Economic Rationality and Globalization: A Feminist Perspective

KM: a section focuses on Polanyi's analysis of the social and political construction of markets and of "market society" in Europe, and then discusses the extent to which this type of analysis can be applied to the formation of global markets in the late twentieth century. It then looks at gender dimensions and the tension between the assumptions of economic rationality associated with market behaviour and the real-life experiences of women and men. Beneria then extends this analysis to the effects on women of globalization and the feminization of the labour force.