女性就業に関する地理学的研究 : 英語圏諸国の研究動向とわが国における研究課題
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概要
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This paper seeks to review the existing geographical literature in the English-speaking countries concerned with womens employment, which has been quite a popular topic since the second half of the 1970s, and to obtain implications for Japanese geography, which has paid little attention to the subject thus far. The viewpoint here is limited to employed women workers living within metropolitan areas or their suburbs.In the second section, the background of interests in a proliferation of the topic as an important component of gender research is sought. In this regard, the author refers to the recent tendencies, especially in metropolitan areas of these countries, of expanding female-headed households (caused by a rise of marriage and childbearing age, a decreasing birth rate and an increasing labor participation rate), an increase of poor women and the impacts of economic restructuring of labor market.The third section, with the two sub-sections titled behavioral approach and structural approach, based on Rutherford and Wekerles terminology, is devoted to a detailed introduction of and a brief commentary on the previous studies obtained in the English-speaking world. The former approach treats the four specific themes of commuting/ residential choice, time use, feminization of poverty and labor market segmentation by gender, while the latter deals with the three themes of the impact of economic restructuring, feminization of poverty, and the relationship between local labor market and regional policy. It is demonstrated that the two approaches should be complementary, implying that integrating them will potentially contribute to a fuller understanding of the complicated female employment situation in segmented labor markets in the real world.Then, in the fourth section, after a brief explanation of temporal change of Japans labor market since the 1960s, when the womens employment rate began to rise rapidly in the context of fast economic growth, the previous literature on womens employment in the fields of economics and sociology, which expressed an earlier concern for this subject than geography in Japan, is referred to. A few papers in our discipline are also reviewed.In the concluding section, possible future tasks in Japanese geography are discussed. Spatial aspects of womens employment and the female labor market should be elucidated by geographers, since the past studies by economists and sociologists are insufficient in a spatial sense. Moreover, although employed women workers have often been regarded as ‘homo economicus’ in economics and economic geography, such a one-sided perspective, which can lead to a view that they are the subjects of exploitation by capital, is highly dangerous in light of an increasing tendency towards individualism and a diversification of value system in current society. The first segmentation of the labor market, or division of all workers into managerials (the primary labor market) and semi-skilled or unskilled blue collar (and partially white collar) workers (the secondary labor market) has intensively been under way in the context of a changing capital accumulation toward a flexible manufacturing system. Note that most employed women workers are included in the secondary labor market. Additionally, another or ‘secondary segmentation’ (Horn-Kawashima, 1985) has also been taking place within the secondary labor market, implying a division of all employed women workers into elite and mass. Specific spatial aspects of this ‘secondary segmentation’ have remained unclarified, although those of the first one have been discussed rather minutely.
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