Women’s business: The digital
monetisation of children’s clothing
and the construction of work-constellations
Tania Huijben
Student number 10206507
Thesis - Research Master Social Sciences - University of Amsterdam Date: 17 June 2019
Supervisor: dr. Marguerite van den Berg Second reader: prof. dr. Sarah Bracke
Abstract
In the context of the post-Fordist sexual contract, selling children’s clothing online constitutes a case of women’s entrepreneurial strategies to combine different forms of paid and unpaid work. Based on (online) ethnographic and interview data, I examine how Dutch women sell children’s clothing—personally made or second hand—on Etsy, Facebook, Marktplaats, or their own webshops, (set up) from home. I argue that we cannot understand this entrepreneurial strategy and the completeness of their work using existing theories that limit work to place, time, economic revenue or job type. Building on feminist theories that make work visible, I develop the concept of ‘work-constellations’, which enables us to imagine work as a constellation of elements that remain in motion and always exist in a changing relationship with each other. This article demonstrates how, by selling children’s clothing in different ways, a) women combine different forms of paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive work; b) that these forms are connected and co-dependent; and c) that they are dynamic.
Keywords
Work-constellations, women entrepreneurs, feminist theory, unpaid work, reproductive work, digital work, post-Fordist sexual contract
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Introduction
I: What does your week look like?
Emily: Well, if you are an entrepreneur, you are actually always working. On the one hand, that can be very positive, and on the other hand, it can be difficult. Even at home, you often think about your business: What you are going to do, how you are planning it, things like that. […] I get up pretty early, say, somewhere between 5 a.m. and 6.30 a.m. The first thing to do is to get everything ready: breakfast and things like that. In the meantime, I check my orders, which I already print out. I just make a plan of what I am going to do and in which week. I have partially outsourced my social media. That saves me a lot of time, because I used to spend three or four hours a day doing that. That [the other part of it] is something I just do in-between. So when the children are out of school, I just do things like that in between. On Monday morning, for example, then I will do all sorts of things that I have to do. Make a round, for instance, along the bookkeeper. At the moment, I am doing my orders. Besides, that rack must still be emptied (points to a clothing rack), that must be put online again, because it was at a store temporarily. Yes all sort of things. Look, during some periods, it is mega busy. For instance, when I have a photoshoot. I’ve a photographer who photographs all products all day long. After that it is very busy, because it needs to be uploaded to the website. I do that myself. In the beginning I also did photography myself, but not anymore. […] Look, I also have days of 14, 15, 16 hours, but I also have days of only 3 hours; it varies! For example, someone can call now that the webshop is down, then I say, ‘Sorry, but I have to go to the web builder’. Actually, it is just a lot of responding to what happens that day. Yes of course I place my orders every day. When I'm on vacation, I also have someone who does that for me, so that's nice, because that should go on. I just do social media every day. At least once or twice a month, I plan everything. At first, I did it all ad hoc, but that is simply no longer possible. I plan everything, and it’s put online by Facebook, but for example, Instagram doesn’t. So every morning, I start posting things online. I just have a marketing plan in mind: What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?
On a Monday morning, I sat down for an interview with Emily, to talk about the children’s clothing business that she is running through the internet, set up from home. Ten years ago, she developed a business plan to sell durable clothing produced both ethically and sustainably. She designs and sells the clothing herself, and has outsourced part of the production to other local women entrepreneurs. She combines her knowledge as a mother, her digital savviness and her former business experience, and after several years of hard work and financial investments, she has established a well-known children’s clothing brand in the Netherlands.
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Although it is clear to Emily that she works hard—or is ‘actually always working’, as she phrased it— many of her activities would not be seen as such with our current dominant conceptualisations of work. These approaches understand work as paid employment. Work is calculated on the basis of attendance at the office, a contract or hourly wage (see, for example, research on work done by the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics [CBS], Cremers, 2015; The Netherlands Institue for Social Research [SCP], Merens & Bucx, 2018; and Eurostat, 2018)1. This raises the question of how to
perform this calculation for the varied and fragmented nature of Emily’s work activities. Much of her work remains invisible in these studies and their followed policies on precarisation, economic and social security, and women’s emancipation. Despite decades of feminist scholarship on unpaid labour (see for example Davis, 1981; Federici, 1974; Mies, 1981), research continues to be dominated by the idea that work is only real when it is paid, and that there is an ‘outside of work’ beyond paid employment.
In contrast, my ethnographic interviews with Emily and 11 other Dutch women who sell children’s clothing online—while reckoning that not all work is paid—, made me question whether there was an outside of work for them at all. All of these women were constantly busy performing different forms of work, and no clear distinction could be made between their paid and unpaid activities, or between reproductive and productive labour. Their work is porous and hybrid, lacking a clear beginning, end, place, and different forms of work happened simultaneously. As I could not make sense of the way their lives are structured using existing theories, I have developed the concept of ‘work-constellations’. This concept helps to grasp the multiple, dynamic forms of work they perform.
To develop the concept of work-constellations, I employed McDowell’s (2009) broad definition of work, which is especially relevant in a context of advanced capitalism in which nearly everything becomes mobilised as work (Adkins, 2016; Weeks, 2011):
Work in the widest sense consists of all those activities that are central to material existence, to our place in the world: indeed, to all aspects of human life. It provides us with sustenance, goods for exchange and, in most societies, income. Work is what makes life possible, it is a way of producing things to eat, to wear, to shelter in and to sustain not only ourselves but also all those people who are considered too young, too old, too weak or incapable of working for themselves (McDowell, 2009, p. 26).
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I use the concept ‘work-constellation’ to imagine work as a dynamic composition of elements existing within a changing relationship with each other. In doing so, I am inspired by the Dutch meaning of constellation (constellatie), which can be defined broadly as ‘the way in which it is built’, ‘the relationship between parts’, ‘mutual status’ and ‘state of affairs’ (Nederlandse Encyclopedie, n.d.). Hence, in the case of work-constellation, this refers to the (state of affairs in the) relationship between different parts of work.
In this article, I build upon feminist scholarship that has made work that was previously not considered as work visible. On the one hand, I use Adkins (2012), Ekinsmyth (2011, 2013), Gregg (2011), Luckman (2015a, 2015b) and Mäkinen (2018) to focus on paid work outside formal workplaces, and on the other hand, I build on Federici (1974) and Jarrett (2016) who argue that unpaid work is work too. However, as I will demonstrate, these scholars either hold on to the false idea that work is paid—or that work has to be paid in order to be defined as work (see top-left side Figure 1)—or that they build upon the notion that paid productive work takes place in formal workplaces and unpaid reproductive work occurs at home (see bottom-left side of Figure 1). I demonstrate that in the case of selling children’s clothing, diverse constellations are formed that consist of paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive work outside formal workplaces (see right side Figure 1). Work-constellations allow room for different ‘productive moments’ (Adkins, 2012), for integrating unpaid work, such as housework (Federici, 1974) and digital work (Jarrett, 2016), as
work, and for illustrating how these different work entities relate to and depend on each other. With
this, I aim to go beyond the focus on one form of work, including the binary of work vs. not-work or work bound to place. Instead, I strive to make visible the entire constellation of different forms of work that women perform dispersed throughout places.
After discussing the previously mentioned theories in greater depth in the following section, I describe my research case and approach. Finally, I illustrate the concept of work-constellations through my empirical work.
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Figure 1 Theoretical underpinnings work-constellations
Highlighting work as work
I place myself in the tradition of making work visible as such so that it can be treated accordingly. This opens possibilities for bargaining about its conditions, refusing it, and politics regarding the (re)distribution of work (Federici, 1974; Tokumitsu, 2015; Weeks, 2011). Making work visible as work is important, because, first, work today has strong moral and ethical attachments, which obscures the fact that work is a necessity for survival, and thus makes people exploitable and governs them in precarity (Lorey, 2015).2 Second, our current dominant definition of work as paid
employment remains too limited. ‘Work-constellations’ brings together various forms of work that are often overlooked as work, but have been highlighted by different feminist thinkers.
To begin, I take into account ‘the process of the folding of the economy into society, a process concerning the movement of productive and value-creating activities away from the formal workplace and their dispersal across the social body’ (Adkins, 2012, p.621). As Adkins argues, to understand work (and especially women’s work) in a post-Fordist context, we should look beyond employment as ‘the productive moment’, but instead as a ‘continuum of productive moments’ (2012, p.622). The question then becomes a matter of how work is moving outside the formal
2 How the moral and ethical attachments to work govern people in precarity, see, for example, Weeks (2011) regarding
work’s subjectivation, Muehlebach (2011) on post-Fordist affect, and Tokumitsu (2014) on the Do-What-You-Love-ideology.
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workplace. First, it is enabled by digital technology. Internet, smartphones and laptops easily move work out of the office and into the street, homes and the bedroom (Gregg, 2011, p.1). As Gregg claims, online communication technology leads to ‘presence bleed’: the ongoing presence of work (2011, p.2). Second, ‘the folding of the economy into society’ relates to the new sexual contract in post-Fordism, which expects women to perform paid work while remaining responsible for the largest portion of unpaid and reproductive work at home (Adkins, 2012, 2016).3 This has led many
women to develop entrepreneurial strategies to perform paid work from home, such as blogging about motherhood (Mäkinen, 2018) or selling handcrafted products on the online platform Etsy (Luckman, 2015a, 2015b; see also Ekinsmyth, 2011, 2013, on ‘mumpreneurs’).
These authors thus point out that it is important to examine productive or paid work outside the formal workplace. I follow them in viewing the practice of selling children’s clothing online as an entrepreneurial strategy to form ‘work-constellations’ that align with the new sexual contract in post-Fordism (Luckman 2015a, 2015b). Furthermore, I highlight its ‘productive moments’ outside the formal workplace (Adkins, 2012) and how technology enables the ongoing presence of productive work (Gregg, 2011). However, I depart from their conclusion that this leads to a work-life collapse (Gregg, 2011, p.5; Luckman, 2015a, p.87)—the idea that the boundary between work and life blurs (Ekinsmyth, 2011, p.106) or dissolves (Mäkinen, 2018, p.142). Namely, this suggests that there was formerly a life at home without work that is now taken over by work, and thus fails to notice the work that was already taking place at home.
In contrast, I would like to make this work visible as well via work-constellations, inspired by Marxist feminism and particularly by the Wages Against Housework Movement (Federici, 1974)4. This movement famously protested that housework was unfairly framed as love, or as something women naturally do, and argued for how important it is to make this work visible as work. While the strongest feminist movement in the 70s fought for the right to perform paid labour (to become part of the economy), the Wages Against Housework Movement argued that women’s housework was already part of the paid economy. By giving birth, raising children, socialising them as workers and by cleaning, washing, preparing meals and thus enabling male workers to work such long work
3 In Fordism, this sexual contract consisted of an ideal of men earning a family wage by working fulltime in a workplace,
while women, as housewives, performed the unpaid work at home in exchange for economic security (Adkins, 2016). Although this was not the case for many people—especially men of colour, who did not earn a family wage, and serval working-class women and women of colour also did paid work outside the home—the ideal was strong and widespread (Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Meulenbelt, 2017).
4 They are commonly known as the Wages For Housework Movement, but I follow Federici’s (1974) statement that their
aim is, by claiming wages, to reject housework. She explain that they are actually a movement against housework, and that it is therefore better to speak of ‘Wages Against Housework’.
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weeks, they reproduced the workforce. This reproductive work is thus part of the capitalist system of production, unrecognized but crucial for capital accumulation (Federici, 1974, p.5). By making this visible as work, this feminist movement strove to reduce women’s work instead of increasing it.
This analysis was recently revived to remind us that productive work remains dependent on reproductive work, and that the latter continues to be undervalued (see, for example, Arruzza, Bhattacharya, & Fraser, 2019; Weeks, 2011). Since the Wages Against Housework Movement, women’s paid work has increased significantly, but reproductive work continues to remain un- or underpaid, and is still largely performed by women (International Labour Organization, 2016, p.19). In post-Fordism, the reproductive work for people with well-paid jobs is often commercialised and performed by low-paid (often immigrant) women, or else it is conducted as a ‘second shift’ by women who also work outside the home (Hochschild, 2003). Alternatively—as this study demonstrates—it is sometimes performed by women who develop entrepreneurial strategies to combine it with paid work from home (Adkins, 2016; Luckman, 2015a, 2015b).
However, existing theories fall short in describing the multiple different ways in which women constellate their work in post-Fordism. On the one hand, Hochschild (2003) acknowledges how, in post-Fordism, women perform both productive and reproductive work. But by depicting this as two shifts, a clear line between the sphere of productive work and the sphere of reproductive work, is implied. On the other hand, Luckman (2015a, 2015b) ends the division of those spheres by pointing to the ongoing negotiation between ‘paid activities and care activities’ in the home sphere. I also view selling children’s clothing as a negotiation between different activities. However, rather than seeing care and paid work as opposite activities (as Luckman does), I understand it as a negotiation between different forms of work, including care as work. ‘Work-constellations’ can integrate both productive and reproductive work, paid and unpaid, as work without pinning it down to different spheres. In so doing, it demonstrates how women constellate work in different ways in post-Fordism.
Finally, the Wages Against Housework Movement also inspires efforts to understand digital media work, which is important in ‘the folding of the economy into society’. Jarrett (2016) argues that the figure of the ‘Digital Housewife’ can help us to understand productive consumer work performed in Web 2.0. Similar to housework, social media is often seen as simply social engagement and something people do out of love. However, the data that people produce is used by social media platforms to make profits. Therefore, Jarrett highlights how social media platforms are dependent on the free digital labour of people chatting and ‘liking’ each other in order to make profits. Recognising the importance of digital media work, I take this into account in work constellations.
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In conclusion, this paper sets out to integrate these various forms of work, and to highlight their relations and dependencies by introducing the concept of work-constellations.
Case and approach
The history of women’s paid and unpaid textile work makes children’s clothing a strategic case to research women’s (informal) businesses. During the industrial revolution, when a great deal of productive work moved to factories, women continued to carry out part of the production process from home, especially in the textile sector, such as silk weaving and artificial flower making (Boxer, 1982; Tilly, 1994). This allowed them to combine paid work with care and housework at home, while at the same time this allowed factory owners to exploit a cheap and flexible workforce. Furthermore, handcrafting—producing and mending—clothing has long been part of women’s reproductive work at home (Hackney, 2006; König, 2013; Luckman, 2015a). As a result, besides teaching us about new characteristics of women’s work—such as possibilities for (and pressure to) economise—this case allows us to understand the historical continuity of women’s hybrid and non- and underpaid work (McDowell, 2009).
My fieldwork took place from September 2018 to April 2019. Inspired by online ethnographic research methods (Haverinen, 2015; Murthy, 2008; Schrooten, 2012), I started by researching how innumerable women entrepreneurs sell children’s clothing in several online spaces. I focussed on private webshops (where women sold their own handmade, designed or collected children’s clothing, often accompanied by other products for children, blogs about motherhood and personal stories), the handmade marketplace platform Etsy (where women sold their own handcrafted clothing provided by Etsy, for 0,18 euro per listing5 and approximately 9% for a
transaction6), Marktplaats—a Dutch digital marketplace comparable to Craigslist or eBay—(where
women sell many articles of second-hand children’s clothing), and Facebook (which not only offers a marketplace and a space for promoting webshops, but also a medium to form groups for selling and purchasing centred around a specific lifestyle, philosophy, brand preference, or (economic) need, and thus functions as a place where women offer advice, share experiences and help each other out). These places were often connected, as most of the women sold or advertised through multiple platforms.
These webshops and platforms evoke a positive impression with cheery pictures, but I was interested in the work behind all of this. Consequently, besides carrying out explorative research
5 ‘Listing’ is Etsy’s term for an advertisement.
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online, I did in-depth semi-structured interviews (lasting two hours on average) with 12 women (five had their own webshop, three had an Etsy webshop, and four sold second-hand clothing on Facebook and Marktplaats). I asked them about how they began selling children’s clothing and how they sell the clothing today. This included details such as how they obtain, keep, and prepare the clothing for selling, how they make photographs, interact with customers, and what their weeks look like. The interviews had an ethnographic character (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). They took place in a familiar space (often their home, another workplace, or a café they regularly visit), and most of the women showed some of their selling practices, such as the places they work, the clothing, machines, how they make pictures, their digital environment, and interactions with clients (drawing on insights from go-along interviewing; Kusenbach, 2003). I transcribed and anonymised the interviews. For this article, I translated the quotes and removed and changed some details of their stories to ensure their confidentiality.
The majority of the women were white and middle class, living across the Netherlands. Ten lived with a husband, and 11 had children, of whom nine still lived with their children. All of them were in their 30s or early 40s, except for one, who was recently retired and has restarted handcrafting clothing for her grandchildren.7
The work-constellations presented in this article are thus primarily based on the experiences of middle-class women. This is in line with what is described by Ekinsmyth (2013, p.532) and Luckman (2015b, p.146), who characterise women’s entrepreneurial strategies as a mostly middle class phenomenon. However, the selling of second-hand clothing is not limited to this group, as I found out in my online ethnography, what was told me in the interviews, and was revealed in the interview with one woman who sold second-hand clothing from a severely economic necessity. This one interview focussed especially on fears and safety strategies for selling online, and was a huge contrast with the other interviews which generally showed a positive experience with selling children’s clothing. The role of socio-economic position is not the scope of this article. However, selling children’s clothing online offers a good case for further research into broader experiences with entrepreneurial strategies.
In addition, the experiences of the women I interviewed should be understood within the context of the Netherlands. In relation to the post-Fordist sexual contract, it is relevant that the Netherlands has a strong tradition—especially for women—of part-time work (Portegijs & Van den Brakel, 2016). While women’s employment rates have increased over the last decades, the ideal of mothers being home for their children thus remained in the Netherlands. Recently, however, this has been problematised in public debates and by the government’s policy. Today, part-time
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employed or ‘stay-at-home’ women are problematised as not economically independent and are encouraged to increase their amount of paid work (e.g., Portegijs & Van den Brakel, 2016, p.12; Ten Broeke, 2019).
Furthermore, the interviews in this research should be understood in relation to my own positionality (Haraway, 1988). Since the women I interviewed saw me—also a woman, 26 years old, graduating but without children—as someone who might want to start selling children’s clothing in the future, a bond of trust was quickly created, and they were very willing to explain (and sometimes even advise me on) what it is like to sell children’s clothing and to manage all the responsibilities when having children. Five of them had started their (Etsy) webshop recently and without a prior plan, were happy with their new successes, and seemed honoured that someone was interested in their work. They explained in great detail what running a children’s clothing webshop involves, and they emphasised what they love about it (including in contrast to their life before the webshop). Three other women I spoke to started selling children’s clothing with a serious business plan aiming to generate income. They seemed concerned with convincing me that they are not like every other woman who has started a webshop, but that their business is serious and not easy to run.8 In these interviews, their ideals (on sustainability and ethics) and struggles
with competitors were more central. The women who sell second-hand clothing through Marktplaats and Facebook seemed a bit more surprised at my specific interest in selling children’s clothing, especially in relation to work. Namely, this activity corresponds even less with the dominant definition of work and was often not as clearly distinguished as an activity for them as it was for the other women. Therefore, these interviews focussed less on selling children’s clothing alone, and more on the broader experiences of buying and selling diverse, second-hand items via online platforms.
As these descriptions highlight, the first round of interviews revealed that children’s clothing is sold in a variety of ways, and that this holds a different place and meaning in each of the women’s lives. For all of them, however, the monetising of children’s clothing involved a great deal of work. This included among other things buying clothing or fabrics, producing, washing, folding, ironing, taking pictures, uploading them, writing online descriptions or stories, advertising, corresponding with potential buyers, corresponding with actual buyers, packing, sending, managing
8 Besides that this probably says something about my approach (it would probably have been different if I did not
assume that they were working from home), it shows something about their experiences that women’s businesses are often not taken seriously, which they also gave some examples of themselves. In addition, by stressing that they had a serious business, and drawing a line between themselves and the majority of unprofessional entrepreneurs, they reinforced this discourse.
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finances and doing administration. Furthermore, despite all this work, they earned relatively little money, often just a couple of euros per sold item. I came to this conclusion by mapping all the work activities they had previously described during the interviews. At this point, I realised that to understand the ‘logic’ of selling children’s clothing, I had to look beyond merely economic reasons, and to instead understand that it only made sense to view the whole ‘work-constellation’ together. To analyse their work-constellation in a more complete manner, I selected—from the previously described different practices—three cases9 for a follow-up interview, in which I asked
these women to map all their daily activities (inspired by the participatory appraisal research methods, see for example Theis & Grady, 1991). First, we wrote all the components of their lives and daily activities on sticky notes, which they mapped on paper. In addition, they explained their mappings, including what the different components were and how they were related. In this way, we worked together in analysing how selling children’s clothing is embedded in their lives, and we further discussed what this consists of and how it relates to other forms of work they do.
The concept, and usage, of work-constellations thus developed throughout the entire research process. Besides being a concept to think with, it also proved to be a tool for analysis (mapping their work-constellations while analysing the interviews) as well as a participatory appraisal interview tool (mapping work-constellations together).
Work-constellations with selling children’s clothing
In this section, I illustrate the concept of work-constellations using my empirical data. The concept is developed based on the interviews with all 12 women. However, since the full usefulness of this concept can only be clarified by illustrating the details and context of the stories, I discuss this here on the basis of my interactions with two of the women. I use my fieldnotes, the interviews and participatory mapping exercise that I did with Susan (who started her business as a hobby) and Laura (who sells second-hand clothing). I do not aim to present their work-constellations as ideal types for how children’s clothing is sold, but rather show how their stories offer an insight in the varieties that are present in constellations. As such, this helps to illustrate not only how work-constellations can widen our definition of work, but also that it helps to see how people constellate their work in different ways.
Below, I discuss this in three steps. First, I demonstrate how constellations provide room for different work entities. Second, I illustrate how they highlight the mutual relations and
9 These cases were selected because they clearly differed from each other but did, for a great deal, encompass the
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dependencies among the different work entities. Third, I elaborate on how these work entities and mutual relations are dynamic.
1. Different entities of work
Susan
Susan is selling children’s clothing on the handicraft platform Etsy. She lives with her husband and her six-year old daughter and 10-year-old son in a small village in the Netherlands. She was educated as a specialised nurse, but after severe burn-out and depression, and the birth of her first son, she quit her job. While her husband has a fulltime well-paid job in a corporate company, she takes care of the housework and ‘has her hands full with her children’. Susan told me that the moment her children went to school, she asked herself the question, ‘What do I want do with all this time?’ She did not want to work for a boss again, and so she started thinking of doing something for herself with drawing, something she had always loved to do.
Following the dominant perspective on work (as described in the introduction of this article; Cremers, 2015; Merens & Bucx, 2018; Eurostat, 2018), it might seem as if Susan is not working. From this perspective, it also seems as if she is outside of work, since she is no longer formally employed and her husband is earning the family’s income. However, if we apply a critical feminist perspective, taking into account unpaid and reproductive work (in line with Federici, 1974), multiple work activities become visible. Susan is not out of work, since she is performing a great deal of the housework, taking care of and raising the children. However, this is still not the full story.
A relative suggested making postcards of her drawings and selling them. After trying for a while, she opened her Etsy webshop and started to sell more things. Susan told me that her children’s judo coach asked her to design a new logo, and that she really liked this. ‘Well, these are not things that make you rich, but that is not what I am talking about. We also bought this house with the idea “my husband works, and I am not physically well enough [they discovered rheumatics] and I cannot continue to work in the hospital”. […] And that is still our money distribution: we only have one that needs to provide for the maintenance, and everything I do is extra. Well, last year, I actually paid our holiday with my shop. Isn't that really cool?’ She laughed: ‘I didn’t expect that either. I really had a great plan: My first year, I wanted to sell something every month; that was my plan. The second year, I wanted to sell something every week. And this year, I had around 10 to 12 sales per month’. The moment the coach asked her for the logo, ‘I felt like I was still playing around [fröbelen]. And then I thought, “Hey, I am real, I exist”’, as Susan told me during the interview. ‘So she was the first customer that came
12 from the outside. That’s a very cool feeling and “I can do it”. And also a reason for me to think, “I don’t give up; I go on”’. This inspired her to take her webshop more seriously. She subsequently signed up for an online group with other Etsy webshop owners. For 10 dollars a month, she can listen to seminars, receive advice and share experiences with smaller assigned groups. In this group, she learned a great deal about improving her photos, trends and branding. She now mostly sells clothing with her own drawings in Canada.
Besides her reproductive work, she also started to monetise her creative hobby. This can be understood as an entrepreneurial strategy to perform productive paid work from home, in line with the post-Fordist sexual contract (Adkins, 2016; Luckman, 2015b). In her case, she started selling children’s clothing as an entrepreneur not out of economic necessity, but because it provides her with a feeling of existence. Although the economic revenue is small, it offers a narrative of paid work, which is important in a context with strong moral attachments to paid work, and in which women’s emancipation is equated with paid work (Tokumitsu, 2015; Weeks, 2011). However, avoiding the trap of narrowing Susan’s work down to this monetisation aspect (and to understand her work only as paid work), I want to continue taking into account her unpaid and reproductive work as well, and to argue that constellations can aid in doing so. Namely, work-constellations provide room to view all those different activities as work and help to see that she is working much more than our dominant work framework highlights. Like stars as different entities in star constellations, the variety of work activities represent different entities in a work– constellation.
However, this is not the only way that different forms of work are combined. Laura’s work, for example, is constellated in a considerable different manner.
Laura
Laura introduced herself jokingly as a ‘Marketplace mom’. She buys and sells as many second-hand things as possible through Marktplaats, and sometimes Facebook. Almost everything she owns she has purchased on Marktplaats and has the potential to be sold again, including children’s clothing. At the moment, she is on sick leave recovering from the birth of her third child. Usually, however, she works 3,5 days a week as a teacher, provides private tutoring, performs some paid projects and studies for an extra degree in order to be promoted in her teaching job. She lives with her three children in a small town in the north of the Netherlands. Her boyfriend (the father of her third child) lives in a village nearby. She started selling children’s clothing approximately 14 years ago after her first child was born.
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In contrast to Susan, Laura’s work does not resemble a Fordist ideal at all. Laura herself performs all different forms of work to survive as a family. She works as a teacher, she tutors and she takes on other temporary projects to earn a sufficient income. In addition, she also performs reproductive work: cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children, herself and her boyfriend. Furthermore, she also sells children’s clothing. To understand what kind of work the latter is, we should examine how it fits in between all her other work, which I discuss in the next section.
Here, I would like to stress that by studying the selling of children’s clothing from a feminist perspective, multiple forms of work become visible. With our dominant framework of work as paid employment, Laura would qualify as ‘working’, but only because of her work as a teacher. Hence, her other entrepreneurial paid work from home (in line with Adkins, 2016; Luckman, 2015b) and her unpaid reproductive work (in line with Federici, 1974) remain obscured. With work-constellations, however, I aim to make all this work visible and to bring them together. It helps to think beyond one formal definition of work as paid employment, and beyond a standard paid-unpaid work distribution.
Figure 2 Schematic representation of Laura and Susan’s work -constellations
2. Relationalities of work entities
Now that I have demonstrated that Susan and Laura’s work consist of different entities, I highlight how these work entities relate to each other and how constellations help to understand this relationality. Much like how a star constellation makes the interdependence of stars visible—or the position of a star between other stars—work-constellations highlight the interdependence of different forms of work. This clarifies that selling children’s clothing is only fully understandable by examining how it is embedded within and consists of multiple other entities of work.
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Susan
In our second interview, I invited Susan to map all of her daily activities in order to see how her webshop is embedded within her life. Susan mapped her activities as a daily schedule. She told me that she starts the day with either walking their dog or bringing the children to school, her husband performing the other task in each case. Afterwards, she cleans the house. While doing this, she often listens to web seminars to improve her Etsy webshop. At 10 o’clock, she starts working either on designing a new product (researching which product, editing photos, writing a title, description and keywords, and posting it on Etsy and Pinterest), work for her webshop (updating her webshop: revising photos, texts and tags), or drawing (ideas, drafts, colourising, finishing touches). Susan explained that the kind of work she does for her Etsy webshop depends on how quick she is with the housework and how she feels physically. When she is really tired or in pain, she cannot think in English, and thus cannot work on her Etsy shop. Most of the time, she is still able to draw, though; only when she suffers a great deal of pain does drawing become impossible, at which point she instead tries to relax. At three o’clock her children come home, drink tea and do something ‘gezellig’ (cosy) together. In these moments, she tries not to work on her Etsy shop, because while working, ‘she’s not a nice mother’, Susan told me. The only thing she sometimes does when the children are at home is drawing for her webshop, because they can do it together and ‘it’s just cosy’. Around 5.30 p.m., her husband comes home and they cook together. After watching television with her children and bringing them to bed, she again works for a while on her webshop.
This shows that the entrepreneurial strategy of selling children’s clothing is not only about monetising—about earning money—but about combining different work. First, Susan earns money by selling children’s clothing in such a way that it can be fully inserted and adapted to all reproductive work (housework, child care, maintaining her own body) for which she is also responsible. As a result of continuing all this reproductive work, she enables her partner to maintain a regular-paid fulltime job outside the home. Conversely, the fact that he earns this much money also ensures that economic revenue from selling children’s clothing does not need to be the priority for Susan. This means that ‘doing what she likes’ can be paramount (compare Tokumitsu, 2014), allowing her to prioritise buyer’s appreciation over money and, if necessary, allow the children, household and her physical condition to take precedence.
The second way in which she combines different work with this entrepreneurial strategy is through the creative aspect. For example, drawing—despite the fact that it forms the basis of her sales—does not feel like work to her, which allows her to do it with her children. In addition, the creative aspect also helps her take care of herself: she can draw when she is tired or in pain, and it
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makes her happy. At the same time, taking care of her health is also crucial for her options to make money with her webshop. Namely, as Susan explained in our second interview:
If it wasn't fun, I don’t think I could draw these happy characters; they would look very different. The look they have is because I really like it. If you look back at my drawings I made when I had a burn-out and lived alone, those are very serious black-and-white drawings, very different from what I now make.
In other words, through drawing for her webshop, she takes care of her children and she works on her health, which enables her to remain work-ready (Adkins, 2012) for her webshop, house- and care work. This illustrates how Susan’s reproductive, productive, paid and unpaid work are completely intertwined. While drawing forms the basis for sales, it is difficult to say whether it constitutes a paid or unpaid activity, or whether it is productive or reproductive work. Her work is highly porous and hybrid, making it indistinguishable where one part begins and the other ends.
Third, the technological component of selling children’s clothing is essential in combining different work. Internet, and the fact that much of her webshop work can be performed from a tablet or smartphone, enables her to carry out this work from home, always in between and during other tasks. For example, while cleaning, she listens to seminars to improve her webshop. This makes the housework bearable (‘it nourishes my head’), and at the same time, it makes her reproductive work ‘productive’. Accordingly, for Susan, no distinction exists between productive and reproductive work, or between paid and unpaid.
Another example of how digital technology allows her to combine different forms of work is that contact with customers can be achieved literally from home, and occurs easily during or in between other tasks. Susan told me that the first thing she does when she wakes up and the last thing she does before she goes to sleep (including on weekends and during holidays) is to check her email from bed.
I: Do you ever have people react unpleasantly if you respond later?
Susan: No, they usually just don’t respond. For example, if someone says at three o’clock in the morning, ‘Hey, I like your sweater. Can you make it like that’, I see it of course at seven. I used to think, ‘Well, I will do it later’, but not anymore. I answer immediately.
I: At seven o'clock in the morning?!
Susan: Yes, in Canada, someone has already been waiting for four hours. He sent that email at 10 in the morning, and at two o'clock, still no answer received. And as they say, ‘There are
16 millions of competitors. If you want to have that sale, you will have to be alert’. Not everyone invests in it, but I think, ‘What difference does it make? I'll just send you a quick email’.
That she can perform a great deal of work for her webshop from her phone or tablet enables her to do so in between other activities, and from anywhere (everywhere at home and on vacation). However, this has its drawbacks:
Susan: For example, putting things in sales groups [on Facebook], I usually do that while watching the news or something, just quickly. It is actually very stupid, because then you stay busy, and you don’t pay attention to what is happening in the news, so that afterwards, I think, ‘What did I actually look at? I don’t even know what it was about’. I noticed that after the holidays. Actually, it is a shame; you are constantly very busy in your head.
Thus, since it takes place on her phone, the work for her webshop can move between and around other work, can be adjusted around cleaning, self-care and taking care of her children, and can move with her on holiday. However, the other side of the coin is that it never stops, and that is exhausting. There is an ongoing possibility to respond to customers, but also the ongoing possibility to adapt to their needs, and thus, a continuous pressure of competition with other sellers. Moreover, the Etsy algorithm—which rewards online activity with higher visibility—encourages her to never close her shop, and to be ‘always on’ (Entwistle & Wissinger, 2006, p. 788). This results in an ongoing pressure to maintain a visible Etsy profile. Consequently, it is not only office work that is constantly present and enters the bedroom as a result of digital communication technology (Greg, 2011), but women’s entrepreneurial work does as well.
The ongoingness of Susan’s work, however, is not limited to a certain type of job (as office work in Gregg’s or freelance modelling labour in Entwistle & Wissinger’s case). Susan is constantly working not only with children’s clothing, but also with the children, housework, recovering and preparing for work , and often, she performs multiple work activities at the same time. This ongoingness cannot be captured in a concept of work that is limited to place, time, or economic revenue, because her work itself is not limited to these elements. With work-constellations, I propose letting go of these distinctions, and instead highlight this ongoingness by making visible all those different entities of work and how they exist in relation to each other.
Laura
In our third interview, I asked Laura to map all components and activities to see how selling children’s clothing fits within and consists of all her other work. Laura explained that she is
17 actually responsible for everything in her household: earning enough money; taking care of the children; taking care of her boyfriend, since he’s struggling with health issues; and all the other household tasks. Laura told me that this is quite a lot to handle. She further explained that seeing and enjoying her children is the most important thing in her life. Therefore, she is trying to work less as a teacher and more from home.
Laura is thus responsible for earning money, housekeeping, taking care of children, and partly maintaining her boyfriend. For Laura, it is not simply a matter of balancing (Luckman & Andrew, 2018), or an attempt to shape a relationship between work and life (Luckman, 2015a), but a coordination between teaching, tutoring, cooking, cleaning, raising her children, buying clothes for them and selling their clothes, which entails juggling numerous work activities. A work-constellation makes this visible by illustrating all work entities in relation to each other (see Figure 3).
With my fieldnotes from our first interview, I discuss below how selling children’s clothing
constitutes part of Laura’s juggling. First, this involves detailing how buying and selling second-hand products represents a strategy to save money or live more economically, thereby reducing her teaching work outside the home. Second, I explain how this represents a strategy to combine different forms of work.
For our first interview, I visited Laura in her home. After some hours talking, a friend of hers came by with a large shopping bag full of children’s clothing. Laura found the clothing in a Facebook group and exchanged them for a bag of Christmas candy. While we continued the conversation, Laura began inspecting the clothes, determining whether they were the right size, whether there were any spots, if the clothing was pilling and so on. She also explained how she sorted them: the best clothes were for her daughter; the clothing that was still of high quality and a good brand, but the wrong size, she would sell on Marktplaats; and the old clothing she would give away for free. She explained that she never tries to obtain as much money as possible; she just wants the amount of money the clothing is worth. Most important to her is that the clothing will be re-used for what it is worth, with money being a way to secure this. If people are willing to pay money for it, then they will probably use it and handle it with care, which is
18 different when giving it away for free. During the interviews with her, it became clear to me that she does not see this as ‘earning money’ (and also not as work, or a job), but rather as ‘saving money’. To her, selling represents a way to avoid wasting money or the clothes. Thus, it offers a way to live an economical and sustainable life.
This demonstrates that selling children’s clothing for Laura, not only aligns with the reproductive work of repair—maintaining the value of things, in which mending clothing constitutes traditional women’s work (Hackney, 2006; König, 2013)—but also the historical gendered ideal of frugality: the frugal—or thrifty—housewife, who put a great deal of effort into making sure that all sources are fully used in order to make ends meet, especially in economically difficult times (Child, 1838; Jensen, 2012).10 Hence, although Laura herself does not view selling children’s clothing as her
work—in line with the common-sense definition that limits work to her teaching job—when we examine her work as a constellation, we see that selling children’s clothing constitutes part of her paid and unpaid work to survive as a family.
In addition, the following fieldnote demonstrates that selling children’s clothing is hybrid work, as Laura also uses it to teach her daughter about the value of clothing and money.
After Laura had sorted the clothes, her eight-year-old daughter arrived home with a friend. Laura instructed them to grab drinks and snacks and asked about their school day. Then, she told her daughter she needed her help with showing me how they usually sell clothes on Marktplaats. Laura went upstairs to get a pair of children’s boots, but when she returned, her daughter had left the house for the play yard. When her daughter came back—and was reprimanded by Laura for suddenly disappearing—she tried on the boots and concluded that they were too small for her. Laura asked her to demonstrate photographing them on the grass. The young girl grabbed her mother’s phone and ran towards the grass while wearing the boots. Laura reacted angrily: ‘I just cleaned them. Now I need to clean them again’. The daughter sighed, annoyed, but put on her own shoes and took the boots to the grass to take a picture. Laura explained to me that she tries to involve her daughters in selling children’s clothing in order to teach them about the value of goods and money. She wants them to see that having money and clothing is not self-evident, but that there is work required.
10 We also discussed this historical continuity in the interview. Laura stated that frugality was something she learned
from her grandmothers. One grandmother used to live on a farm, and was always saving things and preserving food in case of a bad harvest. Her other grandmother, after her grandfather died, employed all kinds of strategies to make ends meet with little money. She also told me that when she was a child, her mother used to sell children’s clothing on markets and through advertisements.
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By involving her, her daughter sees the work behind selling things (cleaning, photographing, packing, etc.), as well as the work that goes into having clothing (her daughters sees that the packages of clothing ordered through the Internet are prepared by other people). Just as Laura had been socialised into a frugal hard worker by her mother and grandmothers, she too socialises her daughter through selling children’s clothing. Consequently, for Laura, no distinction is made between the activity of earning money and the parenting activity; the activities are completely fused.
After taking the pictures, her daughter left the house and Laura and I sat down to make an advertisement for the boots in the Marktplaats app. While doing this, Laura’s baby sat on her lap, enthusiastically trying to grab the phone. She told me that she sometimes makes advertisements while breastfeeding the baby.
Today’s digital communication technologies allow her to literally earn money with her baby in her arms. In contrast to her work as a teacher, she is able to do the selling of children’s clothing from home with her children together (raising and caring for them), while simultaneously tidying up the house, sustaining value, and thus living sustainably and economically. Viewing this entrepreneurial strategy solely as a means to earn money thus fails to understand how it exists in relation with all these other work activities and responsibilities. Work-constellations aids to—by highlighting the relationality of work entities—make this visible and to understand why she continues this business.
Laura explained to me that she often doubts whether all the work and hassle of selling is worth the money, since the economic revenue is so little. She is constantly making a trade-off. On the one hand, in this way, she gains more time with her children, which is, in the end, the most important thing for her. On the other hand, however, she does not always have the energy to sell the products, and the process moves so slowly. Her house is filling up with boxes of children’s clothing because of this, taking up a great deal of space and making her restless, because she wants to get rid of them.
This illustrates the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2006) present in the online selling of second-hand children’s clothing. It promises an easy possibility to combine different elements of work: to sustain value, to be with the children, to raise them, and to perform a little less work outside the home. This promise sparks energy and optimism. However, in practice, it is not that easy, and it also presents an obstacle to Laura’s flourishing, by adding an extra tasks that cost energy, the pressure of another task that needs to be done, a feeling of guilt when spilling value due to not selling the clothes, and literary creating an obstacle in her house. As a result of (the long history of unpaid
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labour) not taking reproductive work—this sustaining of value—into account as work, the effort remains invisible. This is what makes it cruel optimism.
To conclude, Laura, too, is constantly working, and this cannot be captured by our current concepts of work. We see the folding of the economy into society (Adkins, 1012). However, this does not illustrate a neat folding, but rather messy one, with it being impossible to see where the economic aspect begins and ends. In addition, productive and reproductive work are completely merged here (Ekinsmyth, 2011). Accordingly, work-constellations make the logical next step, to no longer distinguish between paid, unpaid, productive, or reproductive work, but instead illuminate the entire constitution of work activities.
3. Movement
In addition to showing the difference between Susan and Laura’s work-constellations, in this section, I elaborate on how both their work-constellations differ over time. Unlike the dominant definition of work, which is highly static (one can only move in or out of work), work-constellations make it possible to illustrate how one’s composition of work changes over time. In this section, I discuss (based on the sections above) what this looks like in Susan and Laura’s cases.
Susan
As discussed in the section ‘relationalities of work entities’, Susan mapped her work as a seemingly structured daily schedule. However, her explanation of the mapping, a great deal of movement became visible in this schedule. She explained that what she does for her Etsy shop differs every day, depending on what her husband does, how quickly she finishes housework, and how she feels physically. Her work-constellation is thus changing every day. We can imagine this schematically as following:
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In other words, how her work is composed is dynamic. Important to note here, is that her work-constellation not only changes with small variations per day, but also underwent a major change the moment her children went to school. At that time, a large part of raising and caring for them was taken over by the school, suddenly leaving room for other work. At this point Susan started making and selling children’s clothing.
Figure 5 Movement in Susan's work-constellation
This demonstrates that instead of understanding the economisation of her hobby as a transition to
work, work-constellations depict it as a shift in the composition of work. Susan’s work with the children
has decreased, and her work with the webshop has increased. By letting go of the work-not work or paid-unpaid scale, it becomes clear that instead of moving in and out of work—or between working and not working—Susan’s different work activities are growing or shrinking, but she continues to work. Work-constellations visualise that all her work entities are related, and thus that the entire composition shifts when one of them changes.
Laura
In the third interview, when I asked Laura to map the components of her life, she immediately asked if that should indicate how it was at that moment, or how it usually is. Namely, while she is on sick leave, recovering from her pregnancy, she does not work as a teacher, she is at home more often and now has a great deal of time to care and raise the children. Furthermore, in principle (as far as her health allows it), she now has a little more time to sell the children’s clothing and to resume her studies, things that she did not get to in recent years. She also admitted that she is worried about how she will soon have to combine these different elements when she starts working as a teacher again. Unlike the birth of her previous two children, she
22 now has less help with the baby. Now that she is on leave, she can do it all herself, but she is worried about how she will do this when she restarts working outside the house11.
Laura’s work constellation appeared different before and during her maternity leave. We can imagine that schematically as following:
Figure 6 Movement in Laura’s work-constellation
This work-constellation clarifies that changes in one of Laura’s work entities affects the entire composition of her work. Laura’s maternity leave reduced her teaching work and provided room for other work, including giving birth to a child, taking care of her children, and selling children's clothing. It also highlights that the moment she returns to her work as a teacher, less time will be left for all the other entities. Consequently, the moment she went on maternity leave, she did not leave work, or start working less; she simply switched to other work.
Moreover, this demonstrates that room for movement in work is important. An idea of work that only considers paid work does not see that the possibility for this is affected by changes in other work. For example, work-constellation highlight that for Susan and Laura—and many if not all people—the amount of care work changes over time (care work in times of illness, when
11 Not only for Susan and Emily was illness a theme, but to my surprise it came up–in a certain way–in the majority
of the interviews. I suppose that taking care of their bodies does not make these women exceptional; everyone must do this in relation to work (to be able to work and to recover from work). What is interesting here concerns the ways in which they care for their bodies, is enabled by remnants of the welfare state (which is why Laura can now be on sick leave) and the ‘afterlife’ (Muehlebach, 2011, p.62) of the Fordist sexual contract (Susan’s husband earns a family wage). ‘Work-constellations’ could be used to further examine how recovering from work and caring for one’s body is related to entrepreneurial strategies and one’s position in various social structures.
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children are born, or when getting older), and that this affects the possibility for other work entities. It also illuminates that if certain work is taken over, either by a partner or by a collective facility, room is left for other work.
To conclude, in contrast to concepts that limit the definition of work to one activity—and movement is only more or less work, shifting from in or out of work, or from non-work to work— work-constellations, are capable of illustrating that different work activities can increase and decrease, and that these are interrelated.
Discussion and conclusion
The case of selling children’s clothing online from home offered insights into women’s entrepreneurial strategies to combine different work in the context of the post-Fordist sexual contract. This research demonstrated that these entrepreneurial strategies cannot be understood only as an aim to earn money, but that they should be considered in relation to all other work activities (all kinds of reproductive and unpaid work) these women are made responsible for. Furthermore, acknowledging that not all work is paid, it has highlighted, that these women were constantly working: taking care of and raising their children, taking care of themselves, cleaning, cooking, preparing clothes, advertising, making contact with buyers, and sometimes working in a waged job as well. These work activities occasionally took place in offices, often occurring at (several places in the) home, and sometimes on holiday.
Important for stressing the relevance of a new conceptualisation of work, was that the overly limited—but dominant—definition of work makes people suffer in their everyday lives. Many of the women I interviewed had doubts, were insecure, or felt the need to defend whether their work is real work and whether they were working enough. The moral and ethical attachments to work, combined with the limited work definition, continuously led to the question, ‘Do I work enough’, as well as to a feeling of failure of not doing enough. Thus, while the interlocutors of this study were always working, they felt that they were not allowed to call it work. Therefore, they consider their work as never enough, resulting in constant failure. I expect that these women are not unique in this. Therefore, I perceive a new conceptualisation of work for other cases—in which people perform fragmented and multiple (unpaid or underpaid) work activities— relevant as well. Namely, such fragmented and ongoing work cannot be grasped with our current theorisations and concepts of work that limit work to place, time, economic revenue, or type of activity. In the case of selling children’s clothing by women entrepreneurs, it was not possible to distinguish what part of their work was paid, which part was parenting and which part was selling. In other words, the boundaries between productive and reproductive, or paid and unpaid, were
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completely merged (Ekinsmyth, 2011). Therefore, this research demonstrated the necessity to think beyond these boundaries. Following, I argued for a conceptualization of work as a constellation of different work entities, all existing in relation with and dependent on each other.
The concept of work-constellations helped to better understand the lives of women entrepreneurs and also makes visible the situation in which they are placed. Women form these constellations because they are held responsible for both paid and unpaid reproductive work activities. Susan and Laura’s cases revealed that the degree of responsibility for different tasks (or different work entities) can differ, as well as how they are combined in different ways. Moreover, it demonstrated—in contrast to a static concept of work, in which someone can only move in or out of work—that one’s different work entities increase and decrease over time, and that these are connected. In short, it showed the relationality and made multiple work activities visible that have been highlighted by various feminist scholars as work, but are still often overlooked or made invisible. By bringing these forward and together, it challenged the use of a demarcated notion of work and posed the question whether there remains an outside of work at all.
As this article demonstrated, the concept of work-constellations functions as a tool for interviews, to analyse multiple work activities and to represent them through visualizations. However, this concept also comes with certain limitations. Although mapping work-constellations on paper aided in visualising work, the constant movement is not reflected in a snapshot, and it remains difficult to represent also small and multitasking work activities in-depth. Therefore, constellations are not an instrument to represent a complete picture of someone’s work, but rather a powerful tool for imagining (the complexity of) work.
Ultimately, imaging the complexity of work possesses a great relevance in a context of precarisation (Lorey, 2015) and with regard to changing labour relations in an increasingly digital (platform) economy (Graham, Hjorth, & Lehdonvirta, 2017; Van Doorn, 2017). Since social security (for certain people; especially white male workers) in Western states has been organised trough paid employment (through a contract between employer and employee; securing a stable wage, sick leave, pension, etc.), there is a tendency to understand employment’s decreasing security as a new phenomenon (e.g., Standing, 2016), and thus a call for reinforcement of security trough employment. But as this article demonstrated (and is also pointed out by other critical thinkers, e.g., Van den Berg & Marigliano, 2017; Van Doorn, 2017) there is a historical continuity in the precarity of women’s work. Since women’s work has long been (and still is) un- or underpaid and undervalued, it did not provide the same security as formalised (‘productive’) work. Consequently, instead of resorting to an idea of security linked to paid formal work or attempting to reinforce the boundaries of paid formal work, this article stressed the need for a move to a notion of security
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which embraces all work necessary to ‘make life possible’ (McDowell, 2009, p. 26). The concept of constellations allows to highlight security in relation to the complex and relational work-entities that already make up ‘work’.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express many thanks to everyone involved in this project and who made this research possible. First of all, to all the women whom I interviewed for their time, openness, and teaching me about their lives. Thank you for your warmth, it made the interviews a real pleasure. Special thanks to the ones who helped me in finding other participants. Second, thanks to my supervisor Marguerite van den Berg, who was a great supervisor in many ways. You have opened several new doors in my head, pointed me to much interesting literature, and taught me valuable strategies for both work and life (especially in acknowledging that they are not distinguishable). I really appreciate your extensive time and attention in this supervision, and I am highly inspired to continue with feminist scholarship. Also, thanks to Sarah Bracke to make time to be my second reader. Then, I would like to thank my fellow students for working together and all the fun we had this year. Els Roding, Simone Schneider, Brigit Ronde, Britt Swartjes, Signe Stevnhoved Rasmussen, Jessica Warren, Dana McLachlin, Jim Kroezen and Sammie Jansen. I learned a lot from you—not only about research methods, but also how important it is to work together, even in such an individual project—and I liked to ‘lummelen’ with you! Also thanks to all my other friends and family, and especially to Vikki de Jong and Sherilyn Deen for proofreading and feedbacking my drafts. And Yoren, my love, thanks for your endless support. During this thesis, we started another great adventure of moving in together. I was a bit afraid of the ‘housewife effect’, but nothing was further from the truth. Thank you for doing so much cleaning, cooking, and smiling so I could dedicate myself to this project. And a lot of the fun in this project was a result of our great conversations. I hope we will keep doing that for a long time!
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