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As is well known, with Can the Subaltern Speak Gayatri Spivak excluded and theoretically deconstructed the possibility of a subaltern subjectivation and thus also of political articulation. She showed that subalternity can only be grasped through elite thinking, which is why it does not even exist outside the elite presentation, and that it is always only a purely discursive phenomenon. This is the background of the thesis that a subaltern woman cannot speak and that some father or the rebel of the nation takes her place and speaks in her name. In other words, subalternity as such precludes a subjectivation that is transparent to itself, can never be the subject of its own history and hence the subject of its own emancipation. Yet this is something that we only know, something that only applies at the ontological level, where the concept of subalternity is void. At the strategic level – for Spivak this means at the level of political articulation – this void can be filled with an essentialist projection. Although a subaltern woman cannot speak per se, the Subaltern Studies Project can do so in her name, as long as it has a clear political interest in sight, namely as long as this interest means subverting official Indian history. This means the history, from which the subaltern woman is already excluded. It is only in the name of this interest that it makes sense to essentialize subalternity, thus making it politically effective. With the concept of “strategic essentialism”, Spivak attempts to provide a theoretical legitimization for a subversive political practice based on essentialism and to have it approved by deconstruction, despite its theoretical incompatibility with deconstruction. The point here is to attempt to salvage the political dignity of deconstruction and of postmodern thinking. The ideal political role of strategic essentialism that Spivak projects is to enable oppressed people of all kinds – nations, ethnic, sexual and other minorities – to present themselves and pose political demands, but without extinguishing internal differences and internal debates. It is to be used only temporarily and only for a specific political purpose, because otherwise there is a danger of abuse, nationalisms, totalitarianisms, etc. The concept of strategic essentialism actually became necessary, because the historical situation that we live in is articulated in two different languages: on the one hand in the language of postmodern, anti-essentialist reflection and on the other in the language of old essentialistic politics. Strategic essentialism is proof that there is no way to relate these two languages back to one another or to suspend them in another, universal language. Therefore, they can only be translated into one another. Since Humboldt, however, we know that no word in one language ever finds a perfectly corresponding word in another language. Translation is by definition imperfect, or it is only possible as a compromise that necessarily leaves a blind gap behind that constantly seeks its ultimate closure. Every translation – and in this it differs essentially from the original – urgently requires a further translation. For this reason, it is an endless task. In addition to a further meaning of the original, it also produces the need for yet another meaning and so forth. It can only close the gap by reopening it. This is specifically why the term strategic universalism was coined. It is not at all merely a reaction to the concept of strategic essentialism, which articulates a contrary and now allegedly neglected political motivation, such as the universalistic side of the binary relationship between the universal and the particular, but rather a kind of Derridian supplement: the concept of strategic universalism was developed to close the non-reducible gap between two languages of our historical experience, between the language of reflexive critique and the language of political practice.

Characteristics that have typically been associated with femininity must therefore be seen not in essentialist terms but as characteristics that women have developed in response to their socialization and their historical roles in society. The association of women with moral virtues such as caring comes not from women's innate moral superiority but from women's activities in the private sphere where these values are accepted in theory, if not always in practice. Since they are linked to women and the private sphere, however, these feminine characteristics have been devalued in the public realm, particularly in the world of international politics. The question then becomes how to revalue them in public life in ways that can contribute to the creation of a more just and secure world. Taking care not to elevate these feminine characteristics to a position of superiority, we can regard them as an inspiration that can contribute to our thinking about ways to build better futures. Even if the better future is not female, a human future that rejects the rigid separation of public and private sphere values and the social distinctions between women and men requires that the good qualities of both are equally honored and made available to all.

The other group of feminist responses to the post-essentialist idea of culture is less inclined toward a role for culture. One line of this response is to replace or minimize culture as a frame. Authors following this line are wary of strategic essentialism as a resource for women, emphasizing that regardless of which insider account of a culture is authorized, any account proceeds by excluding some other insider account, most often the account of those still further subjugated. 79 Ratna Kapur, for example, proposes that cultural claims be reframed; specifically, she advocates that sexual practices in India be evaluated not in terms of their cultural authenticity, but rather in terms of erotic desire and exclusion. 80 In response, Maneesha Deckha notes that proposals such as Kapur's offer a practical alternative only when such reframing is possible, whether in terms of sexuality, justice, pain, or other concepts. "Eliminating cultural claims at this historical moment would leave many vulnerable groups without any legal tool to guard against cultural disintegration, extinction, or exploitation… . Some essentialism in cultural claims must be tolerated. It will [*608] be a trade-off of potentially essentializing means for egalitarian ends." 81 In the context of immigrant women and the so-called cultural defense in criminal law, Leti Volpp formulates a modified strategic essentialism, in which cultural information going to an immigrant defendant's state of mind would only be allowed if this was consistent with the principle of antisubordination. 82 Cultural information would be permitted in the case of an Asian woman seeking to explain her mental state when she attempted to commit parent-child suicide, for instance, but not in the case of an Asian man seeking a cultural defense for his violence against an Asian woman. 83 In a similar vein, Deckha accepts the strategic use of cultural essentialism as a last resort provided that the cultural claim does not subordinate women or others within the cultural minority by impairing their autonomy or equality. She also accepts that such claims might privilege the interests of some vulnerable members and not others, so long as they meet this antisubordination condition. 84 In contrast to anthropologists like Mahmood, who seek to offer accounts of feminist insiders using strategically essentialist accounts of their culture as a tool of empowerment, legal academics like Kapur, Volpp, and Deckha are primarily interested in making nonessentialist or essentialist claims for a purpose and only secondarily as a description of how things are. Thus, they turn anthropological accounts of cultural tools into legal tools of their own.

The mainstream model is part of a whole epistemological approach which is built on duals of which the male-female dual is only one (McCloskey ; Nelson ). The public/private dual, for example, leads to the household being ‘exclusively regarded as the place of consumer spending and saving, but not as the location where the labour force is reproduced and where gender norms are reinforced and reproduced’ (van Staveren : 277). Dualism extends to scientific practice itself, with the rigour of the mainstream scientific method presented as the dual of intuition, precision the dual of vagueness, objectivity the dual of subjectivity, and so on. The former are all traditionally thought of as ‘male’ characteristics, while the latter are all traditionally thought of as ‘female’ characteristics. The dualistic characterisation of gender feeds into a social/institutional process by which power is maldistributed, including cognitive power. The gender classification of characteristics is socially generated to a considerable extent. Indeed, if gendered nature is not in fact dualistic, then the ‘male’ characteristics do not apply universally to men, any more than the ‘female’ characteristics apply to all women. The implication of what has been discussed so far is that a feminist epistemology differs from the epistemology underlying male-dominated mainstream economics. But, as Richards () argues, if epistemology were to be represented as a normal distribution, male and female epistemologies would be overlapping distributions. Nevertheless the distributional means are sufficiently distinct to allow us to think in terms of each having a characteristic epistemology (on average). Indeed, there are many leading non-mainstream male economists who adopt a different epistemological stance from the conventional approach, associating themselves with an epistemology normally characterised as female (on Keynes, see Forster-Broten , and on Boulding, see McMaster ). Their epistemology followed from the prevalence of uncertainty in an open system (of knowledge and of society). Foster (, ) similarly explores the epistemology of evolutionary economics in relation to the uncertainty associated with an open, evolutionary social structure. Perhaps the key concept here is ‘otherness’ (Kaul ). In a dualistic framework employing a ‘masculine’ epistemology, women are ‘the other’; feminine characteristics are to be avoided, so that science can produce demonstrable truths to be held with certainty. But in a ‘feminine’ epistemology, to recognise otherness is not to reject ‘science’ but to recognise the situated nature of knowledge as a general phenomenon, i.e. an epistemology not peculiar to women. This naturally leads to thinking of knowledge as arising from human logic rather than deductivist classical logic, being provisional and subject to uncertainty, and something which requires persuasion, demonstration being impossible. This is the epistemology of the Scottish Enlightenment, which arose in the context of a country which had recently formed a union with a dominant neighbour—it was hard not to recognise otherness in such a situation. The significance of this ‘feminine’ epistemology extends from philosophy to practice: Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science … identif[y] ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups (Anderson ). The feminist cognitive approach governs the approach to building (provisional, uncertain) knowledge in macroeconomics. But it also governs behaviour with respect to knowledge in everyday practice, and particularly with respect to risk and uncertainty. Thus, for example, behavioural differences between genders have been found within the financial sector, leading to the Lehman Sisters Hypothesis that the collapse would not have happened if women had been in charge (see van Staveren , but see Nelson for a different view). Such studies must of course take account of the fact that the women being studied already operate within a system of power relations, in employment, in society and in the household. But, that gendered epistemic differences have been seen by some to persist is significant, given the scope a hierarchical society provides for epistemic injustice (Anderson ). 4 Gender as a focus for alternative approaches to macroeconomics There have been developments outside mainstream economics which are specifically addressed to gender issues, for example, the international movement to promote Gender Budgeting, to scrutinise government policy from a women’s perspective. Since women account for roughly half of the population, focusing on the rights of women is not exactly a minority interest. But the feminist literature demonstrates the wider macroeconomic implications of taking gender seriously than simple sectional interest. On one hand, focusing on gender sheds new light on consumption, saving and investment behaviour, as well as the more traditional feminist concerns with the labour market. On the other hand, the issues thrown up by considering economics from a feminist perspective resonate more widely within non-mainstream economics. It has been argued above that feminist epistemology potentially has much wider application. Indeed, the gender perspective provides a good context in which to consider how differently economics might be done. One set of issues is raised by considering the nature of the individual, individual identity and the individual in society: ‘[f]eminist theory questions objectivity in knowledge production, argues for the importance of lived experience, and requires us to grapple with interconnected identities’ (Forster-Broten : Abstract). As Davis () argues, identity is inherently social, undermining a dualistic categorisation of the individual and the social. Thus, gender identity is profoundly influenced by social norms. Further, interpersonal relationships, in the economy, in wider society and in the household, are conditioned by the social nature of identity. This perspective was addressed in Smith’s ([] 1976) Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he further developed Hume’s concept of sympathy. This human faculty employed the imagination, not only to understand experience from another’s perspective but also to arrive at moral judgement. The moral motivation for particular behaviours (such as caring for others) arises both from a sense of fellow feeling with the caree and also from a sense of social obligation within a particular social structure. It is the influence of the social, and the scope for broad generalisations (e.g. about the behaviour of women), which makes these characterisations of individual behaviour relevant to macroeconomics. That gendered analysis does not lend itself easily to deductivist mathematical formalism is not in itself a problem for an alternative epistemology. There may well be scope for mathematical formulations of particular arguments, to be put together with arguments arising from other methods. The key difference from a mainstream methodology is that in a Keynesian/feminist epistemology, a formal mathematical model cannot constitute a full argument with respect to a complex, open social system. The system is open not least because of the emergent nature of such key elements as gender, gendered behaviour and social norms.

Witt further designates gender “the mega social role,” by which she means that one’s gender is a uniquely important social role, inasmuch as it takes priority over and systematically influences one’s other social roles (2011, chap. 4). She notes that some social roles, like being a mother or being a husband, are explicitly gendered and hence transparently influenced by gender norms. Other social roles, like being a doctor or being an academic, are not explicitly gendered, but Witt points out that gender norms still strongly influence how these roles are variably enacted by women and men, as reflected in differences in working hours, earnings, specializations, and clothing. Witt (2011, 76–77) contends that characterizing genders as mega social roles in this way explains how social individuals are synchronically and diachronically unified—why there is only one social individual with various social roles where each person is, rather than a multitude of distinct role occupiers: the mother, the doctor, the immigrant, and so on. This, she tells us, is why she takes genders to be the unifying essences of social individuals. Nonetheless, on Witt’s account, the role occupiers in her example can’t be unified into a woman in the same way that the bricks, boards, and so on are unified into a house. For clearly, the bricks, boards, and so on are many things that are brought together to form a house; whereas Witt pointedly takes the mother, the doctor, the immigrant, and so on to be just one social individual with various social roles. Presumably, then, she seeks to explain how these various roles can be combined, and this is why she designates genders as the uniessences of social individuals. A social individual’s various social roles are all organized according to that individual’s gender, on her view, and in this sense, they are unified by that individual’s gender. Given our preceding arguments against gender uniessentialism, however, it can be seen that this is a solution in need of a problem. A single person can occupy various social positions, both simultaneously and over time, in the same way that it is generally possible for a single entity to belong to various kinds or, equivalently, to instantiate various properties, both simultaneously and over time. So, for the social roles of mother, doctor, and immigrant to be combined, it suffices for them all to be occupied by a single person, as indeed often happens, regardless of whether those roles are unified in any stronger sense. Genders may still be uniquely important social roles, for roughly the reasons given by Witt, but again, this is compatible with straightforwardly identifying each woman and each man with the corresponding person or human organism. In response to Witt, some critics have questioned whether any specific social roles have such special importance. It might instead be thought that agents typically have many different social roles that interact with each other in complex ways, with none of those roles generally taking priority over the others (see Ásta 2012, 4; Cudd 2012, 3–4). Indeed, this point may be seen as a dictum of intersectionality studies (see Stoljar 2018, 130), notwithstanding Witt’s (2011, 101) assertion that “the intersectionality of multiple social roles with gender is compatible with gender being the mega social role.” Moreover, it might be thought that even if there are mega social roles in Witt’s sense, these needn’t be gender roles. Instead, one’s racial or ethnic identity, or one’s status as disabled or able-bodied, might appear to take priority over one’s other social roles, including one’s gender (see Cudd 2012, 5–6). Be that as it may, Witt’s characterization of genders as mega social roles essentially concerns how gender roles and gender norms significantly interact with other social roles and social norms, and all this is perfectly compatible with saying that it is people who occupy the relevant roles and are thus subject to the associated norms. Gender kind essentialism, as we indicated earlier, is thoroughly opposed by many feminist philosophers who, as Witt (2011, xii) reports, see it as “theoretically misguided and politically dangerous,” and as inimical to morally necessary social change. However, despite this prevailing hostility to gender essentialism, Witt argues that her gender uniessentialism is actually useful to feminism, and she further insists that, whatever the merits or demerits of gender kind essentialism, her gender uniessentialism does not entail it and hence does not require its defence (2011, 9–13, 15–16, 127–28). Yet, as we have seen, Witt’s theory actually includes a specific account of gender properties as social positions (as pointed out by Stoljar [2018]), and hence arguably entails a specific version of gender kind essentialism, given a minimal conception of kinds. Besides, as we have suggested, gender kind essentialism per se may appear fairly trivial and—as Witt herself indicates (1995; 2011, 7–9)—entirely harmless, once it is distinguished from stronger doctrines. In any case, Witt claims that gender uniessentialism, in combination with her normative account of gender kinds and her ascriptivist account of gender norms, has the virtue of drawing our attention to oppressive gender norms in a way that enables us to effectively oppose them, in line with standard feminist goals. As she sees things (Witt 2011, 47, 128–29), in order to end or reduce women’s oppression, it is better to concentrate primarily on how gendered social roles are systematically ascribed to individuals by others in society, and pay less attention to individual preferences and biases concerning these roles, including the preferences and biases of women themselves. She later clarifies (2012, 9), however, that she does not view the social position of being a woman as oppressive in itself, but instead takes the further social norms that are contingently associated with it to be frequently oppressive, and so apt for social change.

Here we see an instance of the “debunking” strategy of exposing a morally objectionable phenomenon as constitutively socially constructed, with the aim of showing that it is not inevitable but instead can be changed by social means (see Haslanger 2003; Witt 2011, 38). Notably, this strategy involves two ideas that are liable to be conflated: that of being socially constructed and that of being socially changeable, neither of which strictly implies the other (see Schaffer 2017, 2455; pace Díaz-León 2015, 1145; Griffith 2018, 395–96). For instance, the fact that so many people have high cholesterol is not socially constructed, but it is socially changeable. In contrast, the fact that public languages are widely used is socially constructed, but it is not socially changeable, at least not within any functioning society. Still, all this is compatible with acknowledging that the social roles and social norms with which Witt is concerned are both socially constructed and socially changeable, and that exposing their specific social character is useful for devising ways to alter or eliminate them, where some such outcome is deemed desirable.

As Smith (2022) recently noted, there is ‘unprecedented attention to the gendered effects of pandemics, in terms of not only health effects, but also the disproportionate social and economic impacts on women, yet little progress in rectifying these inequities’ (p. 202). Addressing this ‘gender paradox’ requires strategic manoeuvres on the part of feminist advocates, researchers, practitioners and policymakers (Smith, 2022). Advocacy for social protection that addresses gender inequality from a systems perspective is a welcomed advance, not least because it demonstrates a move beyond the erroneous assumption pervading development practice for over two decades – that cash (transfers) can solve all problems. Language can be performative (Ahmed, 2012), however, and simply calling a social protection system gender-responsive or gender-transformative does not make it so. Meanwhile, existing social protection systems may already have institutional features and benefit packages that advance gender equality, albeit implicitly. There is a need for action-oriented research that identifies what is already working in specific contexts and what might be adapted elsewhere, in addition to that which identifies gaps and problems. One of the high-level observations of this landscape analysis is the leadership of development institutions in the existing research. At the same time, we identified a need for studies driven by a qualitative interest in understanding process, politics and outcomes, particularly through the perspective of existing and potential social protection beneficiaries. Such research could go a long way towards creating feminist, nationally appropriate roadmaps for social protection systems.

Despite all this goodwill, disciplinary resistance to diversity will per­ sist even if individuals themselves are not discriminatory. Structural resis­ tance appears—at minimum—in the vertical hierarchy of the discipline, in evaluation methods, and in topical areas and alternative perspectives marginalized and devalued in economic thought. Entry and advancement in the discipline is subject to gendered (and racialized) power relations institutionalized in seemingly gender­neutral practices. Gender­biased student teaching evaluations and gender­biased peer review processes affecting publishing carry over to the evaluation of work for tenure and promotion review. Dominant group preferences, real or perceived, influ­ ence what economists study and how they study it. Gender ideology con­ ditions those preferences because economists are affected by social beliefs and values related to women, men, and gender relations. Moreover, the construction of valuable work as paid work alone in eco­ nomic thought has negative impacts on the visibility and perceived value of women and the work women do, including that of women economists. The fictional separability of paid work from unpaid work, the source of the labor supply, reinforces the degradation of unpaid work and those who do it.26 A changed understanding of the value of unpaid work could con­ tribute to changing the perceived value of those who do the work; it would likely be equity­enhancing. However, such a shift may be unwelcome, as it could disturb existing relationships that empower those associated with paid work relative to those associated with unpaid work. If the discipline is to become inclusive, our understanding of work must change in order to value the practical and theoretical contributions of nonwhite and nonmen people.27 I have sought to trace how these two points—persistent resistance to diversity and the construction of “work”—are connected by linking women and “women’s work” to actually existing economists. I found that economics remains a “man’s field” through structural resistance to women economists, through interpreting women’s economic activities as mar­ ginal to the “real business” of economics, and by delegitimizing feminist research about those activities. In practice, the delegitimization of femi­ nists’ paid work as economists is the devaluing of women’s unpaid work in economic thought. Because economic thought is influential outside the economics discipline, the delegitimization of feminist economic research devalues women’s unpaid work outside the discipline as well. The weight of the second point about work, that feminized unpaid work is associated with women to their disadvantage, is the same weight that has kept many women economists, especially feminists, from thriving academic careers. Critically, the association alone, whether or not it reflects reality for indi­ vidual women, is the foundation for bias that has kept women from getting jobs, from getting tenure, and even from the discipline itself over the past fifty years. The same weight, from the same source, has kept many more women from being hired and promoted outside economics as well. Efforts to “fix” structural resistance to diversity without addressing the devalorization of gendered work in the economics discipline are likely to have limited impacts. They may contribute to demographic diversity, but demographic diversity may not translate into epistemic diversity in a dis­ cipline that marginalizes critical thought. In effect, such efforts may have impacts inside the discipline but do little to shift the weight that the ortho­ dox conceptualization of work puts on women economists and women more generally. Hence, DEI efforts in economics are likely to remain uniquely challenging. As those efforts continue, “good apples” with influ­ ence should ensure that underrepresented economists have pathways to advancement with scope for genuine academic freedom. This is espe­ cially necessary when their intellectual contributions challenge the value systems and the unequal power relations that economic orthodoxy reinforces.

Gender ideology and existing structures that reinforce disciplinary norms and values can effectively marginalize certain areas of study and unorthodox interpretations of economic concepts. Concepts that appear “neutral” can act as definitional boundaries that entrench and naturalize orthodox interpretations at the expense of alternatives (Barker and Kuiper 2003; Méthot 2013).12 Disciplinary norms have been deployed (consciously or not) as women and underrepresented men enter and advance in the discipline.13 For example, disciplinary norms direct graduate students to research questions within histori­ cally constructed boundaries that define the “proper” terrain of eco­ nomics, pushing other questions into the margins (Mata 2009). Those boundaries are policed (intentionally or not) by faculty members, men­ tors, and others, often in what is understood as the student’s (or faculty member’s) interest. From the perspective of dissertation committee members, if a candidate wants to graduate, get an academic job, pub­ lish, and earn tenure, many would advise her to do what is expedient and not upset the apple cart by challenging those boundaries. The demographics and hierarchical structure of the discipline reinforce this directive: dissertation topics and journal articles need to appeal to committee members, reviewers, and editors, who, historically, have been white men. If this demographic was perceived to have preferences for cer­ tain topics or approaches—or distaste for a set of topics or approaches— pandering to these perceived preferences is strategic. They may be more likely than other demographics to view research on race or gender as “not of general interest,” for example, even though women and underrep­ resented men are the majority of the population of any country.14 Disciplinary norms and dominant epistemic values therefore structure economists’ careers, especially prior to tenure. It is noteworthy that pref­ erences that are shared, or are perceived to be shared, by members of a relatively powerful, relatively homogeneous group may distort group members’ own perceptions. Another mechanism that institutionalizes bias in tenure and promotion decisions is the adoption of seemingly gender­neutral student evaluations of teaching. Colleagues need not be sexists who discriminate against women for bias to be present; bias is a function of the socialization of stu­ dents into a gender ideology that devalues women. The adoption of teach­ ing evaluations is an example of how apparently neutral data collection can convert bias in one period to structural resistance to diversity in the next. Student evaluations of teaching embed resistance to women’s advancement in the structure of the occupation itself. Evidence indicates that the penalty for being a woman is especially high when women teach in male­dominated disciplines like economics (Lazos 2012; Mengel, Sauermann, and Zölitz 2019). While innovations in evaluation methods could give rise to sexism without sexists, about 50 percent of women report directly experiencing sex discrimination, and 33 percent of men and 44 percent of women report witnessing sex discrimination between 2008 and 2018 (CEDPC 2019: 49–50). At nearly 40 percent of the full sample, sex discrimination was the most common form of discrimination witnessed, followed by that based on race, research topics, and political views, all at 23 percent. These data suggest that gender bias remains one of the most significant chal­ lenges in the discipline. Within academic economics, gendered expectations, norms, and values are pervasive and influence recruitment, evaluation of merit in tenure and promotion, behavior within the occupation, formation of occupational atti­ tudes, occupational culture, and occupational stereotypes (Caplow 1954: 102). Gender ideology is internal to the discipline and its “climate”: it con­ tributes to the demographics of economics and to women’s—and men’s— gendered experiences in the discipline.15 Occupations with strict vertical hierarchies tend to profound conservatism (Caplow 1954). Historically, gatekeepers have been more likely to promote those who look similar and think similarly. Homogeneity has costs. Compared with other social sci­ ence disciplines, economics suffers from a lack of epistemic diversity. As Janet Seiz (1993: 187) cautions, “The lack of diversity in the scientific com­ munity and the powerful influence of ideology produce a commonality of unquestioned beliefs, limitations of vision, and conscious or unconscious wishes. False arguments may not be rooted out because those who would be inclined to challenge them—members of social groups with different experiences and interests—lack numbers and influence.” Women in economics, especially feminists, have been critical of this occupational culture from the time they entered the discipline in numbers large enough to advocate for women as a group in the early 1970s (Cohen 2019). They have argued not only that women are excluded but that research about women is marginalized. Hence feminists have been nega­ tively affected by the culture while they document and combat it with their research. They experienced disciplinary closure to women and the closure of intellectual space. The marginalization of feminist research is a function not of simple misogyny or protecting material interests alone. It is resistance to the way feminist research challenges orthodox interpretations of value and related distributions of power in the discipline, in the household, and in society. In emphasizing the value of reproductive labor and the dependence of production on reproduction, feminists challenge the centrality of paid work in economic theory and the popular perception of the paid worker as the primary contributor to the household (Himmelweit, Simonetti, and Trigg 2001). In this way feminist research challenges the centrality of men as the primary actors in economics and in life more generally.

For some decades, the informal economy was predominantly depicted as composed of negative attributes whilst the formal economy was portrayed more positively as the path to ‘‘progress’’, ‘‘advancement’’ and ‘‘modernization’’. In recent years, this hierarchical ordering has been inverted by a variety of scholars who have begun to portray the informal economy more positively as a route to progress. For them, the conventional normative portrayal of economic ‘‘development’’ and ‘‘progress’’ as a process of formalization has been countered with an alternative reading of progress and development as a process of informalization. Reporting a survey conducted in the Ukraine during 2005/2006, this paper has begun the process of evaluating critically this emergent more positive reading of the informal economy. This case study has revealed the relatively shallow permeation of formalization and that the informal economy is strong, extensive and a core integral component of the Ukraine economy. It also displays how although studies of Western economies discuss the complementarity of the formal and informal economies in terms of the volume of informal work, with affluent populations depicted as conducting more than deprived populations, in the Ukraine this complementarity takes a rather different form. Disadvantaged populations such as those living in deprived areas, lower-income households and those excluded from formal employment are more likely to conduct such work out of necessity in the absence of alternatives and to engage in more routine and less rewarding forms of such work. More affluent populations, meanwhile, are more likely to undertake such work out of choice, and to engage in more rewarding endeavor in this realm. The result is that uneven development in the Ukraine is not characterized by a distinction between formalized and informalized households. Instead, it is characterized by a distinction between households embedded in the formal economy who conduct more rewarding forms of informal work out of choice and households excluded from the formal economy who engage in more informal work but out of necessity and of a less rewarding variety. Put another way, affluent populations in the Ukraine have greater choice and opportunities regarding the forms of work they use and labour they supply, whilst the livelihood practices of deprived populations seem more a product of constraints and lack of choice rather than a matter of choice. This raises some key questions. Should economic policy continue to concentrate on the development of the formal economy in such post-socialist societies, especially given how few households rely on such a form of work as a coping practice? Or should some attempt be made to also facilitate the development of the informal economy, especially amongst deprived populations, in order to enhance the living standards of these populations? In other words, should all of the policy eggs be put into the basket of the formal sector or should attempts be made to also harness the ability of people to use the informal sector as a livelihood practice? Until now, such questions have not been high on policy agendas. Based on the dual economy thesis which assumes that there is a natural and immutable shift towards the formal economy, few have questioned whether giving primacy to the formal economy is the appropriate policy response. In this paper, however, we have started to display that informal economic practices are not some marginal sphere but instead, are alive and well in this post-socialist society. Indeed, informal economic practices might even be seen as the ‘‘mainstream’’ economy given how the majority of the population depends on them for their livelihood. However, just as the formal labour market is composed of multifarious forms of work, some of which have relatively negative impacts on economic development and social cohesion, and some relatively more positive impacts, and some of which are conducted out of choice and others necessity, this paper has tentatively revealed that the same appears to apply to the informal economy. It might well be the case therefore that it is far too simplistic to adopt simplistic binary hierarchical depictions that represent the formal economy as ‘‘good’’ and informal economy as ‘‘bad’’, or vice versa. Instead, a finer-grained understanding and more nuanced approach towards understanding the informal (and formal) economy is required that recognizes its plurality of forms and their varying consequences for economic development and social cohesion. If this paper encourages a move in this direction and beyond the over-simplified generalities that have too often plagued discussions of this form of work and resulted in pro- and antiinformal economy stances that advocate either purely formalization or wholly informalization as the way forward, then it will have fulfilled its objective.

At a slightly less cynical level, one might posit fundamental incompatibilities between mainstream scholars’ desire to work within the system and the incrementalism and com-mitment to stability that accompany that stance, and feminist scholars’ emphasis on socialchange. One might consider disciplinary definitions of what counts as policy issues wor-thy of investigation and probe the complex ways that the rational actor model, the organi-zational process model, and the bureaucratic politics model of policy-making (Allison1971) render women in particular, and race and gender more generally, invisible or insig-nificant. One might examine the continuing effects of Western demarcations of public andprivate spheres, as well as formal versus informal sectors of the economy, on the defini-tion of institutional practices warranting policy investigation. At a methodological level,one might look at the potent consequences of treating race and sex as control variables in a quest for universal explanation, which both naturalizes and renders invisible processes of racialization and gendering that reproduce and preserve hierarchies within the cur-rent world order. Much could be learned from sustained investigation of each of these hypotheses. In addition to presumptions concerning incrementalism, policy questions worthy of investigation, the fruitfulness of particular models of policy-making, and understandings of race and sex as demographic variables rather than socio-political processes, I would like to suggest that fundamental epistemological assumptions, which inform policy stud-ies, contribute to the erasure of feminist knowledge. Fundamental disagreements about ‘the politics of knowledge’ give rise to sanctioned ignorance. Dominant approaches to policy studies remain committed to the principle that ‘scient-ific policy analysis is and ought to be value neutral, ethically detached, and confined to predicting the consequences of alternative policy actions’ (Dunn 1983, p. 1, see also Hawkesworth 1988). Value neutrality as a regulative ideal is intended to free policy research from bias, distortion, and willful manipulation, to enable policy scholars to cap-ture ‘the world as it is’. Yet it is precisely this assumption about the possibility of value-neutral inquiry that feminist scholars have called into question. Feminist scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to the examination of method-ological ‘neutrality’ in the natural and social sciences. Their investigations have revealed extensive androcentrism in diverse research methods manifested in the selection of prob-lems deemed worthy of investigation, research design, definition of key terms and con-cepts, decisions concerning relevant evidence and counter-examples, data collection andanalysis, interpretations of results, and assessments of practical falsifications (Bleier 1979,1984, Fausto-Sterling 1986, Hubbard et al. 1982, Eichler 1980, Westkott 1979, Stanley and Wise 1983). Contrary to claims of neutrality, feminist research has demonstrated a pervasive level of sexism in scientific research that renders women invisible, ignores women’s concerns, precludes elicitation of certain kinds of information about women, reproduces gender stereotypes in the operationalization of terms, denies that gender mightserve as an explanatory variable in any instance, and reverts to functionalist explanations that accredit the status quo (Kelly et al. 1987, Benston 1982, Vickers 1982, Farganis1989). Sandra Harding has suggested that not only are the concepts, methods, and conclu-sions of inquiry permeated by androcentrism, but sexism also influences the recruitment of personnel in science and the evaluation of the significance of scientists’ research. ‘If women are systematically excluded from the design and management of science and their work devalued, then it appears that neither the assignment of status to persons within sci-ence nor the assessment of the value of the results of inquiry is, or is intended to be, value-neutral, objective, socially impartial’ (Harding 1986, p. 67). And Margaret Benston (1982,p. 59) has concluded that ‘present science practices a kind of “pseudo-objectivity” wherebecause they are not taken explicitly into account, subjective factors are uncontrolled and unaccounted for.’In contrast to methodologies developed in accordance with positivist assumptions about knowledge production, which explicitly deny any political dimension to ‘scientific’ inquiry, feminist research acknowledges that particular political convictions inspire its existence. Feminist convictions attune scholars to power dynamics that structure women’s and men’s lives. By making power dynamics visible, probing silences, absences, and dis-tortions in dominant paradigms, feminist inquiry challenges established explanatory accounts and identifies new questions for research. ‘It is the political commitment that femi-nists bring to diverse fields that motivates them to focus attention on lines of evidence others have not sought out or thought important; to discern patterns others have ignored; to question androcentric or sexist framework assumptions that have gone unnoticed or unchallenged; and sometimes to significantly reframe the research agenda of their discipline in light of different questions or an expanded repertoire of explanatory hypotheses’ (Wylie 2000, p. 16). Noting that methodologies involve philosophical questions about the nature of know-ledge, as well as practical questions concerning strategies of inquiry, feminist scholars have pointed out that methodologies are group-specific and as such political. The appro-priate methodology for any particular inquiry is a matter of contestation as scholars often disagree about the ‘way to truth’. Strategies that are accredited as legitimate means to acquire truth gain their force from decisions of particular humans; thus there is a power element in the accreditation of knowledge. Power is never the only factor involved, but neither is it a negligible factor. Feminist scholarship suggests not only that politics is embedded in the research pro-cess, but that particular political commitments improve the quality of analysis, heighten worth objectivity, and enhance the sophistication of research findings. Far from being a source of bias and distortion, feminist convictions and principles are deemed an asset to research. In marked contrast to positivist conceptions of science, feminist scholarship suggests that a commitment to struggle against coercive hierarchies linked to gender, race, and sexual-ity, a commitment to promote women’s freedom and empowerment, and a commitment to revolt against institutions, practices, values, and knowledge systems that subordinate and denigrate women, enhance the truth content and deepen the insights of feminist accounts of the world. Thus feminist scholarship not only breaks with but denies the possibility of guiding precepts of positivism, such as value-neutrality, norms of distanced, dispassionate research, and the quest for universal explanations.

As it stands, global finance is the only marker of globalization that exhibits the imperial spectacle of epistemic, self-privileging ‘self’ versus ‘other’ geographies and marauding financial practitioners. Intense competition across shores and centres for a sustained share of the worldwide market for financial services and products has caused a need for global management and regulation. This has taken on the colour of imperial, unquestioned, exclusive authority represented by institutions such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), which function as icons of Western ‘reason’, to rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investor Service, with no less a grandiose, global role (Marshall 2007). The net result has been a valorization of financial practices and arrangements on the ‘inside’, a demonization of OFCs located on the ‘outside’ – socalled temptations to be resisted – and appeals for regulatory strengthening at local and global levels. This is a rehearsal of one of the most tenacious tropes of colonialism – the idea that history is shaped around two opposing directions: the progress forward of humanity from slouching unawareness to erect, enlightened reason; conflicting with a regression backward to anachronistic space ‘from white, male adulthood to a primordial, black degeneracy usually incarnated in women’ (McClintock 1995, pp. 9 – 10). There is a need, therefore, to expose those tropes and discourses that render unproblematic the persistence of undemocratic, unaccountable global ordering structures in finance, and the idea that increased regulatory scrutiny of financial practices can make the difference in securing international financial stability. The emphasis on discourse is intended to highlight struggles for meaning-capture. Following Barnett and Duvall (2005, p. 55), discourse refers to the ‘social processes and systems of knowledge through which meaning is produced, fixed, lived, experienced, and transformed’. Examples of discourse include both written and verbal discussion, technical manuals and reports, press releases, the symbolic use of institutions and policies, and so on. Discourse is not a material action but it constitutes power in a much more indirect sense, endowing some actors (insiders with specialist knowledge and information) with privileges and prerogatives not enjoyed by others. This is clear in the divide between financial specialists and consumers, investors and shareholders, and between transnational networks of regulators and country officials. Here meanings and definitions of legitimate transaction, financial value, instruments and products are secured and contested. Hegemony in the Gramscian sense is achieved when there is intra-elite consensus on the universe of norms, definitions and deviations. This is the power to establish the ‘common sense’, that is, to express the advantaged position of dominant social groups with respect to discourse. To be sure, I make references to discourses of entitlement, science and objectivity, imperialism, nature and gender. These are all historically grounded discourses to which financial science appeals for its legitimacy, authority and respectability. These discourses do not exist transcendentally or without contests as there have been moments of destabilization and reaffirmation in the history of the finance industry, moments that allow for a profound questioning of financial rationalities. Reference is also made to tropes. Defined by various leading dictionaries as a figure of speech in which words are used in a way that changes their meaning, this article refers specifically to the meaning captured in poetics, that is, ‘[t]he intentional use of a word or expression figuratively, that is, used in a different sense from its original significance in order to give vividness or emphasis to an idea’. Put simply, a trope behaves like a metaphor, standing for meanings other than its literal sense. The metaphors deployed for describing OFCs, such as ‘havens’ and ‘secrecy shelters’, for example, tell us about other power relations – the power to classify, name, or construct discourses of risk and danger. To re-present OFCs as havens is to assist in the mobilization of stereotypes that elides the need for empirics or investigation of the individual OFCs in order to determine their susceptibility to financial abuses. Where attention is drawn to gender discourses at work in shaping understanding of the realm of finance and capital, I follow the feminist critique of the appeal of the natural (Weedon 1997). To be sure, the feminist literature stresses that there are stereotypes attributed to male gender and female gender that deny women co-equal status with men as fully human and fully equal beings. The stereotypes derive from patriarchal understandings of statehood and social systems where the preserve of men is as bearers of intellect and power, whereas for women, child rearing and caring is treated as their domestic preserve in keeping with an assumed weaker nature. This dichotomization of gender produces sexist biases that in utterance, imagery and deed render invisible the injustices women experience as a devalued feminine. The reproduction and deployment of such gender discourse unwittingly reinforce patriarchal values; and so is the case within the field of finance, where it experiences no self-doubt given its faith in a neutral reason going to work on the pursuit of the liberal freedom to exchange, invest and accumulate. In a chapter entitled ‘Gender and the globalisation of finance’, Tony Porter (2005) focused on gendered occupations in finance, gendered aspects of the relationship of the international financial system with the global South and the impact of gendered attitudes and images on global finance. He notes how traditional gendered inequality exists in the field of finance and discusses the ways global finance is fissured with images that affirm such inequalities, a matter that de Goede extends, of which there is more later in this paper. In the power relations between Western global governance authority structures, financial stability discourse is punctuated with traditional constructions of passive femininity, even as the situations under scrutiny are ones in which women seldom physically figure. Offshore financial centres in geographies of the South often give bulk expression to the term ‘tax haven’, and in the spiel are often coded feminine, meaning a devalued version of femininity. OFCs are also infantilized in the popular discourse, a matter addressed further below. The stock market as a perfect market exists as an ideal; but the materiality of the stock market rests with the command of information, the influence of arbitrage operations, and mastery of economic tools to determine the value of financial instruments, contracts and definitions. Until very recently this was the site of late-modern masculinized financial identities featuring toughness, hubris, and a capacity to steer questions on how money, profit and value are generated on to discussion about proper stock valuation, eliding, of course, the contestability of such modern financial practices. The above dichotomized domains along gender lines are rooted in socio-historical and cultural constructions of sex-gender based on biological difference. It affirms and extends the long-run effort to establish manliness as laudatory, and then a particular version of such manliness; one that valorizes enterprise, stamina, valour, heterosexuality and pride. Beynon’s (2002) allusion to diverse masculinities is of importance here. He refers to hegemonic masculinities as constructions forged in relation to weaker and subordinated forms, but notes that the contests are within and across the broad class and racial spectrum. Beynon also adds that consensus around a hegemonic masculinity type is often secured through the ridiculing or absorption of alternative constructions. He avers that financial men gained male ascendancy following the demise of many heavy industries (e.g. coal mining) and the advent of post-Fordist changes in the composition and technical skills requirement of the labour force. Power, as it were, shifted from the male camaraderie, physical strength and trade union solidarity of the Keynesian era to mastery in the world of free market economic policies, computer processes and financial engineering. Popular consciousness was shaped by the culturally praised achievement of financial investors as they contrasted with the more mundane everyday lives of most men. This mirrored developments in the intellectual world where struggles for meaning-capture by knowledge producers and ‘hidden persuaders’ (as per Hodgson 2003) of the neo-liberal orthodoxy against those of the Keynesian variety were marked by a triumphalism of both historical moment and episteme (at once the ending of the Cold War, and trust in financial specialists’ – largely male – judgement).

Discourses play a significant role in this process of construction of meaning: “The world is not objectively accessible, but instead is imparted through language through discursive processes and symbolic interpretations” (Uther 2014: 60).2 This means that much of the meaning-construction of social reality, which the brand of social constructivism espoused here relies upon, is done through what many authors call discourse. The frames that are studied in this analysis are considered as elements in discourse. Discourse, here, is understood, following Maarten Hajer, as “an ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices” (Hajer 2006: 67). This captures the simultaneous constructedness and constructiveness of the social meaning of material objects: Through language and practice humans both capture the meaning material objects have, and change or reproduce this meaning. Similarly, Dryzek defines discourse as “a shared way of apprehending the world. Embedded in language, it enables those who subscribe to it to interpret bits of information and put them together into coherent stories or accounts” (Dryzek 2005: 9). This means that meaning is constructed in discourses in “supra-individual and rather unconscious” ways (Methmann et al. 2013a: 6). At the same time, human actors, in this study, will not be considered as entities subordinate to a super-human structural power of discourse. Actors, according to Uther’s discussion, are both constructed and constructing (see Uther 2014: 55). Following her approach, actors are considered to be the central active agents in any meaning-making situation, and thus not helpless pawns in the flow of discourse: “The actor is not passively subdued to the discourse, as, for example, the subject of Foucault, but it actively participates in shaping the discourse through its own interpretive achievements” (Uther 2014: 66).3 This two-fold characterization of actors as both constructed and constructing is captured by practice theory. The terms ‘practice’ and ‘discourse’ are considered to not be antithetical to each other: Practices are “meaningful patterns of action, which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and around the material world” (Adler and Pouliot 2011: 4). Thus, (non-linguistic) practices are understood to interact with (linguistic) discourses and in this interaction construct or deconstruct meanings. Other authors reconcile linguistic and non-linguistic elements of meaning-construction by subsuming both under the term ‘discourse’(see Anshelm and Hultman 2015: 11; Methmann et al. 2013a: 6) As Dryzek (2006: 3) argues, “discourses are a matter of practice as well as words, for actions in the social realm are always accompanied by language that establishes the meaning of action” (see also Adler 2008: 198). I assume, in line with these authors, that meaningful action—or practice—and meaningful talk—or discourse—construct or deconstruct the ideational meaning of an object. Further, I assume that practice is meaningful action which acts out certain meanings about the world, thus making it causally relevant.

Feminist economics has also deconstructed dominant narratives of the European crisis and the austerity measures of the last decade. It has examined the financial and production consequences of austerity and their connections with social reproduction (Gálvez 2013; Rai and Waylen 2013). FE highlights the role of households—and the women within them—as the units that actually bear the burden of economic adjustments. On the one hand, neoliberal management implies the dismantling of the welfare state and the subsequent transfer of resources from the state to private capital in education, healthcare, and social protection—services that are basic to a guarantee of some progress toward equality. This dismantling also entails the eradication of spaces for collective deliberation and negotiation and the loss of social control over political decisions. On the other hand, neoliberalism reinforces the private sphere in two ways: 1) commodification and financialization of daily life gives more power to markets (as explained below), and 2) households are forced to handle greater responsibility with whatever (private) resources they have available, by modifying or reducing their consumption or developing “survival strategies” (Pérez Orozco 2014). These strategies are privatized in households and made invisible, as no policies are made out of them. But they are performed by particular subjects. Women, in their intersection with specific class, race, migration status, and age positions, are the ones who take on the role of home protector, guarantor of the household savings, and party responsible for family well-being (Bassel and Emejulu 2017). This capacity to cope is not idealized by FE; the purpose is to politicize it. In summary, from a feminist perspective, the great recession is not only an economic crisis, but a crisis of social reproduction, which has intensified the precariousness of life and individualized its risks. It is also a care crisis in the sense that the need for care is increasingly fulfilled in the market by those who can pay for it or precariously dealt with by those who cannot. Faced with the neoliberal management of the crisis, FE does not have a consensus on how to respond, but it has multiple proposals enriching one another: A reversal of austerity policies. • Progressive fiscal reform that incorporated gender criteria (such as a family model that treats equally male breadwinners and female caregivers. • A fight against fiscal fraud. • Restoration of public resources to reverse cutbacks in the welfare state and enlarge it to include people who have been excluded until now, ending women’s second-class citizenship. • Development of benefits and services that have historically been provided by unpaid work, such as preschool education and care for dependent people. • Defense of the commons, the limiting of which is part of a new attempt to accumulate by dispossessing others (Caffentzis and Federici 2014). • Gender-sensitive budgets that take into consideration impacts on gender issues and the well-being of different social groups. One example of these proposals is the so-called F Plan (Elson 2015). It was conceived as more than a simple economic approach to growth and employment creation. With its focus on building a caring and sustainable economy for people and the planet, the plan defines a framework for understanding the impact of the financial crisis on three interacting spheres: finances, production, and reproduction. It proposes an economy based on mutual support and respect for human rights, as well as being oriented toward the wider and inclusive objective of improving well-being to reduce inequality, not only today, but also for future generations. Feminist Views on the Privatization and Commodification of Intimate Life Feminist economics strongly resists the expansion of the neoliberal development model and the commodification of intimate life. It denounces the logic of profit permeating such areas as affections, sex, care, and biological reproduction, as we will now explain. Affectivity is becoming increasingly important in production processes for various reasons. First, the workplace has mobilized the affections to increase productivity with quality circles, team work, promotion of creativity, and enhancement of communication abilities. Second, in parallel to the care crisis, affective work has emerged as an economic sector in itself, with a multiplication of firms that “take care” of the citizen according to the logic of commodification. Third, production and objects on sale are becoming immaterial, affections and experiences are becoming commodities. Fourth, firms are developing loyalty management mechanisms to build long-lasting and trustful relationships between firms and clients. Fifth, in a complex environment, mediated by new technologies, firms present themselves as necessary mediators to manage and guide new social relationships in the creation of value (Alfama, Bona, and Callén 2005).

Feminist methodology is defined as a feminist theory on the principles of conducting feminist research, indicating a course of application and thereby concentrating on the very process of doing feminist research (Harding, 1987; Jayaratne & Stewart, 1991). These principles are derived from the aforementioned approaches and viewpoints, such as the ethics of care and feminist epistemology. Feminist scholars propose to change economics as a discipline by accepting the vulnerability and interdependency of human beings as a core assumption, which contrasts with the existing figure of a rational economic man that underpins neoclassical economics (Blank, 1993). This figure of homo economicus is portrayed as a man that “springs up fully formed, with preferences fully developed, and is fully active and self-contained. He has no childhood or old age; no dependence on anyone; no responsibility for anyone but himself” (Nelson, 1996b, p. 31). To understand the economics of becoming, which constitutes the underpinnings of the feminist economics, as presented in the thesis of this chapter, is, however, to understand that “[h]umans are born of women, nurtured and cared for as dependent children, socialised into family and community groups, and are perpetually dependent on nourishment and shelter to sustain their lives” (ibid.). According to Kenneth Boulding (1986), the presiding orientation of economics toward “how society was organized by exchange” rather than how “society was ‘provisioned’” has contributed to the failure of modern economics. Feminist economists engage with caring and social provisioning as starting points in their methodologies and point out definitive goals such as: “satisfaction of basic physical needs, realization of one’s potential, fairness, freedom, participation, good social relations and ecological balance” (Goodwin et al., 2005, p. 9). These goals are very similar to the central human functional capabilities put forward by Martha C. Nussbaum (2000) in her book Women and Human Development. By naming ten particular capabilities, Nussbaum defends a set of universal values that could be read as “basic political principles” (p. 70) for the improvement of women’s well-being. These basi principles follow: “life of a normal length, bodily health, bodily integrity, being able to use the senses, to imagine, think and reason, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy, and control over one’s environment: political and material” (pp. 78-80). The capabilities approach, introduced by Amartya Kumar Sen (1985) and developed by Nussbaum, inspired many economists in their practical, comparative, and quantitative research on the quality of life. The work of the British economists, Paul Anand, Graham Hunter, and Ron Smith (2005), exemplify such applied research since they operationalize and test Nussbaum’s approach by using data from the British Household Panel Survey. They “find evidence that a wide range of capabilities exhibit statistically significant relations to well-being [and] that the relations are complex and slightly different for men and women” (Anand, Hunter & Smith, 2005, p. 9). The Basic Capabilities Index developed by the Social Watch (Social Watch, 2015a) constitutes another example of applied research. Although statistical measurement is often reductive (losing specific context and culture dimensions), which is also the case if big data is used (e.g. a prevalence of “WEIRD” in samples – “WEIRD” standing for “Western”, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic countries’ citizens (Kosinski et al., 2016)), this index was created to demonstrate the critical deficiencies experienced by a large part of the world’s population and to encourage countries in the Global North to keep their promises with respect to the Millennium Development Goals (reformulated as the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015). The indicator is based on three components: child mortality under 5, maternal reproductive health, and education measured in registrations for primary schooling, literacy, and the number of children finishing 5th grade (Social Watch, 2015a). A news release from 2007 states that “at the current rate of progress, universal access to a minimum set of social services will only be achieved in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2108” (Social Watch, 2015b). Undoubtedly, this message clearly expressed the gravity of the situation, and therefore meets the goals of the Social Watch. However, feminists often reject this kind of universalism. They view it as a reflection of the aims, values and experiences of dominant groups, in this case, as countries in the Global North imposing a certain vision of development on countries in the Global South. They also question the grounds on which its claims presumably meet a shared set of needs and interests between women or men or between any other homogenous groups, such as nations (Harding, 1999). Referring to Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges,” Drucilla Barker (2003) posits that “collective subject positions are always socially constructed and partial” (p. 107). This brings us closer to the discussion on research methods used by feminist economists.

What would a different system of global economic governance look like that might better fulfil commitments to gender equality and human rights? A gendered analysis of global economic governance would begin from the premise that the social forces engaged in global capitalism and its economic governance are not only structured along the lines of class, race and ethnicity but also are gendered in terms of their prevailing ideas, institutions and power potentials. Some guiding questions might include those listed in Box 7.2. Each of these components of social forces that could reshape global economic governance will now be considered in turn. These consist principally of two broad types: ideologies that justify or legitimate a given political order, and the commonly held predispositions or assumptions that lead people to treat the economic and social world and its interactions as if they are self-evident or part of the ‘common [figure 7.2 OMITTED] sense,’ which structures what is conceived of as possible in the realm of policy/politics. From a gender perspective it is crucial to underline how both the ideology of disciplinary neoliberalism as well as the ‘common sense’ that governs the prevailing concepts of global economic governance does not take into account the economy of daily life: how people exist on a daily and intergenerational basis through the interaction of paid and unpaid work. The dominant perspective ignores the way in which economies are not only a set of financial transactions but also a collection of work and labour processes, some of which are paid and others unpaid, and how each of these processes involves distinct sets of social relations as well as economic inputs and outputs. To understand why this is the case we need to think through the way that production for the market place is related to how families and communities provide the very conditions for production to occur. Thus, productive activities in a capitalist system normally refer to the processes of creating goods and services that can directly create profit. By contrast, the reproductive economy consists of people, and it involves activities and processes that are not merely associated with biological reproduction but also the feeding, caring, replenishing, and daily maintenance and socialization of family, household and community members. Reproductive work and voluntary community work could in principle, be done by men or women – but provisioning has been socially constituted as mainly the responsibility of women rather than men in most societies (Elson 1998). However, it is impossible to conceive of production in the absence of the reproductive economy since it encompasses work carried out by human beings for direct support of the productive sector through for example the produced input of labour. Indeed, US researchers have estimated that accounting for all unpaid domestic work would add 80 per cent to GDP (Zuckerman 2014). However, at best, in the perspectives that prevail in the governing discourses of global economic governance, provisioning remains largely invisible and thus outside of the scope of public policy. At worst it is a lacunae or ‘strategic silence’ in the generic frameworks of knowledge that constitute orthodox economics. By contrast a key focus and purpose of feminist economics is to make this unpaid work visible and thus to reconstitute our understanding of the ‘economic’ in order to restructure the provision of resources (including time) and care in a more equal fashion between women and men, in both private and public institutions. A feminist perspective therefore suggests a wider vision of the economy that sees national output as a product of the interaction of the domestic sector alongside the public, private and financial sectors, producing services that include the reproduction of the labour force on a daily and generational basis. Whilst outside the formal production boundary, this work affects the quantity and quality of labour supplied to production; it also affects ‘the stability of the social framework in which market and state are embedded’ (Elson 2002). Such a vision of the economy, if integrated into the institutions of global economic governance, would transform economic analysis and policy prescriptions. For example, policy makers would include social reproduction (including the ‘care economy’) in considerations of labour market, social, monetary and fiscal decisions since social reproduction normally depends on some form of income support. This can happen through wages, transfers by governments or access to arable land and informal sector activities. Conversely, many of the insecurities that are inherent in the labour market and other forms of access to money are absorbed and mediated at the household level. The degree to which households can respond to market downturns and crises – the extent to which women’s unpaid labour can act as a shock absorber – in turn affects the way economic growth occurs. Whilst many economists recognize gender relations as a factor of analysis at the microeconomic level, macroeconomics remains focused on aggregates and policy objectives such as price stability. The traditional policy instruments of macroeconomics such as fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies are constructed as if they are gender-neutral (Cagatay and Erturk 2004). If by contrast, there is a recognition that macroeconomic policies rest upon a set of distributive relations across different sectors of the economy and involve distributive choices across various social groups (Elson and Cagatay 2000), then gender relations (along with class, race and ethnicity) should be incorporated into the analysis of those distributive social relations. This would mean integrating an analysis of the gendered divisions of labour and decision making in the different spheres of economic activity. This ‘bottom up’ approach whereby economic policy would be steered by the daily realities of women and men as they experience the intersections of social reproduction, production and finance would go a long way towards ‘re-embedding’ economics in society. Such an approach would ask how people meet their daily needs, what the requirements are for human well-being, how they are being met, what constraints exist to meet such needs, and what economic policies support or undermine daily needs and well-being. Such a focus on the unpaid economy requires a commitment of public investment in basic infrastructure such as access to fuel and fresh drinking water as well as social infrastructure such as health and care services. It will also require some redistribution in the remaining unpaid work between women and men, boys and girls. This would require reconsidering what is meant by progress, efficiency, growth and development. Women’s movements and other civil society groups have argued that we cannot go back to the model of economic development that existed before the crisis as this signalled growing inequalities, environmental destruction and, a growing global domestic crisis witnessed in the huge shifts in social and family arrangements. Restoring growth – a return to normalcy – is insufficient if the goal is a more just, equitable (in terms of class, race/ethnicity, caste and region) and sustainable (conserving natural resources) development (Jain and Elson 2010: 19). This does not mean ‘anti-growth’.8 Economic growth – if it is defined as the increase in the real use-value of economic activity – can mean many different things with different environmental and social implications. If it is simply measured according to conventional national income accounts premised upon exchange-value it can mean more private automobiles or better public transport; more strip mining or child care centres. Thus thinking about organizing the economy in a different way to avoid environmental degradation and to focus on needed social investments and ‘decent’ work which provides sufficient income and recognizes workers’ rights would be part of a new common sense and growth strategy premised upon human needs. For example an element that would be central to a new growth strategy would be food sovereignty, that is, local and democratic control over the provisioning of food, something that has not been delivered by the liberalization of international trade in food. Recognizing that women make over half of the agricultural work force in developing countries, better land rights for women and more equitable public investment and regulation of markets to support women farmers would undergird this new approach (Jain and Elson 2010). In economics, students are demanding a more real world-based curriculum of study that moves away from the neoclassical free market theories and abstractions that dominate teaching and modelling.9 Reform of the educational curriculum more generally and particularly in the field of economics, is a key aspect of creating a new ‘common sense’ of economic literacy that can underpin new frameworks of global economic governance. This will require a revolution in the way in which economics is both taught in schools and universities and discussed in political discourse and particularly in the media, in ways that encourage a variety of different viewpoints and policy prescriptions. It will also require greater representation of heterodox (including feminist) economics in the policy community to realize a more encompassing, democratic model of global economic governance. This means that what is considered a crisis and how winners and losers are identified will also depend on the type of knowledge at the heart of governance: educational efforts of transnational feminist advocacy networks have been important for challenging orthodox economic understandings of global economic governance. They have played a particularly important role in issue creation and agenda setting and influencing policy discourses towards the acceptance of a more heterodox, socially embedded economics (for example, the International Gender and Trade Network, the Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics, the Development Alternatives Network for Women (DAWN) and Women in Development Europe (WIDE).10

Processes of neoliberalisation have generated distinctive forms of gender and racial oppression, and anti-democratic governance, as well as political and economic cri- ses. Contemporary authoritarian regimes have emerged on this terrain to promote overtly anti-democratic and racialised and gendered forms of popular sovereignty to sustain ever more deeply crisis-ridden neoliberal social orders. Typically, these authoritarian regimes present themselves as welfarist in orientation, thereby osten- sibly challenging neoliberalism. A closer examination of these policies, however, reveals ongoing neoliberal trends—including a deepening focus on the reform of the household and the marginalisation of minorities—complemented by deepening authoritarianism to curb dissent. Since 2016 for instance, as a response to growing social discontent, China has initiated reforms to the hukou system and its stark rural/ urban divide by, for instance, encouraging permanent migrant settlement, and pro- viding healthcare and pensions for migrant workers. Responsibility for migrant set- tlement, however, rests with local governments, which lack resources and incentives to integrate migrant workers. Migrant children continue to be mostly excluded from high-quality state schools and educated in low-quality private schools or sent back to rural areas, leaving them ill-educated for anything other than low-paid service work (Goodburn 2020). The lack of support for childcare, eldercare and domestic work means that such work has become privatised and marketised. This has had par- ticularly negative effects on women due to the influence of a new discourse on moth- erhood, tied to notions of suzhi, and promoted by local communities and the party- state, which has reversed the one-child policy and adopted a pro-natalist policy in response to an ageing population. Alongside undertaking care work, mothers return- ing to rural communities are being incorporated into an informal, precarious econ- omy of sub-contracted light manufacturing work (Zhang 2021). Urban low-skilled female workers are also increasingly opting for flexible informal service sector work to cope with increasing care demands (Dong 2020). The social credit system seeks to consolidate the political economy and moral economy of Chinese neoliberalism as a ‘techno-moral fix’ through ensuring market-based legal and regulatory com- pliance and a moral discourse of trustworthiness which is connected to the notion of suzhi (Zhang 2020; Sum 2019, 396). The discourse of suzhi is also central to the treatment of minorities in the province of Xinjiang. Since 2016, the Uyghur and other minorities have been subjected to mass detention in ‘re-education’ camps that aim to raise their moral, mental and physical suzhi to, supposedly, that of the Han majority and, as Cooper (2021, 110) points out, to expropriate their labour in supply chains for global brands (Kam and Clarke 2021, 636–637). The absence of suzhi has been blamed for Xinjiang’s poverty and the inability of minority residents to adapt to the market economy (Zukosky 2012). In India, the government of Narendra Modi has gone further than any previous Indian regime in embedding neoliberal reforms in a moral framework, namely that of Hindutva, an upper-caste, conservative political Hinduism (Chacko 2019). Since 2017, seeking to consolidate a broad base of electoral support, Modi has presented himself as a welfarist Prime Minister launching numerous schemes tar- geting poor communities including the urban poor, women, youth, Muslim women and even the transgender community, which was officially recognised as a legally protected minority in 2014. A closer examination of these schemes, however, reveals marketised welfare delivery with minimal benefits and an elevation of Hindutva social norms and cultural mores which are Brahmanical and patriarchal, positioning left-liberals, Christians and Muslims (particularly men) as enemy oth- ers to be excluded, while lower castes are to be hierarchically incorporated into a Hindutva social order. For example, micro-credit schemes involving private, and public sector, banks and private sector companies associated with the gig econ- omy, have been targeted towards lower caste, urban poor communities and par- ticularly women, whose labour force participation has fallen precipitously low. The schemes have been promoted as rejecting an overregulated, patronage-driven state created by liberal elites and empowering female family members to contrib- ute to the family income and national growth through self-employment, utilising traditional caste- and gender-based occupational skills (Chacko 2020; Gudavar- thy and Vijay 2020). Surveys conducted on the impact of micro-credit schemes on women indicate, however, that they have produced few new businesses and low-quality jobs. Moreover, public health and education systems remain woefully underfunded. The Modi regime has also intensified pre-existing authoritarian ten- dencies. Farmer resistance to neoliberalising agricultural reforms was met with force and internet shutdowns and was framed as threats to the nation by separa- tist minorities. Violent campaigns and legislation against Hindu-Muslim romantic relationships have been framed as protecting Hindu women’s rights to education and work against oppressive Muslim men (Chacko 2020). The stripping of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status was consistent with long-held Hindutva complaints about the special treatment given to Muslims in India by liberal elites, but it was also justified as opening the region to investment, women’s rights and economic growth. In the name of disciplin- ing and protecting Indian civilisation, moves to privatise public sector companies and marketise agriculture have occurred alongside the introduction of strategic protectionism which aims to encourage foreign investment in some sectors while reducing the role of foreign capital in others; supports selected domestic compa- nies; and rejects or renegotiates free trade agreements, which are now blamed for deindustrialisation (Chacko 2021). The case of India has some similarities with Hungary where the government of Viktor Orbán combines a moral framework of white Christian, patriarchal nation- alism with strategic protectionism to reduce foreign ownership and boost selected domestic capitalists in key sectors while encouraging foreign investment in oth- ers and decreasing reliance on international financial institutions. This has been combined with more traditional neoliberal policies such as the constitutionalised enforcement of balanced budgets; inflation targeting and debt reduction; tax cuts; weakening of labour rights; consumer price interventions; anti-poor policies such as the criminalisation of homelessness; and workfare-ist policies. In addition, pro- natalist policies aim to consolidate cross-class support by tying social rights to having children; targeting heterosexual working families engaged in formal paid employment with tax benefits; baby and marriage-incentive loans; child-related debt reduction; and mortgage assistance (Geva 2021; Fodor 2022). Such policies often exclude minorities such as Roma, who remain outside of formal employ- ment, and disadvantage lower class women who must continue low-paid work to obtain a modicum of state support. Leaders have justified discrimination in the labour market as well as the lack of state support for care work through an ‘anti- gender’ discourse opposing gender equality, and through the sentimentalising of feminised care work (Fodor 2022). A limited tax base has contributed to falling expenditure on health and education and the exacerbation of social inequalities (Stubbs and Lendvai‐Bainton 2020, 550–551). Recognising that authoritarian protectionism in India, China, and Hungary and other countries (E.g. see Stubbs and Lendvai‐Bainton 2020, Ramos 2021) has done little to resolve the crises of unemployment and social reproduction that have become major sources of discontent is important for finding a way forward for those opposed to this politics. It is these weaknesses that should be the focus for building the progressive hegemonic approach with alternative moral claims that Cooper (2021, 139) advocates. To this end, the ‘great resignation’ of workers in the low-paid services sector in the USA and the successful farmer protests in India, which forced the government to shelve marketising agricultural reforms, are perhaps hopeful signs for the possibility of building of new social democra- cies by foregrounding issues of labour expropriation and social reproduction.

One can pursue economic ontology in a variety of ways. They differ from one another in regard to the aims pursued, the theoretical resources employed, and the relationships envisaged between the substance of economics and general ontological doctrines. chapter 2 by Harold Kincaid deals with some of these issues. Economic ontology may be practised as an exercise in direct description of what is believed to be the fundamental nature of the economy, or it may be viewed as an exercise in describing or prescribing the ontological presuppositions underlying theoretical accounts of economic phenomena or the ontological convictions held by economists. In the first guise, it is an attempt to directly represent economic realities, while in the second mode, it is directly about economics and only indirectly about the economy. Another distinction is that between descriptive and revisionary ontology (Strawson 1959). We may pursue a description of the ontological categories and presuppositions that we, or some others, work with. Given that much of the ontological underworld in our belief systems is implicit and hidden, the task of articulating it in explicit and systematic form may not be easy. Descriptive ontology in this sense is a challenging project. Revisionary ontology, on the other hand, is an attempt to change, rather than just describe, the prevailing ontological categories and presuppositions of a belief system: it is a matter of constitutional revision. Examples of the latter include John Dupré's criticism of the ontology of mechanism in chapter 16; the suggestions to revise the ontology of economic agency in chapter 7 by John Davis; and Philip Pettit's re-articulation of the self-seeking economic man in terms of virtual reality in chapter 5. Most of the contributions to the present volume belong to descriptive rather than revisionary ontology. It is to be noted that these two endeavours do not exclude one another. In particular, if one wants to do revisionary ontology, say, in order to replace the prevailing ontological windows of certain branches of economics, one had better have accomplished an analysis in descriptive ontology so as to be in possession of an adequate account of the categories and presuppositions that underlie those parts of economics. Some critical writing on economics that has such a revisionary character is clearly not based on an adequate descriptive ontology. It is difficult to do good descriptive ontology. It is more difficult to do good revisionary ontology, based as it should be on sound descriptive ontology. These perspectives are connected with others, such as those of a priori and a posteriori approaches to economic ontology. One can do economic ontology in an a priori fashion by starting from some general philosophical ontology, then try to apply it to parts of economics in pursuit of description. If the fit is poor, one may then switch to a revisionary gear and propose that the ontological presuppositions of economics had better be changed so as to establish a better fit between economics and general ontological doctrine. Economic ontology in this mode may become an exercise in a priori imposition. Alternatively, one may proceed by way of empirical case studies in descriptive economic ontology so as to develop, in an a posteriori fashion, an accurate account of the actual ontological presuppositions of particular economic theories and the actual ontological commitments of particular econo-mists. By comparing these to one another and to the ontologies of other social sciences and scientists, one may then possibly end up with identifying interesting mismatches and using them to develop arguments of a revisionary kind.

It is in the nature of such a constitutional framework that it determines the boundaries of a discipline or a line of research. Among the ontological or metaphysical core principles of economics, including constitutional economics, Buchanan lists individual autonomy, rationality of choice, and spontaneous market coordination. 'Unless those who would be participants in the scientific dialogue are willing to locate the exercise in the choice calculus of individuals, there can be no departure from the starting gate . .. The principle of spontaneous coordination of the market is the principle of our discipline' (Buchanan 1991, pp. 14, 22). Buchanan thus takes such principles as defining the boundaries of a research field or programme. Such ontological principles have social consequences: they effectively help identify the genuine participants in a programme and exclude others as non-participants. 'There is simply no common basis for scientific argument, and ultimately agreement, with those who choose to perceive social interaction either in purely conflic-tual or purely idealistic visions. These visions are, indeed, alternative "windows" on the world' (p. 18). Legitimate membership in the conversations of the economics profession thus requires that the world is being viewed through shared ontological 'windows'. Another feature characteristically ascribed to the fundamental commitments is implicitness. The constitutional world view they work with or the ontological windows through which they view the world are articulated by practising economists themselves only seldom and incom-pletely, if at all, such explicit articulation is characteristically not regarded as one their preoccupations qua economists. In contrast, making explicit what tends to be implicit is exactly the preoccupation of this book. Buchanan says that 'the process through which individuals choose among such windows remains mysterious' (p. 18). It is one purpose of this book to start demystifying the process of choosing such ontological windows. It is a prerequisite of this demystification that we understand what those windows are like. One has to start looking at the ontological windows instead of merely looking through them. This is also acknowledged by Buchanan in his remark about the insiders and out-siders: "External intellectual challenges to the whole enterprise tend to be directed at these elements in the core of the program. The ongoing research within the constraints can, of course, proceed without concern for these external criticisms, but practitioners need to be aware of the core-imposed limits on the persuasive potential of the internalized analytical exercise' (p. 14). It is a purpose of this volume to help practitioners in economics be aware of the core-imposed limits' of what they can successfully do as such practitioners. A more ambitious goal would be to try to help economists to make well-argued constitutional choices, that is, reasoned choices of the constitutional framework within which they do their work, or of the windows through which they view the world - or at least help them to be aware of that larger framework and to design arguments for the constitution they have ended up working with, whether as a matter of choice or perhaps as a matter of some path-dependent academic process. The possibility of constitutional choice implies that ontological constitutions are not fixed, that in principle they can be changed at will. Constitutional change may also - and often does - occur without much reflection; as Wittgenstein puts it, the riverbed within which our thought flows can itself change in response to the flow of thought (Wittgenstein 1969, $97).

The is study of economic ontology concerned with what may be called 'the economic realm: the economic realm consists of those parts or aspects of the universe which are set apart as constituting the subject matter of economics. We may think of the economic realm as being distinguished from other realms (the physical realm, the biotic realm, the realm of aesthetics) by virtue of being composed of certain types of entities or properties - such as 'that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing' (Marshall 1920, p. 1) or 'human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses' (Robbins 1935, p. 16). This suggests that the economic realm has definite boundaries which separate it from other realms. On the other hand, the history of the discipline suggests that such boundaries are not completely sharp and fixed and that there are rival and evolving perceptions of how to draw them. The contents and confines of the economic realm are 'essentially contestable' as a popular phrase has it, and they change along with the rest of the discipline of economics (see Kirzner 1976). The question then arises whether the varying circumscrip-tions of the economic realm are endeavours to discover something about the objective constitution of the world, or whether they are subjective impositions of structure on the social world. The economic realm is connected to other realms in various ways. The possibility of the existence of the economic realm presupposes the existence of the physical, the biotic, and the psychic realms. How exactly this dependence is to be characterized is itself an ontological issue; is it a matter of reduction, or supervenience, or is some sort of emergence involved? The functioning of the economic realm is shaped by the realms of morality and politics. The exact character of this dependence - and the question whether the realms of morality and politics are made of stuff that is different from that of the economic realm - are likewise among some of the major ontological issues related to economics. We may say that the justification of the discipline of economics requires a claim to relative autonomy, but this does not yet give us a precise idea of what such autonomy amounts to. The contents and confines of the economic realm are suggested by the ontological commitments that economists hold. A set of such commitments has the nature of a Weltanschauung, a fundamental world view with a focus on a selection of economically relevant aspects of the world. Joseph Schumpeter (1954) used the word 'vision' to capture very much the same idea. There is a sense in which those commitments have a foundational status: they are more fundamental than other elements in one's belief system in that they are not as easily corrigible and that they are presupposed rather than derived by the reasoning within the belief system. The ontological commitments have the character of absolute presuppositions as R. G. Collingwood called them. He viewed them as the ultimate and unquestioned presuppositions in terms of which all the relative suppositions are to be justified (Collingwood 1940). Ludwig Wittgenstein called them hinges on which our ordinary thoughts and judgements turn, and the riverbed within which our thought flows (Wittgenstein 1969, S$97-9, 341-3). Adopting a metaphor from constitutional economics, we may also view the ontological commitments as providing part of the constitutional framework of a belief system. In this spirit, James Buchanan refers to elements of a research programme which are rarely, if ever, challenged by those scholars who work inside the intellectual tradition . These central elements are taken as pre-suppositions, as relatively absolute absolutes, and, as such, they become, themselves, the constraints (the constitution) within which the scientific discourse is conducted' (Buchanan 1991, pp. 13-14). Thus there is something basic or fundamental about the ontological presuppositions in our belief systems.

“PROCESS” ONTOLOGY Alfred North Whitehead, a noted mathematician and philosopher who wrote mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, also clearly broke from standard philosophy at the point of Humean ontology and epistemology. Whitehead’s ontology is intrinsically open and ethically rich, and I believe has important resonances with the sort of contemporary feminist thought reviewed above. I point to his work not because I think feminists need to take intellectual orders from some “dead white male,” but rather because his formulation of a vital, interconnected, and purposeful universe includes a careful discussion of the questions of ontology and realism that can be directly compared and contrasted to the critical-realist alternative. Whitehead’s challenge to Hume at the level of ontology is profound. Whitehead sees in most modern (and many premodern) philosophers and scientists allegiance to a substance-and-attribute ontology. In a substance-and-attribute ontology, “stuff” or “bits of matter” are the fundamental ontological units (1966, 1929: 128–9; 1968, 1938: 128). These substances are thought of as fundamentally separate and distinct – as chairs, for example, or as persons, each distinguishable from the other – and considered to endure through time, though with changes to their attributes (location, for example, or color). More to the point, whenever the question of knowledge is posed as being about how our minds (in here) can know about other substances (out there), one can see that such a notion of reality has already been assumed. Such a framing of the question assumes that the “stuff” of a knower is distinct from that of the known. Hume worked within the background of substance-and-attribute ontology but rejected substances, leaving only the attributes to be knowable. Whitehead’s ontology, in contrast, is fundamentally process-oriented, energetic, and interconnected. He referred to it as the “philosophy of organism,” though later commentators tend to use the term “process thought.” Whitehead’s fundamental unit of reality, the “actual entity” (1966, 1929: 205), is a “[drop] of experience, complex and interdependent” (1966, 1929: 7), or a “throb of experience” (p. 8). The actual entity is “a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a ‘stuff’” (p. 8). In this ontology, reality is a deeply interconnected whole; each entity “feels” all other pre-existing actual entities (although some more vaguely than others) in what Whitehead terms “prehension” and then synthesizes these data into “the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity” (p. 8). In the present moment, the entity is actualized through its own subjective experience and then becomes the objective data for the entities of the next moment, in an ongoing process. A person, for example, in this view does not first exist and then have experiences and relationships, as would be the case in a substance-and-attribute ontology. In the organicist view, rather, a person is constituted in and by experience and relationships, as sequences of prehensions and syntheses. For Whitehead, these processes are not merely confined to conscious selves, but rather describe reality from the simplest electron to the most complex living creature. By emphasizing experience, including human bodily experience, as the fundamental unifying reality, he removes the mind-vs.-matter conundrum.3 Conscious experience is not to be seen as something apart from matter, but rather is an outgrowth, at a very high level of complexity, of a reality of experience that goes all the way down. Chairs, or elbows, like persons, also “become” in the moment. The emphasis on energy and interconnection, rather than matter and mechanics, in Whitehead’s ontological scheme is, as he himself points out, consistent with developments in post-Newtonian physics. Many later interpreters have noted the coherency of Whitehead’s view with more recent developments in complexity theory and self-organization. What, then, of epistemology? Whitehead, unlike the contemporary critical realists, “accepts Hume’s doctrine that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience” (1966, 1929: 137). There is a radical difference, however, from both critical realism and Hume, in Whitehead’s notion of what “experience” entails. For him, experience involves perception in two modes, only one of which he sees recognized in Hume’s thought. Whitehead calls one of these modes of perception “presentational immediacy.” By this he means the mode in which the percepta “are distinct, definite, controllable, apt to immediate enjoyment, and with the minimum of reference to the past, or to the future” (Whitehead 1966, 1929: 188). His claim, then, that for Hume, “presentational immediacy was the primary fact of perception, and any apprehension of causation was, somehow or other, to be elicited from this primary fact” (1966, 1929: 121), bears a certain similarity to the discussions of causation that the contemporary critical realists put forward. Both Whitehead and the critical realists are concerned with how causality can enter the picture, if all we know are atomistic events along with observations of, in critical-realist rhetoric, their “constant event patterns” (Lawson 1997: 19) or, in Whitehead’s phrase, the “repetition of associated presentational experiences” (Whitehead 1966, 1929: 122). What Hume neglected, however, according to Whitehead, was perception in the mode of “causal efficacy.” Percepta in this mode are . . . vague, not to be controlled, heavy with emotion; it produces the sense of derivation from an immediate past, and of passage to an immediate future; a sense of emotional feeling, belonging to oneself in the past, passing into oneself in the present, and passing from oneself in the present towards oneself in the future; a sense of influx of influence. . . . This is our general sense of existence, as one item among others, in an efficacious actual world. (1966, 1929: 118) For example, suppose one examines a five-pronged object. To note the distinct aspects of color, size, shape, and weight is to perceive the object in the mode of presentational immediacy. To perceive the object as one’s own hand, and sense that it is something that one can, in fact, purposively direct to pick up a pen, is to perceive in the mode of causal efficacy. To see a person in terms of figure, smell, and sound uses the mode favored by Hume; to recognize in that person a being like oneself, a companion, uses the mode Hume omitted.4 Whitehead calls his position provisional realism (1997, 1925: 91). That is, because of the integral presence of actual entities in other entities, we perceive (via the mode of causal efficacy) that “other things . . . are in the world of actualities in the same sense as we are” (1966, 1929: 136). To put it in other words, while we can admit to knowledge only what we know from experience (as an empiricist would posit), because reality interpenetrates and because our experience includes broad, vague feelings of influence and efficaciousness, we are confident that items and relations outside us exist (as a realist would posit). We can easily compare Whitehead’s version of realism to that of the critical realists. Lawson, for example, defines his preferred position as asserting “that the ultimate objects of enquiry exist for the most part independently of, or at least prior to, their investigation” (1999: 27). Both versions of realism refute the fully subjectivist or solipsistic claim that the world exists only as “in our minds” or upon interaction with our minds (as any realism would). But Lawson’s language of “objects” and “independently” seems insufficiently distinguished from the usual dualisms of subject and object and gaps between the knower and known that are inherent in a substance-and-attribute ontology. The “transcendental” realism aspect of critical-realist thought seeks to assert the existence of objects (mechanisms) outside of experience, through (since the gap between knower and known cannot be directly bridged) arguments for their logical necessity. Abstraction and reason are called on to bridge the assumed chasm. Whitehead’s ontology, by contrast, more thoroughly locates the knower within reality, and (through a broader, deeper, and more serious understanding of experience) sees the knower as having a sense of the whole and the many (or, in more current lingo, the “other”), as well as of the self (1968, 1938: 117). Whitehead’s ontology, further, puts emancipatory and caring activities at the core of reality. Elaborating on his idea of “feeling,” he suggests that “[a]t the basis of our existence is the sense of ‘worth’” (1968, 1938: 109). Moral and purposive behavior arises from the fact that “[e]xistence . . . is the upholding of value intensity. Also no unit can separate itself from the others, and from the whole. And yet each unit exists in its own right. It upholds value intensity for itself, and this involves sharing value intensity with the universe” (1968, 1938: 111). Whitehead rejects the notion of matter as passive substance, proceeding either deterministically or randomly without purpose. A sense of aim and direction is integral to his ontology. Similarly to the critical realists, Whitehead finds that “Hume fails to provide experience with any objective content” (1966, 1929: 137) and seeks to fill that void. Unlike the critical realists, Whitehead proposes an ontology, which, by acknowledging noncognitive and nonsensory perceptions, coherently grounds a (provisionally) realist philosophy. PROCESS AND FEMINISM But note what cognitive and philosophical biases must be overcome if one is to become open to considering Whitehead’s organicist philosophy. Feelings! Emotions! Influence! Connection! Holism! Vagueness! Process! Value! Is there any rule of polite philosophical and scientific discourse that Whitehead does not break? The notions that Whitehead seeks to introduce are exactly those that feminist scholarship suggests will be most feared and suppressed. The dualistic structures and notion of solitary, separative selfhood criticized by feminists are the same structures and notion addressed by Whitehead: All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The result always does violence to that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal analysis. We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience. . . . (1966, 1929: 136) A feminist-process view can ground a (provisionally) realist philosophy and even more importantly, can ground emancipatory projects. But, as contemporary feminist scholarship points out, this view of reality faces an uphill battle against social, historical, economic, religious, and psychosexual tendencies maintained precisely in order to suppress those parts of reality that are “not to be controlled.” Other scholars, from feminist, multiculturalist, or ecological perspectives, have also drawn on insights about “feeling” and even directly on Whitehead. Rajani Kanth, for example, uses emotional language in criticizing the Eurocentric nature of critical realism to date, concluding that we need ideas that are not so much “bright, perhaps, I think, so much as warm . . .” (1999: 200, emphasis in original). Charlene Spretnak’s The Resurgence of the Real (1999) provides a wide-ranging and nontechnical introduction to a process-oriented approach to realism, which builds on the feminist, ecological, spiritual, and political concerns emerging at the turn of the twentyfirst century. The use of the term “separative self” to describe homo economicus (Paula England 1993) is taken from the work of feminist theologian Catherine Keller (1986), who in turn draws on Whiteheadean thought.5 CONCLUSION This essay has used philosophical sources to examine how process, openness, purpose, feeling, and value might be intrinsically incorporated into the core of our views of how the world works. For some aspects of economics, the implications of such a changed worldview are fairly direct. The notion of “caring work” is problematic within the neoclassical framework, for example, because neoclassical theory has no room for concepts of intimacy, interdependence, and nurturance. Economic improvement is disastrously tied to notions of Pareto optimality or GDP growth in standard economics because there is no concept of value beyond that given by atomistic, individual utility. A process-feminist view lays the beginnings for taking on such sterility at the root. The fact that this ontological view also provides a way around old epistemological debates will, for many feminist economists, be an aspect of lesser importance. As a matter of everyday strategy, a feminist economist will still often find that phrasing her or his arguments largely within usual mainstream modes of discourse is, as Harding argued in Feminist Economics, the best way to achieve feminist ends. But, for a practicing feminist economist, might it not be more satisfactory, whether engaging in research or advocacy, to proceed with a sense that the universe is such that what one struggles for matters?