Discourse on equality in organizations. A case study of the chemical industry in Tarragona

This paper presents a proposal for analyzing discourses on gender equality in organizations. The research is carried out as a case study, focusing on the chemical industry in Tarragona. To the question: why there are still so many differences between women and men in labour market, despite having multiple tools to avoid inequalities? we propose to focus on discourses of equality to find an answer. The viewpoint that companies have on gender is crucial in enabling policies for equality. To ensure that policies are truly aimed at promoting equality, it is needed a gender approach that nowadays is not widespread in organizations. From these considerations, we present a fourfold typology of discourses on equality in organizations.

Female employment from the household. Towards a comprehensive analysis of work-life articulation

Research on women’s employment has proliferated over recent decades, often under a perspective that conceptualizes female labour market activity as independent of male presences and absences in the productive and reproductive spheres. In the face of these approaches, the article argues the need to focus on the couple as the unit of analysis of work-life articulation. After referring to the main theoretical arguments that, from a gender perspective within labour studies, have pointed out the relevance of placing the household as the central space for the analysis of the sexual division of labour, the article reviews different empirical contributions that have incorporated such perspective in the international literature. Next, the state of the art in the Spanish literature is presented, before arguing the desirability of applying such framework of analysis to the study of employment and care work in Spanish households, which are at present undergoing major transformations.

Health reforms in Latin America: processes and results

Two types of health reforms in Latin America are analysed: one based on insurance and service commodification and the one referred to the unified public systems of progressive governments. Health insurance with explicit service packages has not fulfilled their purposes of universal coverage, equal access to necessary health services and improvement of health conditions but has opened health as a field of profit making for insurance companies and private health providers. The national health services as a state obligation have developed territorialized health services and widened substantially timely access to the majority of the population. The adoption of an integrated and wide social policy has an impact on population well fare. It faces some problems derived from the old health systems and the power of the insurance and medical complex.

Migrant women’s employment in paid reproductive work through the crisis: the case of Italy (2007-2012)

Paid reproductive work, especially in the case of cleaning and home-care for elderly people, is an important sector for foreign women in Italy. For this reason, since the beginning of the current economic crisis, scholars have wondered about the impact of the recession on migrant domestic workers. They have looked particularly at possible competition with Italian women entering the sector for lack of better alternatives. Our paper takes this discussion a step further by assessing the overall changes affecting migrant women in the Italian labour market, 2007-2012. We will look at how their position has been transformed, by taking both an ethnic perspective, in relation to Italian women, and a gender perspective, in relation to migrant men. By way of a conclusion, the argument will be made that there is a substantial lack of competition between Italian and foreign women in the care and domestic sector due to differences in their earnings, hours of work and activities.

Looking for Determinants of Ontological Security in the Spain of the Crisis

The concept of ontological security has a remarkable echo in the current sociology to describe emotional status of men of late modernity. However, the concept created by Giddens in the eighties has been little used in empirical research covering various sources of risk or uncertainty. In this paper, a scale for ontological security is proposed. To do this, we start from the results of a research focused on the relationship between risk, uncertainty and vulnerability in the context of the economic crisis in Spain. These results were produced through nine focus groups and a telephone survey with standardized questionnaire applied to a national sample of 2,408 individuals over 18 years. This work is divided into three main sections. In the fi rst, a scale has been built from the results of the application of different items present in the questionnaire used. The second part explores the relationships of the scale obtained with the variables further approximate the emotional dimensions of individuals. The third part observes the variables that contribute to changes in the scale: These variables show the structural feature of the ontological security.

De la moral del sacrificio a la conciencia de la precariedad. Un análisis cualitativo de los discursos sobre la evolución de la crisis en España

La larga crisis económica que padece España está teniendo importantes consecuencias sociales. La más comentada por académicos, mass media y parte del arco político es la fractura social que se está abriendo en el país, ante el aumento de las desigualdades económicas que generan el enorme desempleo y las duras políticas de ajuste del gasto público. Sin embargo, más allá de cuestiones económicas la crisis está haciendo mella de forma muy profunda en el imaginario social del país en relación a las razones y consecuencias de la crisis, tanto a corto como a largo plazo. El objetivo de este artículo es el realizar una valoración de esas percepciones sociales de la ciudadanía en relación con la crisis, centrándonos en un aspecto como es el de la relación de la población española con el consumo de bienes y servicios públicos, en un escenario de hegemonía de la austeridad como única receta anti-crisis. Para ello, realizaremos un análisis de los discursos recogidos en una investigación cualitativa realizada en el año 2014 mediante grupos de discusión. Los resultados muestran un pesimismo enorme de la población en relación al futuro del Estado del Bienestar y de la propia clase media española, junto a una frustración que puede anunciar futuros ciclos de movilización social.

Household "ethnoscapes" and rite of passage: meaning and chronicity of the diagnosis in schizophrenia

Based on the results of an ethnographic study with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their relatives in Barcelona and Tarragona along one year, I problematize the transformation of roles and relationships inside the household from the first burst and the assignation of a diagnosis as rite of passage. I appeal to a cultural interpretation of family, understanding the family group as a specific ethnoscape. I analyze the chronicity meaning, and its consequences in the conformation of the “role of sick person” in the context of parental relationships. I also discuss the paradoxes in terms of autonomy for the affected persons because of the projection of cultural connotation of chronicity.

Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice.