Book Description

This book combines a case study of industrial homework in the electronics industry with a world-systems approach to understanding the role of home-based work in economic development. It spans the period from the nineteenth-century origins of industrial homework to the important role played by home-based work in current strategies of economic restructuring in manufacturing and service industries. The author draws a clear distinction between industrial homework and earlier forms of domestic labor, such as the putting-out system. She also clarifies the important differences between various forms of contemporary home-based work: waged homework in industrial and service occupations, professional telecommuting, home-based self-employment. Moving from the lives of homeworkers themselves to macro-level analyses, Dangler's case study provides a vantage point from which to examine theories of world economic development, theories of labor market segmentation, and recent analyses of the importance of informal sector activities in the modern economy.