Your Caring Sharing Coop Women Work and Sustainability

Your Caring, Sharing Co-op Women, Work and Sustainability in a Polanyian Paradigm Molly Scott Cato Professor of Strategy and Sustainability Roehampton Business School

Balancing Life and Work Provisioning Economy Women at Work Women and Embedding Co-operative Economics

The Market Myth • Polanyi: the economy as primarily social • The market economy as a ‘utopian myth’ • Traditional economies as embedded in the land • ‘an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions’

Fictitious Commodities • ‘Traditionally, land labour are not separated; labor forms part of life; land remains part of nature, life and nature form an articulate whole. Land is thus tied up with the organizations of kinship, neighbourhood, craft, and creed—with tribe and temple, village, guild, and church. One Big Market, on the other hand, is an arrangement of economic life which includes markets for the factors of production. Since these factors happen to be indistinguishable from the elements of human institutions, man and nature, it can be readily seen that market economy involves a society the institutions of which are subordinated to the requirements of the market mechanism’

The Bioregional Economy • ‘Borrowing your resources from the local natural environment’ • Having a stake in your local place • Ownership and accountability are related

Women and Work (UK, 2008) • 79% work compared with 70% of men • Almost half of women worked part-time compared with only one in six men • 92% of employed women worked in services

Segregation of men and women between different occupations, UK

Beyond the Labour Market GNP-Monetized ½ of Cake Top two layers GNP “Private” Sector “Public”Sector “underground economy Non-Monetized Productive ½ of Cake “Love Economy” Lower two layers Mother Nature All rights reserved. Rests on GNP “Public” Sector Rests on Social Cooperative Love Economy Rests on Nature’s Layer Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson

The Co-operative • Value is retained by those who create it • Sustainable livelihoods for working-class people • Co-operative Women’s Guild (1883) campaigned successfully for maternity benefits

Women as Social Entrepreneurs • Women make up 67% of the workforce in the third sector compared with 64% in the public sector and 40% in the private sector • Self-fulfilment, autonomy and the pursuit of a social mission as key determinants of women’s decisions to set up business, rather than profit motive • Are women’s choices in this sector always voluntary?

• Is there a gender dimension to determining the ideal design for the sustainable economy of the future? • Ontology of ‘immanence’ • Physical embedding and embodiedness

• ‘We live in a material world and freedom has material parameters. Beyond women’s labours stands the resource substrate of nature, next in the chain of appropriation. In order to arrive at a green society, where gender equity is global and a sustainable reciprocity is established with nature, we may have to rethink the unbridled Eurocentric fetish for the transcendent. True freedom involves limits and an acceptance of our embodied condition. ’ • Ariel Salleh

Women’s Bodies; Women’s Wisdom • ‘Following the logic of women’s work, social solidarity would be the basis of economic security, a local economy would be based on secure patterns of reciprocity’ • Mellor also warns against the risk of the continuation of patriarchal systems of exploitation or a simplistic return to ‘a more homespun existence’

Conclusions • Sustainable economy means a fundamental redesign: away from growth and accumulation • Less individualist and more communitarian motivations • Closer identification with nature, non-human animals and other species • A sustainable economy as a co-operative economy • Women more likely to flourish

Find out more www. greeneconomist. org gaianeconomics. blogspot. com Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice (Earthscan, 2009) The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (Earthcan, 2012)