Abstract
Scholars have established the difficulties inherent in proposals that employment may serve as a rescue route for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). However, they have paid little attention to the possibility that those who do strive for employment experience a clash between the prevailing neoliberal policy and the patriarchal culture dominant in their relationship with their violent partners. Based on 33 in-depth interviews with IPV survivors, this study used a grounded theory approach to follow women’s experiences in the personal and employment life domain. The authors propose that in order to understand employment in the field of IPV survivors, it is necessary to deploy a job quality perspective. Further, they found that a gendered conceptualization of job quality is required, one that is evaluated by three relational dimensions: employment spaces blocking IPV penetration, control over one’s own income and a sense of skill recognition. These relational dimensions show that in participants’ work lives, neoliberalism and patriarchy conflict with one another. Accordingly, the contradiction between these value systems must be taken into account in conceptualizations of their mutual reinforcement. The authors propose reconciling them by focusing on the challenging experience of women’s employment, from which the innovative meaning of job quality arises.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 932-949 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Current Sociology |
Volume | 68 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2019.
Funding
We are deeply indebted to Professor Lisa Brush for her significant support during the preliminary stages of our study. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Current Sociology for their invaluable comments. The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Keywords
- IPV
- job quality
- neoliberal policy
- patriarchal culture