Untitled - socium.ge

Informationalism and the network society 27of labor to a constantly changing environment is a precondition for their useas labor.This specific division of labor is gendered to some extent. The rise of flexiblelabor is directly related to the feminization of the paid labor force, afundamental trend in the social structure of the past three decades (Carnoy,2000). The patriarchal organization of the family forces women to value theflexible organization of their professional work as the only way to cope withfamily and job duties. This is why more than 70 percent of temporary workersand part-time workers in most countries are women. Furthermore, while mostwomen are employed as generic labor, their educational level has risen considerablycompared with men, while their wages and working conditions have notchanged at the same pace. Thus, women became the ideal workers of thenetworked, global economy: able to work efficiently, and adapt to the changingrequirements of business, while receiving less compensation for the samework, and having fewer chances of promotion because of the ideology andpractice of the gender division of labor under patriarchalism.However, reality is, to use an old word, dialectical. While the mass incorporationof women into the paid labor force, partly because of their conditionof patriarchal subordination, has been a decisive factor in the expansion ofglobal, informational capitalism, the very transformation of women’s conditionas salaried women has ultimately undermined patriarchalism. The feministideas that emerged from the cultural social movements of the 1970s founda fertile ground in the experience of working women exposed to discrimination.But, even more importantly, the economic power won by women in thefamily strengthened their position vis-à-vis the male head of the family, whileundermining the ideological justification of their subordination on the groundsof the respect due to the authority of the male bread-winner. Thus, the divisionof labor in the new organization of work is gendered, but this is a dynamicprocess, in which women are reversing dominant structural trends and inducingbusiness to bring men into the same patterns of flexibility, job insecurity,downsizing, and offshoring of their jobs that used to be the lot of women.Thus, rather than women workers rising to the level of male workers, mostmale workers are being downgraded to the level of most women workers. Thislong-term trend has profound implications for both the class structure of societyand the relationship between men and women at work and at home.Autonomy and self-programmable capacity in labor would not yield itsproductivity pay-off if it were not able to be combined with the networking oflabor. Indeed, the fundamental reason for the structural need for flexibility andautonomy is the transformation of the organization of the production process.This transformation is represented by the rise of the network enterprise. Thisnew organizational business form is the historical equivalent under informationalismof the so-called Fordist organization of industrialism (both capitalist