Women giving up: a critical inquiry into (unsuccessful) conversion processes in neoliberal economies

ABSTRACT

This article develops a critical inquiry into women’s processes of renouncement in their pursuit of work- and family-oriented goals. It brings together insights from two different schools of thought: the capability approach and critical sociology. This qualitative analysis is focused on how processes of resource conversion fail to mobilise women’s resources and instead block their capabilities. The subjects of analysis are 24 paradigmatic life stories of highly educated Italian women in precarious work, who, having previously invested in the development of a professional career, then began to ‘back away’ from their initial goals following the arrival of children. This article makes three contributions: it sheds light on three multi-layered processes that prove to be unsuccessful in converting resources into the desired work-family outcomes in neoliberal economies, thus making a novel contribution to the capabilities framework; second, it shows that these processes are constructed over three different temporalities, suggesting that conversion processes abide by specific time modalities, thus moving towards a dynamic approach to capabilities; finally, it shines light on subtle but powerful mechanisms underlying the (unsuccessful) conversion processes through which the system of structural gender inequality is reproduced, thus opening up the analysis to the politics of power in action.

KEYWORDS:

• Capability
• conversion processes
• power processes
• temporality
• women career
• neoliberal economy

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Barbara Poggio and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and useful comments. A special thanks also to all the women I interviewed for telling me their stories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Dependent self-employment is a rapidly growing form of precarious work in Europe. Workers in this situation are formally self-employed but they do not have employees and they depend on a single employer. Firms make increasing use of this form of contract in order to obtain greater flexibility at reduced labour costs and taxes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Carreri

Anna Carreri is post-doctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy, and affiliated with SEIN – Identity, Diversity & Inequality Research, University of Hasselt, Belgium. She was a visiting scholar at the Central European University in Budapest and at the Faculty of Business Economics at the University of Hasselt. Her research is conducted mainly through qualitative methods from an intersectional and critical perspective. Her main research interests are work-life issues, quality of work life, new forms of work organization and the role of trade unions. Currently, she is involved in research concerning gender inequalities in academic careers.