Abstract

GONZALEZ MEDINA, Andrea. Work, gender, and social networks: work experiences of fashion fair managers on Facebook. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2017, vol.40, n.2, pp.129-146. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v40n2.66388.

The article questions the classical paradigms of work society, which emphasized the industrial-worker-men. In contrast, it affirms the existence of a reorganization of the work world, reflected in many ways, such as non-industrial and labor regulation activities, as well as the introduction of information and communication technologies. The research focused on two fundamental aspects of said reorganization; the proliferation of activities in the informal sector and the use of information and communication technologies at work. In order to understand these lines of analysis, we selected the case of e-commerce carried out on the Facebook platform. Although this platform has been co-opted by big companies to advertise products, it is also possible to observe the emergence of an informal work market made up of women who use that technological tool to carry out business on Facebook through 'fashion fairs'. The article argues that the work carried out in such fairs is permeated by gender stereotypes. Therefore, its objective is to understand the configuration of subjectivities on the basis of gender stereotypes in the current work environment. In order to achieve this, it proposed a qualitative methodology to analyze labor aspects, use of time, and interaction with technology. The understanding of the work included the following central themes: production of services, de-territorialization of work, and production of symbols, and each one of these was related to a gender stereotype: women in the informal sector; the articulation between domestic-extra-domestic/ productive-reproductive work; and the feminization of the products market, respectively. The article seeks to make evident the processes involved in the production of services and the conditions of informality in which women are involved. The article is structured as follows: the first section conceptualizes the activity according to the categories of non-traditional work, informal e-commerce, and gender stereotypes; the second presents the current historical situation of informality; and the third explains the methodology and the results.

Keywords : e-commerce; Facebook; fashion fairs; gender stereotypes; informality; non-traditional work; production of services.

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