Heidi Gottfried, Karin Gottschall, Mari Osawa, Sylvia Walby, eds. Gendering the Knowledge Economy: Comparative Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 320 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-9457-8.

Reviewed by Christine Fojtik (Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Women in the "Knowledge Economy"

The movement toward an increasingly knowledge-based economy theoretically erases one of the earliest justifications for a division between male and female labor: namely, that there were certain occupations for which men and women were, respectively, more or less physically suited. As more men and women work in offices or at home rather than coal mines, gendered segregation nonetheless persists. To what extent, the authors of this collection ask, do emerging forms of "knowledge work" perpetuate or overturn typical patterns of gendered employment? Do these patterns hold across national lines, and if not, what factors account for their differences?

The editors of this collection of essays draw on examples from the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Japan in order to examine the ways in which a gendered perspective sheds light on the meaning of "knowledge work." The authors seek to reinterpret the value of female knowledge work in a global economy and to question whether the inclusion of gender as a category of analysis fundamentally alters the meaning of knowledge work itself. Further, they point to the dangerous flip side of jobs within the knowledge economy: with flexibility comes insecurity, at a high price for women drawn to such accommodating employment opportunities.

As comparative efforts go, the authors of this one take care to include pieces that assess national examples side by side, rather than providing a collection of essays exploring individual cases and calling it a day. The book is divided into three larger sections, containing a total of ten chapters. Sylvia Walby's introductory chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for the subsequent analyses. Karen Shire's piece draws from Walby's terms to outline the fundamental questions of the field, moving from Walby's theories to the concrete query, "Why does this matter?" Walby's and Shire's essays work well together to re-conceptualize gender, the knowledge economy, and the issue of regulation. The third section, on gendering new forms of employment, uses case studies to test the boundaries of the knowledge economy definition and to redraw it along gendered lines. The second section, on comparative regulation, stands apart a bit from the others. Two of the three essays in this section--those by Osawa and Glenda Roberts--focus on Japanese efforts to integrate work and family life and promote gender equality given increasing levels of female employment. The third, by Ilse Lenz, looks at European Union and United Nations "soft regulation" of gender equality and how women's groups and transnational corporations have affected the establishment of global gender norms. The book's flow might have benefited from a slight reorganization, by shifting the supranational/regulatory essays to the end and putting the case studies second, after the initial reconceptualizations. That said, the difficulties of comparative analysis are many, and I applaud the editors for avoiding a disparate aggregation of essays on related topics.

Walby begins the volume with an introduction about the contested nature of the term "knowledge economy"--do "knowledge workers," for example, include those in the knowledge-intensive service industries?--and how various approaches to categorization produce divergent gender patterns. Throughout the volume, the contributors collectively interrogate the shifting meanings of knowledge work and how these varied definitions include and exclude both modern and traditional forms of "women's labor." Though the rise of a knowledge economy has been credited with providing greater worker autonomy and flexibility by offering employees nonstandard working hours and other special arrangements, these developments have also rendered jobs potentially less secure. How, the editors ask, do these shifts affect employees based on their gender? Walby also establishes spatiality (Are people working from new locations? From home?), temporality (What hours do people work? How have these changed, in light of globalization and a shift to a knowledge-based economy?), and contractuality (What is the nature of people's employment? How secure are their positions? Do they work as "regular" employees? As contract laborers? What protections do they enjoy?) as the three primary areas of inquiry in assessing the effects of the rising knowledge economy on employment norms.

One of the clearest ways in which female labor challenges usual conceptions of knowledge work is through women's work in the service sector. Service work, notably domestic care, does not conform to usual categories of "knowledge" that may privilege technical or academic qualifications. Makiko Nishikawa and Kazuko Tanaka explore the role of specialized knowledge in the care field and examine both organizational and informal means of transmitting this information within the care-work sector. Their assessment expands the definition of knowledge work to include those categories requiring specialized information alongside those demanding academic training. Though they examine divisions within the care-work community regarding level of professional training, they do not extensively delve into the role of class in dictating caregivers' working conditions, a topic developed later in the volume by Diane Perrons.

Technological change has provided new categories of knowledge-based employment as well as redefined the requirements of the old ones. Ursula Holtgrewe's chapter on German call centers typifies the way that shifts in technology have recast gendered assumptions in a particular field of service work. Previously, call center operators prized female workers because of their capacity for "emotional" labor; women's unique skill set allowed them to listen to and emphasize with telephone customers. Modern incarnations of the call center, however, have increasingly de-emphasized the value of female emotional labor. No longer used primarily for the conduct of mail-order business, call centers increasingly allow for telebanking and the provision of technical support--both fields, Holtgrewe suggests, in which technical knowledge trumps emotional intelligence. In this context, employers may prize temporary student workers of either sex over long-term middle-aged female employees.

Technology has also facilitated self-employment in the cultural and so-called new media sectors. While both women and men have pursued careers in these fields, Gottschall and Daniela Kroos determine that the lack of established institutions and well-defined career paths have led to an unusual amount of personal risk for those pursuing these fields, and women may sustain this risk disproportionately. The nebulous paths of advancement in the cyber-sector mean that women's development may be hindered by the existence of informal "old boys' networks" that dictate career progress. Perrons brings together the fields of care-work and new media, arguing that they comprise "opposite poles of a [new] economy" (p. 188). Both female Internet and care workers cite flexibility as a primary component in dictating their employment choices, but suffer job insecurity as a result. Perrons shows the effects of economic transformation across classes, as well as how new categories of employment reproduce old class divisions.

Further inquiry on the nature of the burgeoning knowledge economy might take into account not only the contours of employment in such "first world" nations as Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, but in developing countries as well. India, for example, also offers call centers and technical help lines, which might provide an interesting comparative case study in a collection like this. A wider range of national examples would complement the efforts of this study to broaden the definition of knowledge work beyond class- and gender-based lines.

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Citation: Christine Fojtik. Review of Gottfried, Heidi; Gottschall, Karin; Osawa, Mari; Walby, Sylvia, eds, Gendering the Knowledge Economy: Comparative Perspectives. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23718

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