The Theoretical Lens

A brief orientation before the findings begin

This is part of an ongoing series drawn from my PhD thesis, "Globalization, Internal Migration and Gender Relations: An Explorative Study on the Women Working at the Ready Made Garment Factories in Dhaka", submitted to the University of Dhaka in 2013. The research was a comparative study of women's migration and work in two different parts of Bangladesh – Netrokona and Khulna. These posts are an effort to share that research experience beyond academic walls.

My doctoral research on women, internal migration, and gender relations of women working in Ready-Made Garment factories was grounded in a theoretical framework. A theoretical framework is based on a set of ideas and concepts that guide a researcher to conduct research toward a set of objectives. I want to give readers a brief theoretical orientation – an understanding of the lens through which this research was conducted.

My theoretical framework primarily rests on empowerment. Empowerment is a big, contested, and often misused word. It means different things to different people – governments, NGOs, development agencies, and feminist scholars have all defined it differently, often in ways that serve their own purposes. This post will briefly touch on what empowerment meant for this research – and introduce two concepts that I consider my own point of departure from the mainstream: selfhood and contentment. I will also briefly explain how cultural globalization – not just economic forces but the spread of new ideas, media, technology, and aspirations – connects migration to empowerment in ways that standard economic indicators miss entirely.

Empowerment: More Than a Buzzword

Empowerment has been a heavily loaded term since its popular use in the field of gender and development from the mid 1980s. At its most basic, empowerment is about power – who has it, who does not, and how those without it can gain it. But in development practice, the word has often been emptied of exactly that meaning. Governments, NGOs, and development agencies tend to use empowerment in a way that makes no space for real change in existing power relations. Scholars have called this 'empowerment without power' (Romano, 2002, as cited in Sardenberg, 2009).

This research draws on a different understanding – what scholars like Batliwala (1994) and Kabeer (1999) call liberating empowerment. For Kabeer, empowerment is a process that enables disadvantaged people to acquire the ability to make strategic life choices that were previously denied to them. This ability depends on three things: resources – the pre-conditions that exist; agency – the capacity to pursue one's choices despite obstacles; and achievements – the outcomes of exercising that capacity. All three matter. But agency is the most central. Because agency is not something that can be given to women from the outside. It is something women must do for themselves.

Selfhood

Selfhood – a person's sense of who they are – is often equated in Western thought with individualism. The idea of a self-contained, independent individual who makes choices based on her own preferences and interests. For Joseph (1997), this 'individualized contractual self is also Western centric, white and class privileged.' Kabeer (2011) resonates with this – noting that Western culture has stressed differences between men and women as almost mutually exclusive, with men developing a separate sense of self while for women the stress was always on relatedness – the construction of identity in relation to marriage and family. I fully second these ideas.

Taking it a step further, Chaudhuri (2004) draws a clear distinction between the personal in Western and non-Western societies. In the South Asian context, identity emerges from communitarian and extended family relationships – not from the atomized individual existence more typical of Western societies. A woman's sense of self here is deeply relational. It is constructed not in isolation but in connection – to her family, her kinship network, her community, and the social expectations that surround her. Realizing a woman's individual self-interest is an optimal outcome. However, in the South Asian context especially, a woman's individual self and her relational self reside side by side. Understanding one requires the lens of the other – her kin and social structure.

This insight shaped my research in a very direct way. If a woman's selfhood is relational – if who she is cannot be separated from the people and relationships around her – then understanding her empowerment requires understanding that relational world. Talking to her alone was not enough. I needed to talk to her mother, her father, her siblings, her neighbors. I needed to sit with the family she had left behind in the village. The data from those field visits – the natal family interviews, the community conversations – made complete sense in light of this concept. Her sense of self was not just inside her. It lived in the people around her. And to understand how migration and factory work had changed her, I had to understand how it had changed – or not changed – that relational world.

Perception

Patriarchal social systems clearly fashion the way women's work is arranged in both family and society. Until the end of the 1950s, the ideal of a male breadwinner family was a widely accepted notion. Though in reality neither a complete male breadwinner nor a lifelong housewife model has ever been a full reality (Lewis, 2006), the conservative cultural politics of both the West and Asia continue to make wife and motherhood a powerful symbol. The traditional breadwinner model sees a clear gender division between paid and unpaid work – men in the public sphere, women in the private. As such, the concept of work for men carries a visibly powerful social marker of status and recognition, whereas the concept of work for women is restricted to their selfless giving to family and community – without any monetary attachment. A woman's doing wage work outside the home is thus either considered a 'gift or charity' (Joseph, 1993) or a household decision based on rational choice out of economic need.

This strong social perception of women's work has a very deep impact on the formation of women's own mindset. Any shift in gender relations – and thus in empowerment – needs to take account of how society perceives women's work, and at the same time what women themselves say about their work and their sense of worth.

In the context of Bangladesh, this theoretical argument finds a very specific and revealing expression in the way society distinguishes between different kinds of women's work – formal salaried employment on one hand, and informal, unpaid, or low-status work on the other. That distinction – and how it shapes a woman's perception of herself and her sense of worth – is one of the central premises of this thesis. I will explore it in detail in a subsequent post, through the voices of the women themselves.

Contentment

Contentment is not an easy word to pin down – and I want to be honest about that upfront. In much of the existing literature, happiness and contentment are used interchangeably. Behaviorists like Kohler et al (2005) have termed contentment as happiness and theorized it under different indicators. Freud saw happiness as something essentially subjective – with many different pathways to arrive at it depending on the person. I both agree and depart from this. I agree that the feeling of contentment is subjective. But I depart from the idea that its sources are purely internal or individual. The sources of contentment – what makes a woman feel at peace with her life – are socially induced. They are shaped by a woman's relational world, by how others see her, by whether her work is valued or dismissed, by whether she belongs.

In this research, I have used contentment, happiness, and self-fulfillment at times interchangeably – not out of carelessness, but because none of these words alone fully captures what I was trying to understand. There is, however, a hierarchy. Self-fulfillment sits at the top – it is closest to Maslow's self-actualization, a deep realization of one's full potential. Contentment sits in the middle – deeper and more durable than happiness, rooted not in a momentary high but in a settled sense of how one relates to one's own life. Happiness sits at the lowest level – intense but temporary, driven by external events.

Interestingly, the Bengali language captures this distinction more precisely than English does. The word shukh in Bangla relates to a long-term state of satisfaction – leading to the term shukhi, meaning content. There is a separate word, khushi, which is used for a short-term feeling of happiness and joy. This distinction – between khushi and shukhi – is not just linguistic. It reflects a deeply held cultural understanding that contentment is not the same as momentary happiness. It is something deeper, more sustained, and more relational. This is the distinction my research builds on.

There is a clear dearth of research on contentment in the context of the Global South and, more specifically, Bangladesh. Western perceptions of happiness and their application may prove to be a danger in a society which is essentially patriarchal and where most women are bound by relational identities. Contentment for a Bangladeshi woman cannot be measured by the same yardstick used for a woman in a Western context.

Acknowledging the dominant social markers of relationality and perception of women's work, this study looks at working women's contentment in a broader array – their personal relationships, their migration to a new place, and their new role with access to money and decision-making. Does earning her own money make her feel more herself? Does it give her an inner peace she never felt before? Does living independently in a new city, away from her family, give her an emotional high she never knew before? Does that "emotional upliftment" make her feel shukhi – a feeling that does not falter in the face of hardship? Does having a say in household decisions shift how she sees her own worth? The women I interviewed gave answers to these questions that standard empowerment indicators simply would not have captured. Their voices – and the concept of shukhi – will be reflected in some of my future posts.

Cultural Globalization: The Connecting Thread

Globalization is usually discussed in economic terms – trade, investment, factory jobs. But globalization also has a deep cultural dimension. Singh (2000) acknowledges that the unique technological base of globalization has revolutionized systems of production, communication, and social organization in ways that are both integrative and disruptive. In his words, these media transcend territorial and national cultural boundaries, offering individuals enormous choices and freedom in matters of cultural and ideological preferences – transforming the very notion of time, space, and cultural symbolism.

Advancing a step further, Appadurai (1996) argues that consumption of mass media throughout the world provokes resistance, irony, selectivity and – most importantly – agency. Cultural globalization is not a one-way street in which the West imposes its values on the rest. It creates a dynamic space in which people respond, resist, select, and redefine. The immense potential of cultural globalization in creating agency is an unavoidable reality – and it needs to be seen in relation to migration as well. Migration, whether internal or transnational, is a shift of a person into a new social space and place. And when cultural globalization accompanies that shift – as it does for the women in this research – it has the potential to transform a woman's sense of identity, her meanings of home, her sense of belonging, and ultimately her rights (Feldman, Geisler and Silberling, 2003).

This is where my research extends Appadurai's argument into a gendered space. Cultural globalization reaches a village woman not just through the factory or the city – but through a mobile phone in her hand before she ever leaves her village. Through a television screen at a neighbor's house. These exposures shift what she wants, what she thinks is possible, and how she sees herself. They also influence her decision to migrate – leaving her home for an unknown destination that offers glitters and possibilities for her to be content – to be shukhi. Cultural globalization reshapes her selfhood, her perception of her own work, and her sense of what contentment means for her. She lands in a position to weigh her dreams, aspirations, and lived realities. Migration and cultural globalization thus become a connecting thread – towards redefining selfhood and self-perception, and hence towards impacting bargaining power and gender relations.

My research argues that women's agency and achievement need to be considered under a flexible set of indicators – selfhood, bargaining power, perception, and contentment – alongside the more standard economic measures of wellbeing. Cultural globalization is what makes those flexible indicators necessary. Because a woman who has never left her village may already have been influenced and impacted by what globalization has quietly placed in her path. That change is unmeasurable by any standard economic indicator. And this is what my research tries to tell. Not just the story of what changed. But the story of what shifted – quietly, invisibly – inside.

For those interested: Key references used in this research

Appadurai, Arjun. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

Batliwala, S. (1994). 'The Meaning of Women's Empowerment: New Concepts from Action.' In G. Sen, A. Gita and L. Chen (eds), Population Policies Reconsidered. Harvard University Press.

Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. (2004). Feminism in India. Zed Books. London.

Feldman, S., Geisler, C. and Silberling, L. (2003). 'Moving Targets: Displacement, Impoverishment, and Development.' International Social Science Journal. Vol. 55. No. 175.

Joseph, S. (1997). 'The Reproduction of Political Process among Women Activists in Lebanon.' In Dawn Chatty and Annika Rabo (eds), Organizing Women. Berg. Oxford.

Kabeer, Naila. (1999). 'Resources, Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women's Empowerment.' Development and Change. Vol. 30.

Kabeer, Naila. (2011). 'Between Affiliation and Autonomy: Navigating Pathways of Women's Empowerment and Gender Justice in Rural Bangladesh.' Development and Change. Vol. 42. No. 2.

Kohler, H.P., Behrman, J.R. and Skytte Skytthe, A. (2005). 'Partner and Children: Exploring the Happiness Effects of Having Children.' Demography. Vol. 42. No. 3.

Lewis, J. (2006). 'Work/Family Reconciliation, Equal Opportunities and Social Policies: The Interpretation of Policy Trajectories at the EU Level and the Meaning of Gender Equality.' Journal of European Public Policy. Vol. 13. No. 3.

Sardenberg, C. (2009). Liberal vs Liberating Empowerment: A Latin American Feminist Perspective on Conceptualising Women's Empowerment. Pathways of Women's Empowerment. Brighton: IDS.

Singh, Y. (2000). Culture Change in India: Identity and Globalization. Rawat Publications. Jaipur.