OPTION A: In the past two decades, the pattern of women's participation in the paid workforce has changed dramatically. Now large numbers of women, as well as men, pursue work throughout their adult life. As women relinquish the role of full-time home-worker and remain in the paid labor force during their child-bearing years, families are faced with new demands. New questions, unthinkable to their parents, are being faced by couples; for example, which career will take priority if one partner is offered a job in another locality; how should child care be arranged; how should housework be shared?

Many of these issues will arise in the family life of today's college students. Your task is to try to understand how these men and women, your peers, view their future roles as workers and parents. What are their aspirations and expectations for their future careers? What patterns of work and family life do these young men and women want to have, both for themselves and their spouse?

You should interview 10 undergraduates, five men and five women, about their own career aspirations, and what career they want their partner to have. Design questions that will reveal how these men and women plan to manage career and family as they progress through the family life-cycle, and determine the reasons for their expectations. We will be interested to learn about potential conflicts that may arise if each gender has a different vision of their future role.

Interpret the results of your interviews and discuss problems of generalizing from your data. Please include your interview questions and details of both your sample and data collection methods, including how you chose subjects, where and when you interviewed them, how long the interview lasted and any other observations that support your interpretation.

OPTION B: A commodity chain, in the words of Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, delineates a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity (1986: 159). Most end products are composed of material goods, energy sources, transportation and communications costs,  processing, packaging and sale.  Tracing these links backward leads to the locations,  labor processes, technologies, people, and sites of raw material extraction that have been involved in the creation of the commodity. Studying commodity chains reveals the geographic movements of material and connections between different types of labor processes and technologies as value is added to a product.  This reveals the real connections between the activities of people that are behind the appearances of market transactions.  It also can show the nature of our relationships with the environment by examining the processes of natural resource extraction and pollution that are involved in commodity chains.

For this option  you should investigate the nature and geographic links of a commodity chain beginning with two products that you yourself consume. You could examine an item of your clothing or some food that you eat. We want to you gather information and make educated guesses about the sources and labor processes involved in producing two particular final products that you consume. You should also reflect upon the difficulties of determining the true sources of these items and think about what you would need to do to find out the exact and particular nature of the commodity chains you have chosen to examine.

Pick two goods based on your guess that one has largely local backward linkages, whereas the other has a greater degree of global content, meaning that its origins are largely transcontinental (e.g. a glass of milk vs. a pair of running shoes).   Then do research to try to reconstruct the actual commodity chains for your “local” and your “global” commodities. Discuss the likely kinds of labor relations that were involved in the production of these goods. Discuss both the spatial and temporal dimensions of your commodity chains.  How are the spatial links made?  What connects the processes and materials to earlier periods of history?

Hopkins, Terence K. and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1986. “Commodity chains in the world-economy prior to 1800”
Review 10,1:157-170 (on reserve).