Household

Household from a global perspective: multiple economies, labor, and coping strategies

The household is a valuable lens through which to view contemporary trends of social transformation and economic transition. Diverse economic processes operating across various scales - from global to household - intersect in its daily life. Household members engage in these "multiple economies" in order to secure income, domestic reproduction, raise children, and care for the disabled, frail, and sick. They work formally and informally, in many economic spaces - both outside and inside their homes, do paid and unpaid work, produce and exchange increasing amounts of goods, services, and emotional care.

Household research emphasises the integrated nature of people's everyday lives and the way unequal distribution of a whole range of resources, beyond those recognized by capitalist economy and measured by GDP, mediates individual and household well being.



The 'globalization' of production strikingly tends to bring about a 'localization' of social reproduction across a wide range of national and regional contexts. First, as Nancy Folbre (2000) points out, as 'little welfare states' households increasingly take responsibility for a host of services (education, health, pension security and the like) once considered the responsibility of the state. Extreme creativity can be observed in the way they stitch together a patch-work of arrangements to ensure young children, disabled and frail elderly relatives are cared for round the clock and all are clothed and fed. Second, increased costs associated with the neo-liberal economic growth further undermine the ability of households to purchase these and other services at the market. Third, in addition to greater dependency on global economic dynamics, increased transnational experience of households stretches their multiple economies to global scale. The cost of privately undertaking welfare services disproportionately falls to women and is especially high for ethnic minority women according to a transnational 'care chain' of class and gender relations.



While interest in the hidden economies of informal income generation, unpaid domestic labour and networks of reciprocity and exchange has grown, research tends to remain area and discipline specific. We would like to bridge household research underway across third world, post-socialist and advanced post-industrial capitalist economies, and place it in the context of the economic transformations taking place globally and locally in those economies.



The purpose of this session is to generate dialogue between household researchers and identify common ground, shared experience, and differences among world households recognized as a site of multiple economies, coping strategies and identities. Papers might consider, but not be limited to, any of the following themes:



- Intersections of paid and unpaid work in various economic

systems

- Transnational and local systems of personal ties

- Holistic conceptions of consumption, production and

social-reproduction

- The complexity and contradictions of daily economic struggles

- Strategies households adopt to cope with economic crisis and

rampant privatization/ neoliberalism

- Intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity in multiple

economies

- How capitalist are the households in neo-liberal economies?

- Geographies and scales of household economies: from global to

local

- Connecting multiple economic spaces of households

- Households, states, markets, and non-markets