Sustaining the household in a globalizing world: The gendered dynamics of business travel in Singapore households

• Main Authors: HUANG, Shirlena, YEOH, Brenda S. A., STRAUGHAN, Paulin Tay
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2007
• Subjects: Globalization; migration; Singapore; business travel; family; Family, Life Course, and Society; Tourism and Travel
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2184; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3441/viewcontent/Sustaining_the_Household_in_a_Globalizing_World.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This article draws upon a large-scale survey as well as focus group discussions to examine how Singapore households grapple with the demands of participating in globalized work. It highlights the household as a site of analysis, where individuals engage with contemporary trends of globalisation in their daily lives. Specifically, this article examines the case of Singapore households where one or both spouses engage in business travel. The study (a) emphasises the need to focus on processes that bring about shorter-term transnational variations to a household's daily geographies and how household members negotiate these disruptions; and (b) demonstrates that the transnationalizing household rests on taken-for-granted gender ideologies to reproduce and sustain it, whether through women carrying the reproductive burden while their spouses travel, or through female transnational domestic workers who liberate their Singapore women employers to travel. The findings validate other studies that contend that globalisation has done little to destabilise patriarchal gender norms.