Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

34

Gender Regimes or Gendered Institutions?

RC02 Economy and Society (host committee)

Language: English

There has been much debate on the theorisation of gender at the meso (institutional) and macro (regime) levels in order to engage feminist analysis with the challenges of globalisation, the financial and economic crisis, low fertility, and gendered change over time. These have emerged in response to the critique of the “meta-narrative” and seek to find a new and more appropriate balance in the tension between the goals of generality and specificity. Alternative feminist approaches point to different aspects of policies, institutional arrangements and gender systems that are consequential for explaining complex inequalities across countries and regions.

The session invites papers discussing current debates and new frameworks for analyzing varieties of both class and gender regimes and institutions. We welcome papers addressing critical questions about the dynamics of changing gender and class relations: Are changes in gender relations better theorised at macro or meso levels? That there are major changes in gender relations is in little doubt. But are these better understood at the macro level of gender regimes, which encompass entities as large as countries, or at the meso level of institutions, as argued by the new feminist institutionalists? Are changes in institutions sufficiently similar to be clustered into regimes, or are the changes too fine-grained with contrary patterns in adjacent institutions for the macro concept of “regime” to be appropriate? Do changes in employment, welfare, taxation, households, violence, and political representation take the same direction or not? Are changes in employment in tension or in alignment with changes in welfare? Are there varieties of gender regimes in the same way as varieties of capitalism? Are changes in varieties of gender relations in alignment with changes in varieties of capitalist relations? Does the crisis restructure regimes or just some institutions? Posters: