Women, ecology and economics: New models and theories

Household work and energy consumption: a degrowth perspective. Catalonia’s case study

“…From a time use point of view, it means that the Catalan quality of life depends upon the goods and services provided by unpaid household work as much as on those goods and services provided by the labour market. Hence, the present work confirms the importance of nonmarket activities as it has been argued for decades by feminist scholars (Antonopoulous and Hirway, 2010;McMahon, 1997;Jochimsen and Knobloch, 1997;O'Hara, 1997;Perkins, 1997;Picchio, 2003;Carrasco, 2003;Carrasco and Mayordomo, 2005;Pietilä, 1997), and only recently recognized by mainstream economists (Stiglitz et al, 2009). It confirms also that women work more than men not only for the UW, but also if we sum up unpaid and paid work (Carrasco and Mayordomo, 2005;Fisher and Robinson, 2011).…”

“…5 These demographic patterns have also social consequences; the most worrisome is the tendency towards the social isolation of the single person households (Jarvis, 2011). 6 We list here just some of them: gender analysis of standard of living in industrialized (Picchio, 2003) and less industrialized countries (Antonopoulous and Hirway, 2010); eco-feminist studies on the unpaid work (McMahon, 1997;Jochimsen and Knobloch, 1997;O'Hara, 1997;Perkins, 1997;Pietilä, 1997); studies which aim to obtain the correct mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis of time activities in a critical gender perspective (Carrasco, 2003;Carrasco and Mayordomo, 2005); the cross-countries analysis in the allocation of time exploring gender convergence in domestic work and leisure pattern in different regions of the world (Kan et al, 2011;Gimenez-Nadal and Sevilla-Sanz, 2011;Fisher and Robinson, 2011); analysis on the trends in the valuation of households' unpaid work (Hamdad, 2003); papers on the different application of time-use data to diverse subjects (Joyce and Stewart, 1999); the importance of unpaid work to reach the millennium developments goals (UNDP, 2005a).…”

“…Goods and services produced by the household and the natural world remain external and unaccounted for, and this generates a representation of society in which the embedded-ness and embodied-ness of humanity is hidden (O'Hara, 1997;Mellor, 1997). For decades, feminist scholars have shown that on the contrary unpaid work has importance for the whole economic system (Perkins, 1997;Picchio, 2003;Carrasco, 2003). Indeed, women's resistance and their struggle against their role to be reproducers 2 of labour-power have represented a major issue of feminist activists and scholars (Dalla Costa, 1995).…”

“…In fact, we believe that while unpaid work is necessary "to build and maintain homes and establish human relationships and communities" (Perkins, 1997), the commodification of its goods and service has important consequences in social and environmental terms. In social terms, the commodification of unpaid work tends to cause a continual shift of labour and skill from household production to the market economy; while the expansion of marketization implies a more intensive use of energy (Cogoy, 1995), as the present works tries to show.…”

Ecologies of Sustainable Concerns: Organization Theorizing for the Anthropocene

“…A central contribution of these efforts is introducing new vocabulary of concepts or re‐signifying long‐standing ones, with an emphasis on the processes of everyday life. Since feminist economics’ early times as a field, a vibrant strand of research pays attention to ‘ecology’, and articulates the valuation schemes in current economic models with respect to use of natural resources in addition to women's unpaid labor (e.g., Agarwal, ; Brennan, ; O'Hara, , ; Perkins, , ; Waring, ). Specifically, they offer a broader understanding of the notions of productivity and wellbeing in economic analysis, and argue for re‐defining what constitutes an ‘economy’ (Hawthorne, ; Power, ).…”