Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals by Derek Wall

Author:Derek Wall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786801234
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

6

Feminism and Intersectionality

‘I got circled in the schoolroom, out on the playground.’

‘You Jew! You Jew!’ she recalled, her voice rising, imitating the taunts. ‘Having that experience as a kid and being a woman, and having that challenge as it has been at different times to be a woman, I’ve got pretty good sympathy for people who are not necessarily at the centre of civic appreciation.’

(Elinor Ostrom interviewed by Leonard 2009)

The politics of difference and liberation were central to Elinor Ostrom, however, they came from her particular perspective which is both illuminating and a little unusual. She was an advocate of difference and plurality, who strongly believed in promoting women and minorities. Equally, while keen to see how biology might influence society and vice versa, she was a strongly anti-essentialist thinker who, far from seeing nature as fixed, was aware of its changing characteristics. Such anti-essentialism chimes with other theorists who have advocated ecological politics and feminist commitment such as Donna Haraway. Elinor Ostrom’s work also fits into a larger feminist economics which has challenged the discipline for being male biased and naive in terms of its basic research methods and assumptions. She rarely made specific statements about feminism but it imbues her thinking, which moved away from experts, generally male, to a method that promote listening and participation.

As we have seen, Elinor Ostrom’s life experience made her strongly supportive of the promotion of diversity. It is highly instructive to remember that she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics when she was awarded it in 2009. Women may have had the vote in many countries for over a century, but economics remains a male club. Economics is largely mathematised and women born in the 1930s like Elinor Ostrom may have had less opportunity to study mathematics at school, immediately shutting down access. Elinor Ostrom generally focused on the micro level and she noted that she was taught methodological individualism, the idea that society is made up of sovereign individuals, not social classes or other groups. For both reasons she might be seen as ignoring power and structural influences on human behaviour. Nonetheless, notions of power and contestation run right through her work. It was obvious to her that in the 1950s and 1960s white men had more power in the USA than other identities. From an early age she did what she could to promote diversity. Working in Boston in recruitment to support her first husband through law school, she was proud to try to promote a less homogenous work force.

When I returned to Los Angeles in 1957 and applied for a professional position in the Personnel Office at UCLA, I was greatly relieved to learn that I had received a strong recommendation from my Boston employer. This was particularly gratifying because I had been able to diversify the firm’s staff, previously all white and Protestant or Catholic, to include several new employees who were black or Jewish. (Ostrom 2010b: 3).

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