Gender, Work and Organization in the Time/Space Economy of ‘Just-in-Time’ Labour

Abstract

Formidable changes are occurring in the organization of work, production and the labour process. The emerging world of flexibility, part-time contracts and ‘just-in-time labour’ has invoked systemic disruptions in the sequential ordering of time/space. Feminists have been less than sanguine in their resistance to the placeless, timeless logic of ‘just-in-time labour’. The flexible fragmented present of post-fordist production is variously argued to be in contradiction to the embodied social relations through which women ‘weave’ their own autobiographies. While sympathetic to the concept of ‘feminine time’, its application to the present labour market context requires intense inquisition and critical reflection. The modern episteme consisted of a constellation of discourses linked to narrative realism. This is to appreciate that basic to all forms of gendered subjectivity is a conscious subject living in time and capable of uniting the literal with the virtual, or linking one temporal order (the present) with others (the past and future). The ‘timeless times’ and dislocated ‘spatial flows’ of our current era threaten the ability of gendered subjects to form their identities into sustained narratives. Focusing on post-fordist flexible specialization, this article challenges the fixed, unitary, relational subject of feminist critique and begins to deconstruct the problematics of gender and work in the time/space economy of ‘just-in-time’ labour.