State Feminism, Women's Movements, and Job Training: Making Democracies Work in the Global Economy by Amy Mazur

Author:Amy Mazur [Mazur, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136533440
Goodreads: 17545433
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

ANALYSIS OF DEBATES

Sources and Method

The sources of analysis consist of all available official documents produced during the policy processes: committee reports and hearings statements, ministerial working group papers, women's policy agency archives, and parliamentary documents. In two of the analyzed cases (1975 and 1993), a survey of pertinent articles in the most important national newspapers was conducted. Some key actors at the Ministry of Labor and the Council for Equality were also contacted to confirm some of the conclusions.

Given the way job training issues are intertwined with employment and social policy discussions, a major issue in the analysis of debates was how to focus specifically on training debates, without analyzing the entire debate on employment policy. The analyst has two options: either to study a discrete debate in its totality, or to artificially separate job training concerns from other debate content. As job training issues often had a low priority in policy discussions, focusing uniquely on training debates would have stripped these debates of their meaning within the larger policy context. As a consequence, training debates are analyzed as they unfolded in the larger policy environment. The analysis also traces the policy debates from the point of their becoming a public concern to the policy outcome. The different positions of the social partners are analyzed in the context of preparliamentary committee preparation and parliamentary debates. The collective negotiation process is not scrutinized due to the highly closed nature of discussions between labor and management at the bargaining table.

Another methodological issue that is raised in the Finnish context is how gendered positions are identified in debates. Finnish is one of the few grammatically gender-neutral languages: it does not distinguish between men and women in personal pronouns, nor does it use gender to designate nouns either. Ascertainment of which gender is actually linguistically indicated must be based on explicit referrals to “men,” “women,” “the female unemployed,” etc. Moreover, since the 1980s, feminists have made calls for gender-neutral language in official discussions and documents. As a result, political and administrative discourse is supposed to be objective and unbiased. This linguistic and political gender neutrality poses a particular thorny problem for tracking gendered ideas in the unfolding of job training debates. The debate analysis must, therefore, take great care in identifying whether behind the official gender-neutral language actors are not actually talking in gendered terms. When groups of people are being discussed and they are primarily made up of men or of women, then gender issues will be considered to be raised. It is also important to carefully examine each debate for the presence of women's movement ideas, even if they are expressed in a gender-neutral manner.

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