81 Gender and Work Using Figuration Theory: A Narrative Exercise to Unpack Gender Inequalities and Conceptions of “Work” Heather Hofmeister 1 Introduction On the first day of my Sociology of Work class, when I ask my students to tell me what work is, they say: work is what one does for money. With a bit of prod- ding, some admit that caring work might also be work. I argue (elsewhere) that these views don’t go nearly far enough (Hofmeister 2019). My view tends toward the total social organization of labor (Glucksmann 2016; Taylor 2004), to aband- on the paid-unpaid dichotomy and expand work concepts to include commu- nity work; social types of work like caring for family and kin; material work like maintaining or acquiring belongings and household; personal work; and edu- cational work (Hofmeister 2019). By reducing work to paid work, we miss the variety and interdependence of aspects of work, as well as the degree to which social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and made invisible by this narrow definition. But how did we get to the point that the very definition of work is nearly en- tirely paid and also gendered? And why does work sociology so often look only at paid work, when paid and unpaid work are so deeply intertwined and inter- dependent? This chapter uses Elias’ Figuration Theory, focusing on frames of long-term change and interdependencies, to point out some historical origins of our contemporary ideas about work that help explain why the concept of work is so narrow and so gendered. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 S. Ernst und G. Becke (Hrsg.), Transformationen der Arbeitsgesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22712-8_4 H. Hofmeister (*) Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften, Institut für Soziologie, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, Germany E-Mail: h.hofmeister@soz.uni-frankfurt.de