ABSTRACT
The U.S. economy of the 1980s and 1990s is in transition. While the basic contours of the market-based economic system remain unchanged, the rules of the game that seemed to apply during the postwar period are in flux. Among political economists, a number of frameworks have been proposed to analyze economic restructuring in industrialized countries: most prominently, social structures of accumulation (SSA) and regulation theory. These analyses focus on the institutional and technical conditions underpinning, and eventually undermining, long waves of accumulation. While political economists have devoted substantial attention to the political and economic institutional arrangements fostering long waves of accumulation, the linkages between gender relations and accumulation during specific economic regimes have been undertheorized. To the extent that gender is analyzed within this restructuring literature, women’s increased labor force participation as a demographic, supply phenomenon is analytically separated from structural changes within production. In contrast, Bakker (1996) advocates viewing “gender as an interactive category of analysis in a complete account of the transforming global order.” Thus, gender interacts with class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality in specific historical contexts (Bakker 1996, 8–9; see also Mitter 1986).
