important components of women's work decisions: the existence of alternative
actions (or work choice); the role of the decision-maker, and the goal to be
achieved by implementing the decisions. These three components define the
nature of decisions related to women's work. The second theoretical aspect relates
to the process of 'decision-making': how decisions about women's work are made.
The methodological issue is concerned with research strategies and methods of
collecting information and data about women's work to explore and explain the
context of women's work decisions.
D e c i s i o n - m a k i n g analysis assumes that tiiere are alternative actions that a r e subject to choice. Applying both restrictive and b r o a d c o n c e p t s of work (Section 4.1), w o m e n ' s work alternatives can be broadly r e g a r d e d as involving choices a m o n g m a r k e t work outside the h o m e , m a r k e t work at h o m e a n d non-
m a r k e t work. M a r k e t work is defined as activity that p r o d u c e s a wage, salary or p r o f i t . U n d e r the restrictive concept, only this activity is usually considered as w o r k , while the o t h e r s are considered as non-work. N o n - m a r k e t work, using the b r o a d e r c o n c e p t of work, includes all activities that do not p r o d u c e m o n e t a r y i n c o m e but which can benefit persons other than those who p e r f o r m t h e m . Non- m a r k e t w o r k includes domestic work such as cooking, cleaning the house, washing, caring for or nursing d e p e n d e n t household m e m b e r s such as small children and the sick, a n d food production and processing for own use.
T h e e m p h a s i s on women's family roles as m o t h e r s and wives puts pressure on t h e m to p e r f o r m their domestic duties unless a substitute is available. T h e availability of household help, therefore, will influence the extent to which w o m e n have t h e choice of working in the market, because m a r k e t work t e n d s to conflict with d o m e s t i c work, especially if market work takes place outside the h o m e . W o m e n w h o d o not work in the m a r k e t will experience less role conflict. However, family obligations may also pressure some w o m e n to participate in m a r k e t work a n d t h e r e f o r e to c o m p r o m i s e b e t w e e n their conflicting roles at h o m e and in the m a r k e t . W o m e n who participate in market work may have to give u p at least a part of their p r i m a r y roles, for example, some aspects of fertility, child care or o t h e r d o m e s t i c work, as well as some of their personal and leisure time.
F o r a particular group of women, other forms of n o n - m a r k e t work ( o t h e r t h a n d o m e s t i c work and food production and processing) can b e separately d e f i n e d as 'status-production work'. This consists of four types of work: indirect support activities for the paid work of other family m e m b e r s ; activities to support the f u t u r e paid work and status aspirations of children; activities for the politics of
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status maintenance; and the performance of religious acts. These forms of work mainly contribute to family status and socio-economic mobility among middle-class w o m e n .
Women's work decisions can be regarded as individual or family decisions. As individual decisions, women are assumed to make their own work decisions to achieve personal goals. T h e process of such 'decision making' appears to follow the rational decision-making model. However, because of the emphasis on women's role in the domestic sphere, their decisions are also probably affected by family goals and may be more appropriately treated as family decisions. In the family decision model, a family is assumed to make women's work decisions mainly to achieve family goals. Each individual family member is assumed to be motivated by the family's collective interest. Individual behaviour therefore reflects an assumed congruence of the individual's and the family's needs (Wolf, 1990: 46).
Folbre (1986: 18), however, argued that the family or household cannot be treated as an undifferentiated unit, having a specific goal that represents the collective utility of all family or household members. Folbre asked (1986: 18):
Who defines the collective utility that household members collectively seek to m^iximise? How, for instance, are disagreements between husbands and wives resolved? At what point do children become participants in household decisions rather than objects of those decisions?.
Because the family can neither decide nor think, certain powerful individual m e m b e r s will make decisions and others will follow. Male household heads have comparatively more power within families and therefore tend to make most decisions regarding the labour allocation of family members. On this basis, the process of decision-making related to women's work can be analysed in terms of the organisational-processes decision-making model. Women become an object of decisions made by another family member who has decision-making power. T h e
decisions related to women's work will benefit the family or other persons in the family, but not always the women.
This view of women's decision-making has been confirmed by W o l f s (1990) study on daughters' decisions to work in factories in Taiwan. Taiwanese parents, rather than households or families, made the decisions about their daughters' work while the daughters, because of their life-long socialisation into an
inferior position, dutifully obeyed. By contrast, Wolf (1990:61) also found that neither Javanese household nor Javanese parents controlled or decided how to allocate the labour of their adolescent daughters.
Decisions related to women's work can be viewed from economic, sociological or psychological perspectives. From an economic perspective, women's work decisions can be examined from the individual labour supply or the New H o m e Economics frameworks. The individual labour supply framework emphasises the role of individual decisions to supply labour to the market to maximise individual utility as measured by individual income (Blau and Ferber, 1986; Lloyd and Niemi: 1979).
T h e New H o m e Economics framework emphasises the role of family decisions in allocating family member's labour to maximise household utility, m e a s u r e d in terms of the production of household commodities (Berk and Berk,
1978; G r o n a u , 1976, 1977). Family members produce 'household commodities' by combining their time, that is, their labour with market goods and services to maximise household utility. Household production is constrained by family member's time and the financial resources determined by earnings and any accumulated capital, available to purchase market goods. T h e function of family decisions is to decide how the time of each member should be allocated to market work and the production of household commodities based on the members' opportunity costs in each activity.
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The sociological approach to women's work decisions also emphasises the role of family decisions in allocating the time of family members within and outside the home. In this approach, the family allocates its members' time among various activities in order to maximise its social status while maintaining stability and harmony (Oppenheimer, 1977). The psychological approach focuses on the role of women's work decisions in satisfying women's individual psychological needs. Women's psychological needs related to market work can be regarded as the motivation the goal to be achieved from work decisions, and can be measured in terms of money, social roles and personality (Hoffman: 1963; 1974).
Each approach, the economic, sociological and psychological, emphasises different motives or goals underlying decisions related to women's work. These decisions, however, are basically influenced by the same set of individual, family and community factors. The individual factors include women's educational level (individually and as compared to the education of the men to whom they are attached), their work experience, marital status, and attitudes towards women's roles and women's work in the market. Family variables are derived from the demands on women's labour at home (to perform women's domestic roles, particularly those of mother and wife), and therefore differ between single and married women, and also include family attitudes towards women's roles and women's work in the market. Community variables include community attitudes toward the role of women and whether women should work in the market, as well as employment possibilities. The complex interaction between these factors determines decisions related to women's work. For some women, this interaction produces a strong economic motive for decisions, while for others sociological or psychological motives may be more important.
Explanation and interpretations of these factors, however, will depend on the research strategies and method of data collection used. Most analysis of women's work has been based on cross-sectional survey data (Bowen and Finegan,
1969; Cain, 1966; Oppenheimer, 1970; Standing 1978; Sweet, 1973). Economists typically relate women's work decisions to labour supply and time-allocation theories and, on the basis of certain essential assumptions and using survey data,
have derived statistical models to test these theories (Becker, 1965; Mincer, 1980; Mincer and Polachek, 1980). Sociologists using survey data have focussed on groups that have relatively higher or lower probabilities of participation in economic activity for a given set of characteristics (Junsai and Heaton, 1989: 35), and o n the causes and effects of the household division of labour on women's participation in economic activity (Geerken and Gove, 1983: 21). The survey research strategy, however, has limited capacity to investigate the context of women's work decisions. Its strengths are evident when the research goal is to describe the incidence or prevalence of a certain phenomenon or to predict certain outcomes. The research questions relevant to survey methodology mainly focus on 'what?', 'who?' or 'where?' (Yin, 1984: 17-18). The survey design is necessarily restricted in the number of variables that can be analysed (and therefore in the n u m b e r of questions that can be asked) (Yin, 1984: 23). Moreover, the method's capacity to capture, identify and explain interactions among variables is limited.
The most important explanation of the context of women's work decisions relies on the answer to the questions 'Why do some women choose one work activity, while others choose another?' (focussing on the reasons or motivations for choosing a particular work alternative) and 'How do they make decisions about this work choice?' (focussing on the nature and mechanisms of the decision-making process). These 'why?' and 'how?' questions are more explanatory and lend themselves to the use of a case-study research strategy because of its capacity to deal with operational links over time, rather than mere frequencies or incidence ( Y i n , 1984: 18). Chapter Five describes the case-study method and research design applied in this study to analyse women's work decisions. Using the data thus collected, Chapter Six focuses on explanation and seeks to answer a number of important questions about women's work decisions.