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Kendra Strauss

Simon Fraser University, Labour Studies and Geography, Faculty Member

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Kendra Strauss is a feminist geographer. She is an Associate Professor and Director of the Labour Studies Program, and Associate in the Department of Geography, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
Address: Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

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George Nicholas

Simon Fraser University

University of Alberta

The University of Sheffield

Kansas State University

Syracuse University

University of Aberdeen

Sean Patrick Donlan

The University of the South Pacific

Trinity College, Connecticut

Heather Montes Ireland

DePaul University

University of Windsor

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Papers by Kendra Strauss

Feminist economic geography and Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Going beyond ‘add gender and stir’

Geoforum, 2015

Beyond crisis? Using rent theory to understand the restructuring of publicly funded seniors’ care in British Columbia, Canada

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Crises of seniors’ care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 ... more Crises of seniors’ care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between critical approaches, especially to land rent, and mainstream institutionalist and public choice approaches to rent-seeking. Critical rent theory is evolving beyond this divide to understand a broader range of types of rent. Yet, despite attention to the increasing importance of economic rents and forms of rentierism, labour and social reproduction are often excluded from the analysis of how rent relations arise. This paper demonstrates the problems with these exclusions. The argument is illustrated through an analysis of the restructuring of e...

Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure

Progress in Human Geography

This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity,... more This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.

Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make?

Environment and Planning A

Saving for Retirement: Intention, Context, and Behavior

... in our application to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a DPhil CASE awa... more

Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour

Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour, 2013

ABSTRACT Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the d... more ABSTRACT Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor.

Challenging hegemonic deregulation? The UK Gangmaster Licensing Authority as a model for the regulation of casual work

The gangmaster system has been characterised as a highly exploitative form of labour contracting ... more The gangmaster system has been characterised as a highly exploitative form of labour contracting and a relic of coercive nineteenth century practices associated with the recruitment and control of casual workers. Its continued existence in the UK was brought to popular attention in 2004 when 23 Chinese cocklepickers, employed by a gangmaster, drowned at Morecambe Bay in Lancashire: the Gangmaster Licensing Authority (GLA) was subsequently legislated into existence to regulate the industry. The gangmaster system represents ostensibly contradictory facets of contemporary British labour markets: on the one hand, it has been described as both an historical form of labour associated with a teleological view of capitalist development, and a resurgent &#x27;medieval&#x27; set of working practices; on the other, it is heralded as a successful form of regulatory labour market intervention and a model to emulate in other sectors in which precarious and temporary forms of work are the norm. This paper employs the Gramscian notion of hegemony and Karl Polanyi&#x27;s concept of the double movement to examine the extent to which the regulation of gangmasters can be seen as an ideological and practical shift away from the normative ideal of deregulated labour markets in the UK. Can the GLA model be employed in other sectors that employ casual workers, and has it been shown to improve the quality of temporary, precarious and low-paid work?

Temporary work, agencies, and unfree labour: Insecurity in the new world of work

Internationalisation and the Neoliberal University

Qjb Querelles Jahrbuch Fur Frauen Und Geschlechterforschung, May 29, 2013

Re-engaging with rationality: UK pensions and the context of decision-making

... demonstrated that peer/colleague and family interactions can strongly influence savings ... p... more

Temporary work, agencies, and unfree labor : insecurity in the new world of work

Mind the gap: gender disparities still to be addressed in UK Higher Education geography

Area, 2015

This paper evidences persistent gender inequalities in UK Higher Education Geography departments.... more This paper evidences persistent gender inequalities in UK Higher Education Geography departments. The two key sources of data used are firstly, Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data for staff and students, which affords a longitudinal response to the McDowell (1979) and McDowell and Peake (1990) surveys of women in UK Geography higher educational departments; and secondly, a qualitative survey of the UK Higher Education Geography community undertaken in 2010, that sought more roundly to capture respondent reflections on their career, their choices, status and experiences. Findings show that although the gender gap is closing within HE geography in the UK there are significant ongoing gender disparities.. Therefore, the paper argues that the long and demanding process of reducing gender inequalities (alongside other, equally vital intersectional inequalities) requires continued commitment. Furthermore, respondents evidence the cost of these inequalities: enablers and barriers to job security and career progression can have long term impacts on the quality of life, financial security and affect personal life decisions. In recent years the UK based Athena Swan and Gender Equality Charter Mark agendas have prompted universities to address gendered disparities and the authors note a changing zeitgeist. However, the survey findings point to the need for sustained leadership within geography departments to address the day-today gender-and other-inequalities experienced in the workplace.

Banking on property for retirement? Attitudes to housing wealth and pensions

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of two original datasets on attitudes to housing wealth ... more

Intervening in globalization: the spatial possibilities and institutional barriers to labour's collective agency

Journal of Economic Geography, 2014

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Intern... more

Rethinking Workplace Regulation

Equality, fair-mutualisation and the socialisation of risk and reward in European pensions

Resocialising Europe in a Time of Crisis, 2013

The Significance of Socio-Economic Status, Financial Sophistication, Salience and the Scale of Deliberation in UK Retirement Planning

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

ABSTRACT Many British workers rely upon their accumulated pension savings for retirement income. ... more ABSTRACT Many British workers rely upon their accumulated pension savings for retirement income. Whether they appreciate the importance of saving for the future, and whether they intend to do so, are not well-understood. Based upon a representative sample of UK residents, we show that the perceived importance of pension planning is positively correlated with respondents&#39; risk tolerance, age and income, and whether their spouses participate in employer-sponsored pension plans. Those less likely to believe planning for the future is important are younger, earn less, are women, and will rely upon others for their expected retirement welfare. It is also apparent that generic sources of information provided remotely or at the national scale for individual and household pension planning, preparedness, and knowledge of annuities do not stand comparison with the perceived value of intimate and specialist relationships. The unit of retirement planning is typically the household, rarely the region, and hardly ever the nation. To better understand these findings we frame their interpretation with reference to recent behavioral research that emphasizes people&#39;s limited cognitive and social resources and the use of heuristics such as salience in setting priorities. The implications of this framework and our empirical findings for the design and delivery of private pensions conclude the paper.

These Overheating Worlds

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2014

ABSTRACT In 2003 the British literary magazine Granta published an issue on climate change, “This... more ABSTRACT In 2003 the British literary magazine Granta published an issue on climate change, “This Overheating World,” containing reportage and essays but almost no fiction—and the claim that our “failure of the imagination” regarding socioenvironmental change is both a political and a literary one. The decade since has seen a relative burgeoning of what has been dubbed “cli-fi,” dominated by apocalyptic and dystopian literary–geographical imaginations. In this article I ask this question: If these are our ways of imagining the future, what are the relationships among cultural imaginaries, theories, and politics of socioenvironmental change? Engaging the work of Frederic Jameson on utopia, and the novels of Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver, I argue that the flourishing interest in narrative, stories, and storytelling in human geography opens up opportunities for exploring political imaginaries of climate change through utopian and dystopian impulses present in its “fictionable worlds.” Available to download for those without access to Annals at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NAwhwk44VPDWrHkbX2fm/full Link will work for up to 50 views/downloads.

Migrants, Unfree Labour, and the Legal Construction of Domestic Servitude

Immigration and Vulnerability in Labour Law, 2014

Pension Adequacy and Sustainability

Saving for RetirementIntention, Context, and Behavior, 2012

Feminist economic geography and Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Going beyond ‘add gender and stir’

Geoforum, 2015

Beyond crisis? Using rent theory to understand the restructuring of publicly funded seniors’ care in British Columbia, Canada

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Crises of seniors’ care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 ... more Crises of seniors’ care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between critical approaches, especially to land rent, and mainstream institutionalist and public choice approaches to rent-seeking. Critical rent theory is evolving beyond this divide to understand a broader range of types of rent. Yet, despite attention to the increasing importance of economic rents and forms of rentierism, labour and social reproduction are often excluded from the analysis of how rent relations arise. This paper demonstrates the problems with these exclusions. The argument is illustrated through an analysis of the restructuring of e...

Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure

Progress in Human Geography

This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity,... more This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.

Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make?

Environment and Planning A

Saving for Retirement: Intention, Context, and Behavior

... in our application to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a DPhil CASE awa... more

Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour

Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour, 2013

ABSTRACT Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the d... more ABSTRACT Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor.

Challenging hegemonic deregulation? The UK Gangmaster Licensing Authority as a model for the regulation of casual work

The gangmaster system has been characterised as a highly exploitative form of labour contracting ... more The gangmaster system has been characterised as a highly exploitative form of labour contracting and a relic of coercive nineteenth century practices associated with the recruitment and control of casual workers. Its continued existence in the UK was brought to popular attention in 2004 when 23 Chinese cocklepickers, employed by a gangmaster, drowned at Morecambe Bay in Lancashire: the Gangmaster Licensing Authority (GLA) was subsequently legislated into existence to regulate the industry. The gangmaster system represents ostensibly contradictory facets of contemporary British labour markets: on the one hand, it has been described as both an historical form of labour associated with a teleological view of capitalist development, and a resurgent &#x27;medieval&#x27; set of working practices; on the other, it is heralded as a successful form of regulatory labour market intervention and a model to emulate in other sectors in which precarious and temporary forms of work are the norm. This paper employs the Gramscian notion of hegemony and Karl Polanyi&#x27;s concept of the double movement to examine the extent to which the regulation of gangmasters can be seen as an ideological and practical shift away from the normative ideal of deregulated labour markets in the UK. Can the GLA model be employed in other sectors that employ casual workers, and has it been shown to improve the quality of temporary, precarious and low-paid work?

Temporary work, agencies, and unfree labour: Insecurity in the new world of work

Internationalisation and the Neoliberal University

Qjb Querelles Jahrbuch Fur Frauen Und Geschlechterforschung, May 29, 2013

Re-engaging with rationality: UK pensions and the context of decision-making

... demonstrated that peer/colleague and family interactions can strongly influence savings ... p... more

Temporary work, agencies, and unfree labor : insecurity in the new world of work

Mind the gap: gender disparities still to be addressed in UK Higher Education geography

Area, 2015

This paper evidences persistent gender inequalities in UK Higher Education Geography departments.... more This paper evidences persistent gender inequalities in UK Higher Education Geography departments. The two key sources of data used are firstly, Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data for staff and students, which affords a longitudinal response to the McDowell (1979) and McDowell and Peake (1990) surveys of women in UK Geography higher educational departments; and secondly, a qualitative survey of the UK Higher Education Geography community undertaken in 2010, that sought more roundly to capture respondent reflections on their career, their choices, status and experiences. Findings show that although the gender gap is closing within HE geography in the UK there are significant ongoing gender disparities.. Therefore, the paper argues that the long and demanding process of reducing gender inequalities (alongside other, equally vital intersectional inequalities) requires continued commitment. Furthermore, respondents evidence the cost of these inequalities: enablers and barriers to job security and career progression can have long term impacts on the quality of life, financial security and affect personal life decisions. In recent years the UK based Athena Swan and Gender Equality Charter Mark agendas have prompted universities to address gendered disparities and the authors note a changing zeitgeist. However, the survey findings point to the need for sustained leadership within geography departments to address the day-today gender-and other-inequalities experienced in the workplace.

Banking on property for retirement? Attitudes to housing wealth and pensions

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of two original datasets on attitudes to housing wealth ... more

Intervening in globalization: the spatial possibilities and institutional barriers to labour's collective agency

Journal of Economic Geography, 2014

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Intern... more

Rethinking Workplace Regulation

Equality, fair-mutualisation and the socialisation of risk and reward in European pensions

Resocialising Europe in a Time of Crisis, 2013

The Significance of Socio-Economic Status, Financial Sophistication, Salience and the Scale of Deliberation in UK Retirement Planning

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

ABSTRACT Many British workers rely upon their accumulated pension savings for retirement income. ... more ABSTRACT Many British workers rely upon their accumulated pension savings for retirement income. Whether they appreciate the importance of saving for the future, and whether they intend to do so, are not well-understood. Based upon a representative sample of UK residents, we show that the perceived importance of pension planning is positively correlated with respondents&#39; risk tolerance, age and income, and whether their spouses participate in employer-sponsored pension plans. Those less likely to believe planning for the future is important are younger, earn less, are women, and will rely upon others for their expected retirement welfare. It is also apparent that generic sources of information provided remotely or at the national scale for individual and household pension planning, preparedness, and knowledge of annuities do not stand comparison with the perceived value of intimate and specialist relationships. The unit of retirement planning is typically the household, rarely the region, and hardly ever the nation. To better understand these findings we frame their interpretation with reference to recent behavioral research that emphasizes people&#39;s limited cognitive and social resources and the use of heuristics such as salience in setting priorities. The implications of this framework and our empirical findings for the design and delivery of private pensions conclude the paper.

These Overheating Worlds

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2014

ABSTRACT In 2003 the British literary magazine Granta published an issue on climate change, “This... more ABSTRACT In 2003 the British literary magazine Granta published an issue on climate change, “This Overheating World,” containing reportage and essays but almost no fiction—and the claim that our “failure of the imagination” regarding socioenvironmental change is both a political and a literary one. The decade since has seen a relative burgeoning of what has been dubbed “cli-fi,” dominated by apocalyptic and dystopian literary–geographical imaginations. In this article I ask this question: If these are our ways of imagining the future, what are the relationships among cultural imaginaries, theories, and politics of socioenvironmental change? Engaging the work of Frederic Jameson on utopia, and the novels of Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver, I argue that the flourishing interest in narrative, stories, and storytelling in human geography opens up opportunities for exploring political imaginaries of climate change through utopian and dystopian impulses present in its “fictionable worlds.” Available to download for those without access to Annals at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NAwhwk44VPDWrHkbX2fm/full Link will work for up to 50 views/downloads.

Migrants, Unfree Labour, and the Legal Construction of Domestic Servitude

Immigration and Vulnerability in Labour Law, 2014

Pension Adequacy and Sustainability

Saving for RetirementIntention, Context, and Behavior, 2012

Positioning Eldercare Labour in the Global City: Intersectionality and Social Reproduction in Shanghai

This working paper was presented at the Conference on Global Labor Migration: Past and Present, J... more

What we talk about when we talk about austerity: social policy, public management and politics of eldercare funding in Canada and China

Working in the Context of Austerity: Challenges and Struggles, 2020

As we argue in this chapter, context-specific and relational understandings of austerity and the ... more As we argue in this chapter, context-specific and relational understandings of austerity and the complex policy mobilities (McCann and Ward, 2012) of New Public Management require critical attention to how processes play out in particular national and sub-national contexts (Pike et al., 2018). There are common trends, but unevenness also exists at the national and sub-national levels (Baines and Cunningham (2015). The policy diffusion of NPM also goes beyond European and Anglo-American welfare states, and – as in countries like Canada and Australia that did not suffer financial crises – has been a driver of reform even where the post-2008 austerity discourse is largely absent. This chapter contributes to the literatures on austerity and NPM by comparing two such contexts, focusing on sub-national scales to examine the social care sector in Vancouver, British Columbia (in Canada) and Shanghai (in China). It does so by using the concept of social infrastructure to connect state-led marketization and outsourcing in the elderecare sector with, on one hand, the influence of NPM and, on the other, the financialization that has ensued in recent years.