Fast Forward: Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World

This innovative, global feminist analysis of work and politics examines the diverse problems and related protests of women and men who labor to make ends meet in a rapidly-changing world. Using vivid examples from around the world, it reveals how 'globalization' is reshaping social institutions and lives. Fast Forward explores how businesses and states reshaped and redistributed work around the world during the last 30 years of 'globalization,' often with adverse consequences. Within this fast-moving context, laboring people today engage in work outside of formal employment, try to obtain survival resources, mount a diverse array of often women-centered protests against firms and states, and try-on their own terms-to reinvent work and democratic political practices. Portraying the human face of global change, Fast Forward shows how overlapping social movements wrestle with economic and political marginalization, and initiate highly diverse, but related attempts to change the way the world works.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Preface: Looking Back, Moving Forward Part 2 Seeing Global Change Chapter 3 An Introduction to Work, Gender, and Protest Part 4 Worker Households, Businesses, and States Chapter 5 The Meaning of Work Chapter 6 The Changing World of Work Chapter 7 The Redistribution and Reorganization of Work in the Core Chapter 8 The Submerging Periphery Chapter 9 Reverses in the Semi-Periphery Chapter 10 Welfare States Cut Worker Benefits Part 11 The Changing Ground for Working Households Chapter 12 Class Transformations, Households, and the Emergence of Women-Centered Labor Movements Chapter 13 The Degredation of Social and Natural Work Environments Part 14 Change and Protest Chapter 15 Institutional Struggles: Female and Male Workers Challenge Business Chapter 16 Institutional Struggles: Workers Challenge States Chapter 17 Diversifying Struggles: Redefining Work and Society Part 18 Conclusion Chapter 19 Fast Forward

About the Author :
Torry Dickinson is associate professor of women's studies at Kansas State University. Robert Schaeffer is associate professor of sociology at Kansas State University.

Review :
Dickinson and Schaeffer raise the standard for research on social change and collective action by arguing that transformations of work and gender can be traced to protest on a global scale as diverse as movements for social justice, democratization, women's rights, corporate responsibility, and environmentalism. The evidence is detailed, the analysis compelling. This is an ambitious and thought-provoking study of changes in global work patterns over the last thirty years. Fast Forward lucidly analyzes the often hidden relationships, which link North and South and sustain privilege across local, regional and global differences of class, gender, colour and age. The authors see hope in the destabilization of capitalist institutions and the breakdown of oppressive gender relations. They show how working people around the world are organizing to resist the impact of global capital in their daily lives and on the environment and to create new social alternatives. Fast Forward offers an admirable discussion of the big picture concerning working class labor in the global village...quite instructive in piecing togehter an understanding of how the world economy may be best conceptualized as on organism having many parts, rather than as many countries that have no formal relationship to on another aside from political dialogue. This book is a well thought-out synthesis of developments in the organization of work and its impact on working people around the world. Schaeffer and Dickinson paint an extremely challenging view of the new global economy-a view that is clearly at odds with what you will hear at most thinktanks and universities.