Beyond father and Ford,after feminism and fashion

Linda McDowell’s (1991) work on post-Fordism has now inspired two generations of feminist economic geographers from around the world. ‘Life without Father and Ford’ came out just before I started my doctorate and was the article that prompted me to reconsider how to approach the questions of women and restructuring I was beginning to explore in my research. At the time, I was trying to make sense of the dramatic reform programme that had reshaped the economic landscape in my home country of New Zealand during the 1980s, and like Linda, I had become increasingly convinced that I was witnessing some form of ‘sea change’ moment (Harvey, 1989). My initial aim was to ‘put women in’, showing the gendered consequences of deregulation, marketisation and privatisation.

It was the pursuit of this intellectual agenda that eventually took me to Canada to undertake a PhD in political economy, working with geographers, sociologists and political scientists who were asking similar questions in their research. During this work I, like many other geographers of my generation, discovered that when feminist perspectives were deployed in political economic research, the issues subsequently raised demanded both a new empirical focus and an alternative theoretical approach. No longer was I content with ‘putting women in’, rather my ambition became to rethink the very concepts and categories with which I was working. In my case, Linda’s work helped prompt my efforts to develop a ‘post-structuralist political economy’ – a new account of neoliberalism that drew on both feminist and post-structuralist theories and that explicitly featured the constitutive, contested and process-oriented aspects of what was then a relatively new political-economic formation (Larner, 1997).

It was this emphasis on the situatedness of political-economic processes that subsequently defined me in disciplinary terms. My ongoing research agenda, through which I have explored processes of globalisation and neoliberalism in a series of diverse empirical projects, has seen me characterised as one of the ‘splitters’ Jamie Peck referred to in his opening comments to the Global Economic Geography conference in Oxford 2015. I have continued to insist that the ‘clumpers’ who develop high-level programmatic analyses of globalisation and neoliberalism need to pay more attention to the contradictions, paradoxes and inconsistencies revealed by detailed research into specific cases. Fortunately, I have not been alone in this ongoing disciplinary discussion. Indeed, I would argue that the sub-discipline that Jamie described in his comments – a heterodox, process-oriented, situated economic geography – is in large part the result of a longstanding conversation between feminist economic geographers and their colleagues. Moreover, unlike some other social science disciplines, this is a largely mutually respectful, ongoing and engaged dialogue in which the various constituencies understand what each other has to offer conceptually and empirically. In short, without both ‘splitters’ and ‘clumpers’ economic geographers would be a much less interesting and less diverse group of scholars.

More recently, I explicitly revisited the questions of gender, class and employment at the heart of Linda’s work. Like her, I remain interested in the new and more complex forms that class and gender divisions are taking in the shift towards a service economy, and the increasing labour market participation of women. While the focus in her article ‘Father and Ford Revisited’ (McDowell, 2001) was Britain, similar trends can be observed in other developed economies including New Zealand. Yet rarely do these trends feature in the wider discussions about globalisation, neoliberalism and women’s work. Because of the research of feminist geographers and others, we now know a great deal about the implications of globalisation and neoliberalism for third world, migrant and minority women’s work. However, much less has been said about the changing experiences of middle-class women in more privileged countries. In this context, my anthropology colleague Maureen Molloy and I began to develop an argument that changes in first world women’s work were a crucial, yet under-recognised, aspect of contemporary political economic processes (Molloy and Larner, 2013).

In developing this argument, we built from the recognition that the so-called feminisation of the labour force in both developed and developing involves changing structures of work as much as it does an overall increase in the number of women in paid work. For our purposes, what is significant is the sustained move by women into higher level professional and managerial positions, as well as the changing modes of work that privilege what Linda called in her 2009 book ‘embodied and visible’ performances (McDowell, 2009). This has particularly impacted middle-class women’s work, in that increasing numbers of these women expect to have such employment and careers. Relatedly, organisational studies scholars have identified the growth in the numbers of women senior managers and business entrepreneurs, and asked if there are distinctively feminist or feminine modes of economic subjectivities. In turn, these shifts are linked to the rise of facilitative leadership styles, increasing emphasis on soft skills, networking, presentation of self, mainstreaming of equality and diversity strategies and so on. They also relate to the broader changes in the institutions and conditions of work associated with the rise of the service economy, generalised precarity and the erosion of the presupposition of full employment models.

It is in this context that Maureen and I spent a over a decade examining the experiences, motivations and economic activities of the mostly middle-class women who make up the New Zealand fashion industry. Rather than focusing on the low-skill, low-wage garment workers who have previously featured in international research on the fashion industry, our work examined the heterogeneous networks of designers, stylists, policy-makers, agents, media and fashion week organisers who are central parts of this industry. Making the experiences of these women more visible encouraged us to pose new questions of economic geographic processes such as the rise of the cultural and creative industries, changes in contemporary urban economies, as well as globalisation and neoliberalism. In short, when we ‘put women in’ to our study of the fashion industry and considered what their experiences might meant for established academic categories, it again became apparent that the accepted explanations for these processes simply did not hold in the same way.

In developing our analysis, we drew on accounts of both the creative industries and gendered entrepreneurship in order to underline the growing significance of gendered organisational structures and modes of work in developed economies. Of course, it has long been asserted that the cultural and creative industries sector are the harbinger of new ways of working and living. More generally, it has been argued that, as symbolic and experiential products, creative goods and services are neither produced nor consumed in the same way as more utilitarian products produced through hierarchical and bureaucratised forms of organisation and work. Instead, diverse and specialised workers each bring their personal tastes and aesthetic judgment to their work, and these creative products are produced, circulated and consumed through cultural-economic networks. Geographical contributions to these debates emphasis the mutually beneficial effects of proximity in their arguments about the role of global cities, clusters and creative classes, further underlining claims that the cultural and creative industries are associated with new forms of work and life, as well as new forms of exploitation.

We observed that contributors to the cultural and creative industries literature rarely acknowledge how their claims echo observations made in feminist analyses of gendered entrepreneurship. Feminist scholars have pointed out that the mainstream literatures on entrepreneurship tend to position women as lacking in relation to the masculine norms of economy and industry. They also argue that women face specific challenges in establishing small businesses in that they tend to be judged and evaluated against invisible masculine norms. Their research has shown how this gives rise to a distinction between ‘serious’ growth-oriented firms and ‘non-serious’ small, stable firms, with the former being privileged by policy-makers and financial institutions and economic geographers. Innovation, risk-taking and leadership underpin a ‘heroic’ model of entrepreneurship in which the qualities of an entrepreneur are strongly associated with masculinity. Women entrepreneurs, in contrast, are less likely to articulate a formally defined organisational structure during the start-up and development of their business and are more likely to adopt a relational and flexible approach to their firms.

Drawing on this work, we argued that the small gendered firms that make up the New Zealand designer fashion industry should not be dismissed as ‘life style businesses’. Instead, we argued that this industry manifests a distinctively gendered way of working and living, hence our term ‘work style’ businesses. These firms reflect the aspirations of a generation of middle-class women who expect to be economically active but are looking for occupational models which fit with their own (gendered) priorities in a setting where small export-oriented businesses predominated. This underlines the point made by economic geographers Megan Blake and Susan Hanson (2005) over a decade ago, with their assertion that all too often there is an overly narrow reading of the contexts, sectors and actors who are contributing to innovation and economic development. It also underlines the point that the aestheticisation of work, performative aspects of the workplace, identity, embodied style, and network sociality are not simply cultural glosses on existing economic practices.

Indeed, the fact that the attributes of these small firms are associated with the cultural and creative industries more generally, suggests the small women-headed businesses that we were concerned with may be able to tell us a great deal about changes in the wider economy. In an era of generalised precarity and feminised labour, these patterns of work and economy are becoming much more important and engaging men and women alike. Even when women are not present in large numbers in these sectors, women’s ways of working are. This suggests that we may need to rethink the centrality of gender to the broader globalising cultural economy, and what is now becoming known as the ‘sharing economy’. These emergent spaces and subjects will not necessarily be governed by traditional business models and economic understandings, as is exemplified by the meteoric rise of social enterprise as both a concept and economic category. Nor will these activities necessarily be led by traditional actors, as issues around diversity and inequality gain greater traction in political-economic life. In this regard, we are indeed beyond Father and Ford, and perhaps also after feminism and fashion. It is feminist geography, as Linda showed us all those years ago, that will give us the empirical sensitivities and analytical approaches we need in an increasingly heterogeneous, networked and precarious world.