Abstract
Human capital has been widely adopted by social scientists and policymakers as a tool for analysing labour market and education issues. This chapter suggests that critically engaging with the concept of human capital is a fruitful area for feminist research because it offers a way of making gender and household relations visible within economic discourse and can help in the construction of a new political economy. The aim is to develop a way of theorizing the social development of human resources that is more adequate than neoclassical human capital theory and that takes account of gender and family. Conceptual frameworks drawn from outside the economics discipline may help in this process and two of these that are discussed in the chapter are ‘human capability for work’ and ‘human learning potential’.
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Gardiner, J. (2000). Gender and Family in the Formation of Human Capital. In: Cook, J., Roberts, J., Waylen, G. (eds) Towards a Gendered Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373150_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373150_4
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