Sarah Irwin and Wendy Bottero Market returns? Gender and theories of change in employment relations ABSTRACT This paper explores recent arguments about the marketization of female labour, in the context of a wider analysis of the role of concepts like ‘the market’ and ‘individualization’ in sociological accounts of change in employment relations. It will be argued that within sociology there has been a tendency for rapid, large- scale changes in employment relations to be characterized as the breakdown of social inuences or structures and as the emergence of atomized, individuated market forces. In the most recent models, change in the nature of gendered pos- itions within employment are presented in terms of a decline of social structur- ing and social constraint. These emergent accounts hold similarities to classical economics, and to Marx’s and Weber’s accounts of employment, which also characterized new forms of employment relations in terms of the emptying of their social content and their replacement by market forms. We offer an alterna- tive, moral economy, perspective which foregrounds the continued signicance of social relations in the structuring of employment and employment change. We develop the argument through an analysis of gendered patterns of employment and change in family form. KEYWORDS: Gender; employment change; family; market; moral economy; individualization INTRODUCTION For many commentators we have witnessed a major transformation in econ- omic and social relationships in late twentieth-century society. A signicant series of transformations include the shift from manufacturing to service sector employment, the emergence of a new distribution of employment insecurity, popularly construed as the end of ‘jobs for life’, dramatic changes in women’s expectations and commitments in respect of employment, and seismic shifts in family forms. There is a growing urgency over the perceived need for a new welfare settlement in the wake of these changes. In all these domains, arguments about increased individualism and an increased British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 2 (June 2000) pp. 261–280 © 2000 London School of Economics and Political Science ISSN 0007 1315 print/1468-4446 online Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the LSE