Feminist Economics Today by Marianne A. Ferber Julie A. Nelson

Author:Marianne A. Ferber, Julie A. Nelson [Marianne A. Ferber, Julie A. Nelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226242071
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2003-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Economic Rationality and Globalization: A Feminist Perspective

. . . Lourdes Benería

During the past fifteen years, feminist theory has made important contributions that have deeply transformed many disciplines. Belatedly and perhaps to a lesser extent, it has also had an impact on economics. As demonstrated by the success of Beyond Economic Man, feminist economics has raised much interest among those who have been questioning conventional economic analysis. Their questions range from traditional economics’ often androcentric assumptions to its tendency to focus on efficiency, growth, and the maximization of gains and wealth rather than on the enhancement of human development and well-being.

In Beyond Economic Man, the authors brought attention to the fact that gender and the academic discipline of economics are not immutable, naturally occurring phenomena, but rather are socially constructed. This chapter argues that the project of honing the critique and constructing alternative models could benefit from an extension of feminist analysis to the social construction of markets. This concern is all the more pressing since markets have been expanding and have become ever more integrated on a global scale, while increasingly more aspects of daily life are commodified and larger segments of the world’s population are engaged in market-oriented work.

The next section focuses on Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the social and political construction of markets and of “market society” during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe. Following that, I discuss the extent to which this type of analysis can be applied to the formation of global markets in the late twentieth century. The next section argues that this transformation had, and continues to have, gender dimensions and points out the tension between the assumptions of economic rationality associated with market behavior and the real-life experiences of women and men. I then extend this analysis to the effects on women of globalization and the feminization of the labor force. The final section argues that economists need to change the predominant approaches in orthodox neoclassical models to one that puts humans first, an agenda in which feminist economics can play an important role.

The Social Construction of Markets

This section questions the extent to which social organization is the result of economic organization or vice versa—as well as the extent to which the expansion of markets is a natural process, resulting from the growth of economic activity and gains in productivity and efficiency associated with the expansion of markets. One of the most thorough and influential discussions of these questions can be found in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Written during the Second World War by this Polish social scientist, then living in the United States, it was first published in 1944. In it, Polanyi provides an analysis of the construction and growth of the self-regulated market and of laissez-faire capitalism during the Industrial Revolution up to the early part of the twentieth century.

Polanyi’s analysis centers on the profound change in human behavior represented by market-oriented choices and decisions in which gain replaced subsistence as the main purpose of economic activity. Given

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