In this chapter, the authors analyze the concept of gender and its history; they look at the crisis that is caused by this concept in terms of both orthodox economy and the heterodox economy. A wide range of feminist economics arguments are considered. Feminist economics arguments correspond to the points of Antonio Gramsci's “hegemony” and Louis Althusser's “ideology.” Starting with both philosophers' concepts, the authors explicate the dilemma of orthodox-heterodox economics. First, they discuss the vision of heterodox-orthodox economics. Then, they discuss how technology becomes an important part of orthodox economics, and through the aforementioned philosophers, they discuss what would happen in the economic system if this situation changes.
TopIntroduction
The history of economics is actually a history of war among whole human beings in all historical, sociological, political, etc. areas. In this war, beginning from the ancient times until rising of monotheistic religions, women always had much less importance; they had a secondary role in the economic history.
Before mentioning the feminist economics’ becoming a part of economic history, it is necessary to mention some concepts which are directly related to the topic. But, firstly we should examine the relationship between technology and heterodox-orthodox vision.
Of course, economics history has not been formed by itself; it was affected by many important elements and one of the most significant one of these elements is technology. Technology not only affected how products are produced, what would be produced etc., but also the economics view.
Economic crisis got deeper in parallel with the progress the technology; because, it was formed only by firms on the thought of how much money they would earn. Technology does not really deal with human beings. This case is caused by the orthodox economics vision. Because, the structure of orthodox economics, which was never interested in people needs, caused increase in the technology.
So, in this study we will examine how technology is affected by the orthodox economics vision. What we will say about the orthodox economics’ improprieties will show us the heterodox economics view more clearly and through this approach, technology will be produces for the need of people.
We choose the feminist economics thoughts for two reasons: The first one is, the orthodox economics do not give importance to woman’s thoughts about economics vision. The second one is, as one of the approaches of the heterodox economics, feminist economics can give some useful advices to technological improvement by the view of women’s.
In this study, our methodology is firstly, to mention about some concepts which are related to working life in terms of heterodox-orthodox concepts. Secondly, we will elaborate the concepts of heterodox-orthodox economics. Thirdly, we will introduce the relationship between feminist economics-heterodox economics and try to tell what causes economic crisis through the dilemma of heterodox-orthodox economics. Consequently, we will briefly conclude the dilemma of heterodox-orthodox economics; we will summarize the point of view of these two concepts about crisis.