Post-Fordism, Gender and Work

In recent years there has been extensive debate concerning the way in which advanced industrialized nations have encountered economic restructuring, experiencing a shift away from the dominance of fordism and the emergence of more flexible modes of production. The principal theoretical perspectives in this field, the Institutionalist theory of flexible specialization and the regulationist theory of post-fordism, fail to adequately incorporate a gender informed analysis into their respective models of economic restructuring. This book redresses the gap in existing post-fordist literature and is the first of its kind to comprehensively explore gender relations in the post-fordist economy. The book incorporates a gender dimension into the economic restructuring debate on both a theoretical and a practical level. It also explores the implications of economic restructuring in the workplace for gender relations. Several questions emerge from this discussion relating to issues around numerical flexibility, functional flexibility, and technological change. This book provides an important and original contribution to both post-fordist and feminist literature, whilst at the same time providing a practical insight into post-fordist methods of work organization based on the concept of team working.