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Gender, Work and Organization in the Time/Space Economy of `Just-in-Time' LabourGoldsmiths College, p.odih{at}gold.ac.uk Formidable changes are occurring in the organization of work, production and the labour process. The emerging world of flexibility, part-time contracts and `just-in-time labour' has invoked systemic disruptions in the sequential ordering of time/space. Feminists have been less than sanguine in their resistance to the placeless, timeless logic of `just-in-time labour'. The flexible fragmented present of post-fordist production is variously argued to be in contradiction to the embodied social relations through which women `weave' their own autobiographies. While sympathetic to the concept of `feminine time', its application to the present labour market context requires intense inquisition and critical reflection. The modern episteme consisted of a constellation of discourses linked to narrative realism. This is to appreciate that basic to all forms of gendered subjectivity is a conscious subject living in time and capable of uniting the literal with the virtual, or linking one temporal order (the present) with others (the past and future). The `timeless times' and dislocated `spatial flows' of our current era threaten the ability of gendered subjects to form their identities into sustained narratives. Focusing on post-fordist flexible specialization, this article challenges the fixed, unitary, relational subject of feminist critique and begins to deconstruct the problematics of gender and work in the time/space economy of `just-in-time' labour.
Key Words: gender • narrative • post-fordism • subjectivity • time/space
Time & Society, Vol. 12, No. 2-3,
293-314 (2003) This article has been cited by other articles:
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