The study of gender and organizations and of the gendering of organizations emerged, in part, as a response to what were understood to be problematic conceptualizations of labour and of an overly narrow focus on women and labour. Thus certain – and especially Marxist – conceptualizations of labour were understood to rely on problematic separations of nature and culture, narrow understandings of materiality and matter, and restricted understanding of value producing labouring activities. Such problems positioned the category of labour as an ineffectual and limiting surface for the theorization and analysis of the complex process of the gendering of work and of organizations. In turn, a focus on women and labour not only carried these problems associated with the category of labour, but also problems associated with the category ‘woman’, including its exclusionary effects. In contrast, an approach which focused on processes of the gendering of both work and organizations was heralded not only as enabling a move away from such problems, but also as opening out an understanding of gender as a relational process and of how organizational processes, practices and arrangements may themselves be gendered. As Joan Acker (1990) beautifully expressed it in Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations ‘gender is a constitutive element in organizational logic, or the underlying assumptions and practices that construct most contemporary work organization’ (Acker, 1990: 147).

While the shift away from labour and from women and work to the study of gender and organizations was an incisive and productive one, in retrospect what was lost in this move was attention to the category of labour. This tendency to bracket the category of labour has proven to be costly, not least because substantive, empirical shifts to arrangements of labour under conditions of post-Fordism (including recessionary Post-Fordism) render a focus on labour vital to the analysis of our times. Such shifts are multi-dimensional but include: changes to the assembly, composition and distribution of labour; changes in labour’s capacities and performative effects (that is, in what labour can do); the emergence of novel forms of value; and the unfolding of new sites of the extraction of surplus (including the body made cellular). Moreover, and crucially, many of these changes have played themselves out dramatically in regard to female labour. To offer a few examples: female labourers fuel precarious labour markets in the provision of domestic work and services (Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, 2002); an expanded bio-technological industry is putting the female body to work, and specifically female reproductive tissues, to harvest promissory value (Waldby and Cooper, 2009); domestic labour is now literally hardwired into the performance of securitized assets on financial markets (Adkins and Dever, 2014); and women’s waged-labour is increasingly central to household survival, including to debt-fuelled social provisioning (Roberts, 2013).

What such examples underscore is not only how female labour is a site of intense and complex activity in post-Fordist accumulation processes, but also how such labour is a now key object of analysis for understanding forms of economic and social change, including processes of financialization and economization. Indeed they suggest that rather than an obsolete framing, research focusing on ‘women’s work’ is both timely and necessary in the context of post-Fordist accumulation.

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