Hyperembedded demand and uneven innovation

Abstract

the kind of people seen as suitable for providing the service. The fusion of service and service provider implies that using a new kind of person to provide a service is a true innovation, and one that may meet resistance to the extent that it violates entrenched expectations of who providers should be. One important example is women providing services once monopolised by men. This is a large-scale innovation, involving many people across many industries, part of the massive movement of women into paid employment that was one of the twentieth century’s major labour-force trends. The innovation was a very uneven one, both within and between industries: sometimes men still control a kind of service, sometimes women have entered it but have been ‘resegregated’ into particular jobs defined or redefined as suitable for women (Reskin and Roos, 1990), sometimes women do jobs defined as men’s work. To account for this variability I draw on one industry, the private security industry in Toronto, which usefully exemplifies overall trends. Security work was once done by men only, is still widely seen as work mostly done by and suited to men (e.g. Macan et al., 1994), and is still done mainly by men in Toronto (Erickson, 1996). Though men dominate overall, the role of women varies widely from one part of security to another: women are sometimes absent, sometimes in jobs redefined as suitable for women, and sometimes in jobs very much defined as men’s work. I trace such variability of innovation to the complexity of the relational matrix within which innovation is embedded. The matrix includes several kinds of key actors: employers, service providers, potential employees, clients, and targets to whom service work is directed on behalf of clients. In reviewing research on gender segregation at work, Reskin (1993) calls for work on ‘all labour market actors’, noting that research often looks only at the supply side (employees and potential employees) or the demand side (employers) and rarely looks at clients. The work reported here is novel in considering clients, and in adding the very much neglected role of targets, and above all in looking at the interconnections among all these actors. Part 8 Hyperembedded demand and uneven innovation: female labour in a male-dominated service industry