VARIABLE DEPENDIENTE

economic, and socio-cultural arenas and within the institutions of state, market, and family. Edholm et al. (1978) discuss three different types of reproduction—social

reproduction, reproduction of labor, and biological reproduction—that correspond to three different theoretical questions:

to what extent women’s position and male-female relations are crucial for the reproduction of the social totality, to what extent women’s involvement in this sphere is important to an understanding of their position within the society and to what extent this varies from one productive regime to another, how

women’s reproductive capacities are controlled and whether this control determines the position they occupy in any given group. (pp. 104–105) Each dimension has been discussed in a different body of literature, although the different bodies are linked to each other. The discussion on the reproduction of labor is directly linked to the domestic labor debate and was developed by feminist

economists. Later these debates converged with the discussion of welfare regimes and care regimes by feminist social-policy analysts (Razavi, 2007). The discussion on biological reproduction can be found in the debate on women’s reproductive rights and population policy. Finally, the discussion on social reproduction can be found in the feminist debates on democracy and citizenship.

Recent research on social reproduction pays attention to the link between production and reproduction and sheds light on the social reproduction as an ontological site for understanding political economic changes (Bakker and Gill, 2003; Picchio, 1992). In particular, Picchio (1992) discusses how the conceptual separation of production and reproduction in the classical political economy in the 19th Century influenced the ways in which we imagine the market and other social institutions. She takes the price of labor as an example. While earlier theorists such as Ricardo recognized the

reproduction cost of labor and integrated the cost into wages, the price of labor was increasingly perceived to be determined by labor market supply and demand in Ricardo’s later work and that of others (Picchio, 1992). This indicates that the

concerns of reproduction were externalized from the market. In other words, the labor market is inherently insecure because it ignores the cost of reproducing labor.

However, basic subsistence is essential for the reproduction of labor. Hence, keeping reproduction costs low is critical to profit as well as to labor market stability, and handling the “surplus” labor in the market is also an important issue.13

Picchio (1992) suggests that family and state play important roles in maintaining and supporting the labor market by providing basic subsistence for labor and for those who fail to be hired in the labor market. Picchio (1992) shows that the market has

disembedded from society through the process of commodifying labor and argues that social institutions such as the family and the state have developed in order to handle this rupture, which occurs in the process of disembedding.

Bakker and Gill (2003) articulate three dimensions of reproduction, which are slightly different from the three types of reproduction that Edholm et al. (1978) offer:

1) Biological reproduction of the species, and specifically the conditions and social constructions of motherhood in different societies; 2) The reproduction of the labor force, which involves not only subsistence but also education and training; 3) The reproduction of provisioning and caring needs that may be wholly privatized within families, or socialized or, indeed, provided through a combination of the two. (p. 32)

One notable difference is that the third definition is reduced from reproduction of the totality of society to care provision, which illuminates the tangible relation between social reproduction and the institutions of state and family. This shift did reduce the question of social reproduction as an institutional arrangement for providing welfare and care. However, Bakker and Gill’s (2003) focus on the institutional arrangement of

welfare provision is a fair starting point considering that citizenship is central to social reproduction, that the provision of welfare is directly linked to citizenship, and that the relationship between citizen and state through the medium of welfare provision has been challenged by neoliberal restructuring. Bakker and Gill (2003) take social reproduction as a site from which to observe the changes in production, economic exchange, institutions, social relations, and community. Their strategy provides a more solid point of departure; however, the question of how the discussion of each

dimension of social reproduction is linked to the reproduction of the totality of a society in an abstract sense remains unanswered.

The issue of social reproduction is important not only because it is about producing actual people and labor but also because the mechanism of this process is widely embedded in the norms and cultures that define a society (Edholm et al., 1978, Bakker and Gill, 2003, Mitchell et al., 2003). Yet revealing the links between the biological and labor reproduction and the abstract sense of reproduction of society requires a thorough examination of how the reproduction of population and labor is organized. The merit of the notion of social reproduction is that it sheds light on the changing relations between production and reproduction as well as on the relationships among different dimensions of social reproduction. However, using the term “social

reproduction” as a bundle of different dimensions without explaining sufficiently how the dimensions of social reproduction are linked may blur the discussion. In this regard, I will use the term “social reproduction” when it refers to the general relations to production. Otherwise, I will use the specific terms “biological reproduction” and “reproduction of labor” when I address these dimensions. In this way, I may be able to show how each dimensions of reproduction is linked to each other as I further the discussion in this dissertation.