households, but rarely in the ‘classes of labour’, the landless and near-landless peasants, and worker households that make up the majority of the population.

Pensions and the Capture of Social Reproduction

Pensions are the conceptual basis of social welfare. Through contributions from the entire labour force towards the end of each individual’s labour life, the pension system has an underlying effect that binds together the means of social reproduction. Banking on our need for security in future old age, pension funds have captured and supported financialisation of multiple areas for social reproduction. Despite their scale, pensions are failing to secure wellbeing in old age, and elderly poverty has become a political issue exploited by right wing populism in Germany. Looking at the notion of saving for old age as essentially misguided, I argue that a contractual framework of welfare will be fundamentally challenged by the ageing population. Examining the current failings of the PAYGO system, I consider how public provision of care and a capabilities based pension discourse can have much to contribute to economic organisation, the re-design of the pension system and to securing the means of social reproduction.

Feeding Precarity Between State and Capital: Women Workers and Breastfeeding in Cakung Manufacturing Industry

Women constitute the vital workforce in Indonesia's economy, particularly in sectors like garment, textile, and footwear. Despite their economic importance, these industries are characterised by excessive control, pressure, and violence, transforming women into cheap labour and limiting their lives both in the production and social reproduction realm. This study analyses how the discipline of factory work has implications for women workers in their care work, specifically in breastfeeding. Through a qualitative approach, this study uses focus group discussions (FGD) and interviews with women garment and textile industry workers in Kawasan Berikat Nusantara, North Jakarta. The study also analyses the state's response and position in child-feeding matters. The study shows how the regimented nature of factory work, which controls the energy, time, and bodies of women workers, coupled with the absence of job security and protection from the state, limit workers’ capacity to care for their families, particularly to breastfeed their children. Consequently, women workers have to switch to formula milk. I argue that the workers’ reliance on formula milk illustrates a form of neoliberalism in which the state subjugates women workers to the capitalist economy both in the realms of production and social reproduction, forcing them to live in a precarious condition. This potentially will cause health, nutrition, and other quality of life problems for mothers and children in the future.

Migrant services and the reconfiguration of social reproduction as capital accumulation

Much of past feminist theorization of social reproduction has concentrated on the domestic sphere. However, in multiple domains such as education, childcare, elder care, health care, the delivery of goods, and migrant settlement, first the state and non-profit organizations and increasingly corporate profit-making service industries emerged as significant providers. In this transformed world of social reproduction, the initial query of feminist theorists about the relationship between social reproduction and capital accumulation must again be addressed. This return to a theorization of social reproduction in what is often considered the humanitarian sector of capitalist economies must encompass the labor of precarious workers and unpaid volunteers. Building on but going beyond the feminist debate about social reproduction, this paper explores the relationship between the public–private domain of service delivery and capital accumulation in migrants’ services. In so many instances, humanitarian activities in sectors such as migrant services have become the local face of a multiscalar migration industry. Through an exploration of the delivery of migrant services in a disempowered city in eastern Germany, the paper explicates the dynamics through which social reproduction activities are commoditized and are increasingly linked to locations and mechanisms of capital accumulation through the extraction of surplus value.

Migration, social reproduction, and capitalism: part 1 introduction

Migration, social reproduction, and capitalism: part 1 introduction

Ukrainian female refugees in Czechia after the Russian full-scale invasion: social reproduction of ‘(low) skill’?

ABSTRACT Refugees fleeing the Russian-Ukrainian war after receiving temporary protection visas in Czechia, which allowed free access to the labour market, found themselves in an ambiguous position between ‘refugees’ and ‘workers’. The new arrivals were mostly women with above-average education, but for a year or more after their arrival they were still working predominantly in jobs that were described as low-skilled. The aim of the article is to understand under what conditions temporary protection visa holders sought work, what jobs were available to them, and how the broader institutional framework shaped their employment trajectories, particularly in relation to their qualifications. Based on biographical narrative interviews with the temporary protection holders, the article shows that only people who received significant and specific support in the area of social reproduction outside of the general support of the Czech state were able to gain more time, which was a key source of their ability to try to get a job that was more in line with their personal aspirations. The paper contributes to the debate on the conditions under which migrants are able (or unable) to acquire skilled work by highlighting the dynamics of social reproduction of skill.

Room with a viewership: visibility work & Twitch.tv in the domestic context

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the domestic worksites of marginalized game streamers as a crucial site for understanding the politics of visibility work on platforms. Twitch.tv stands out as Amazon’s world-leading platform for live video entertainment. Through ethnographic interactions with Twitch creators (n = 12), I clarify the challenges marginalized individuals face in livestreaming’s platformization of game cultures. While streaming provides opportunities for creative self-expression and shields against hostile gaming communities, it also relocates streamers’ precarities before audiences to the sensitive enclaves of domestic space. Consequently, Twitch streamers must delicately balance self-presentation and discretion due to the looming threat of over-exposure in a historically unfriendly gaming culture. By exploring these dual experiences from the standpoint of vulnerable creators, this paper offers insights into the intricate strategies of visibility management in social media work. It also contributes to the ongoing discourse on the construction of online presence, extending into feminist theories of domestic work and the social reproduction of online game environments.

Punjabi “housewives” in central Italy: navigating patriarchy, labor exploitation, and welfare exclusion

Who benefits from the exploitation of women’s work, and how? Marxist feminists in the 1970s–1980s and recently theorists of Social Reproduction argued that women’s work is exploited twice, or “super-exploited,” by capital and patriarchy. Such “super-exploitation” is sustained by the process of “housewifization,” which legitimizes the extraction and accumulation of surplus value from the social reproductive work of women. The housewife ideology not only mystifies social reproductive work as natural — thereby legitimizing it as free — but also frames women’s productive work as marginal — thereby legitimizing it as cheaper and more precarious. Building on Maria Mies’ (1981) famous study of women lacemakers in India, where the devaluation of women’s work is shown to serve both capital and patriarchy, I analyze the experiences of Punjabi “housewives” in central Italy, exploring them through the lens of one family and specifically its youngest and eldest daughters, whom I interviewed during ethnographic fieldwork. I show how, despite the essential role played by these women in their family mobility project, the housewife ideology — together with other patriarchal constructs of honor and caste endogamy — obscures the value of their social reproductive and productive work and imposes a number of restrictions on their freedom. I find, further, that their super-exploitation is aggravated in the context of migration: the labor exploitation and welfare exclusion that they face in Italy due to the country’s exclusionary immigration regime and unregulated capitalist market complicate their chances to challenge the oppressive relations they are involved in.

‘You never get a livelihood out of going to school’: the crisis of urban modernity and the education-employment nexus in Harare, Zimbabwe

The economic crisis and informalisation in Zimbabwe from the late 1990s had many consequences, including the unattainability of the early postcolonial modernist lifestyle and the collapse of the robust education-employment nexus and steady transition pathway from school to work for graduates in urban areas. Education in Zimbabwe played social mobility and social transformation and reproduction functions from colonial times and continued to have an inherent value to Zimbabweans in the postcolonial period. However, with the collapse of the education-employment nexus and structural changes in the opposition movement which offered a transition path from university into party politics until the late 2000s, many school and university graduates did not get to experience social mobility. Accompanied by the wider frustrating conditions, such as bad governance, corruption and economic decline, this resulted in young people reconsidering the social mobility function of education and challenging modernist premises about education. These premises had been reproduced at different levels from family to wider society, and young people started rethinking and challenging them through their narratives, considering curriculum changes to include entrepreneurship education, participation in the informal economy and protest movements, all of which challenge the postcolonial modernity framework.

Enrichment in colleges after COVID: spaces for agency and/or cultural reproduction

ABSTRACT A longitudinal study of enrichment across post-16 colleges in England and Wales illustrates the possibilities and limitations of colleges’ societal and cultural impact. Over a four-year study, these activities outside subject curricula, widely intended to compensate for the mobilisation of cultural capital by students in privileged settings, increased in salience whilst responding to post-pandemic crises; but differed across settings in their aims and organisation, including the agency afforded to staff and students. This paper explores these differences, in the context of a longstanding theorisation of colleges as sites of social reproduction interruptible only outside the technical sphere, whilst drawing on contemporary understandings of structure, agency and stratification. Whilst analysis of survey and case study data suggests broad association of general education spaces with agentic enrichment practices, alongside vocational enrichment overlapping technical curricula or generic ‘support’, we suggest that contestation over the aims and content of enrichment takes place in the context of a hierarchical terrain of post-16 institutions and broader societal and policy developments unfolding over time. We argue that authentic and socially just enrichment requires its extension to the interests and agency of students across educational pathways, in contradistinction to the currently deepening stratification of post-16 education in England.

For Whom Does One Toil? Time Use Differentials, Social Reproduction, and Occupational Prestige

Social reproduction theory builds upon Marxist theories that center on the extent to which labor power is the source of capital’s growth through the exploitation of the working class, providing a unique lens for analyzing how labor power differences may contribute to structural inequity. While research has shown that women and girls are primarily responsible for the majority of unpaid reproductive labor, little research has considered how time spent in unpaid work may also vary by social class position. We utilize nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey to estimate time use differentials across occupational prestige deciles, separately by gender, to address this question. We find that higher occupational prestige is significantly associated with less time spent on unpaid household labor for women, but not for men. Our results highlight the complex nature of unpaid reproductive work under capitalism, emphasizing the importance of considering social class positions when examining inequities in the unpaid work burden.

Humanitarian capitalism: The labour regime of aid and the surrogate welfare state in times of global displacement

Recent literature on the geography and political economy of humanitarian migration governance has highlighted the diverse circuits of economic value being forged through ‘refugee crises’ across the world. However, there is a noticeable gap in the examination of what kind of labour relations sustain these new economic circuits. Additionally, there is limited analysis of how humanitarian labour practices intersect with existing geographies of labour precarity in regions where refugee aid operations are conducted. This article aims to address these gaps by exploring the dominant labour relations within the changing landscape of private and public service providers in Greece following the 2015–16 European ‘refugee crisis.’ The article argues that the growth of the refugee aid sector in Greece both capitalised on and exacerbated ongoing processes of labour market deregulation and public sector contraction. The burgeoning aid sector operated as a surrogate welfare state, relying on devalued local labour to address the basic social reproduction needs of global ‘surplus populations’. Extending discussions on the political economy of migration industries beyond profit-making to account for their role in transforming the welfare state and labour relations in spaces of accentuated capitalist crisis, the article demonstrates how the emergency temporalities of aid funding, the rise of public sector managerialism, and employment protection liberalisation impact migrant-facing services, effectively serving as both anti-labour and anti-immigration policy. Furthermore, it illustrates how politically induced migrant ruination is used as a lever to intensify and moralise humanitarian labour in a feedback loop detrimental to both working-class locals and migrants.

Consent as Social Reproduction: Making Space for the Transformative Labour of Refugee and Migrant Anti-violence Advocates in Australia

ABSTRACT Following #MeToo, sexual violence and consent have become more important to Australian governments, policy makers, and organisations addressing gender-based violence. Locating consent in a specific social system of ‘labour’, this article takes social reproduction as an entry point to examine the experiences of refugee and migrant anti-violence advocates in Australia. I suggest that current discourses of consent, as bodily autonomy and judicial power, act as a site of social reproduction through the creation of norms that uphold patriarchy and whiteness. Considered in this way, marginalised groups such as refugee and migrant women are not afforded adequate space and resources to theorise consent based on their own lived experiences. Interview participants (n = 19) are active in their ethnic and faith communities addressing GBV, as well as in organisations such as NGOs and policy domains. Utilising a lens of ‘Transformative Labour’ (Swanson, Resha Terae, and Erin Devorah Carreon. 2024. “Uncovering the Transformative Labor in Black Women’s Community Work.” Affilia, 08861099231223935. https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099231223935), the findings demonstrate the limits of consent when applied to refugee and migrant communities; the ways a history of different feminisms play out in current front-line interventions; and how mainstream, dominant groups might make space for marginalised groups to articulate their own identities, and the time and resources to theorise consent based on their own struggles.

Feminism, reproductive labour and the gendered welfare state in Britain’s National Insurance Act of 1911

Abstract In 1911, numerous women’s organizations, of varying political interests, mounted a campaign against the National Insurance Bill. Such opposition emerged despite feminist support for increased welfare provision in general and especially for the maternity benefit that the Bill proposed to introduce. Feminists criticized National Insurance for discriminating against women, especially its failure to recognize the economic contribution of women’s unwaged reproductive labour. They lobbied and campaigned for a series of amendments, some of which were successful. Feminist opposition to National Insurance sheds new light on an ongoing historiographical debate over the degree to which women were able to influence early welfare states prior to enfranchisement. Their activities cannot be easily contained within a framework of ‘maternalist feminism’, and call into question distinctions between ‘maternalist’/‘social’ feminism and ‘equality’ feminism, and middle-class and working-class women’s agendas. Instead, feminist campaigns around National Insurance reveal an early analysis of ‘social reproduction’ (the origins of which are usually traced back only to ‘second wave’ feminism) whereby British feminists participated in international conversations contesting the gendered definitions of work that went on to inform insurance-based welfare states across Europe.