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The Norms of Power and the Power of Norms
16. See also Ibrahim and Alkire (2007) and Kabeer (1999, 2001), who refer to studies that use measures of access to land as an indicator of empowerment. They argue that these types of studies, by focusing only on land ownership or legal capacity to own, forget the pathways by which such access translates into agency and achievements in women’s lives. 17. How these three conditions are measured, however, is not clear. 18. The World Development Report 2012 identifies freedom of movement, fertility control, freedom from domestic violence, and the ability to have a voice in society as the main components of agency. Ibrahim and Alkire (2007) propose certain “exercises of agency” areas with specific sets of indicators, including control over personal decisions, choice in household decision making, domain-specific autonomy, power to change aspects in one’s life at the individual level, and power to change aspects in one’s life at the community level. 19. See World Development Report 2012 (World Bank 2012, 174, box 4.7) for an explanation of processes that make social norms very difficult to dislodge, even when the conditions that gave rise to them no longer make objective sense. 20. Bicchieri (2006) defines the expectations that underlie norm compliance as 1) empirical expectations, where individuals believe that a sufficiently large subset of the relevant group or population conforms to the norm in a given situation; 2) normative expectations, where individuals believe that a sufficiently large subset of the relevant group or population expects them to conform to the norm in a given situation; and (3) normative expectations with sanctions, where individuals believe that a sufficiently large subset of the relevant group or population expects them to conform to the norm in a given situation, prefers them to conform, and may sanction behavior. 21. Socialization is the process by which prevailing social and cultural norms of what constitutes appropriate gender behavior is transmitted to children. 22. Following the categories created by Garfinkel (1967), West and Zimmerman (1987) call this process “accountability” of our gender practice. Our everyday behavior, according to Garfinkel, is “accountable” in the sense that it is intelligible and legitimate, and observed as fitting a specific pattern so it doesn’t need to be explained to anyone in order to be identified and accepted. 23. Connell (1987) uses the term hegemonic masculinity to describe ways that some forms of masculinity are more culturally exalted and socially dominant than others. “Hegemonic masculinity is constructed in relation to women and to subordinated masculinities. The other masculinities need not be as clearly defined—indeed, achieving hegemony may consist precisely in preventing alternatives gaining cultural definition and recognition as alternatives, confining them to ghettos, to privacy, to unconsciousness” (Connell 1987, 186). Connell also talks of “emphasized femininity” to describe patterns of femininity that have more cultural and ideological support than others. None can be hegemonic in a social context where women are in an overall subordinate position in relation to men—where women are not in the positions of power that enable a definition of femininity in a way that serves women’s interests.
References Akerlof, G., and R. Kranton. 2000. “Economics and Identity.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (3): 715–53. On Norms and Agency • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9862-3