Entrepreneurial reproductive labor as alternative economic practice: The ambivalent discourse of seasonal consignment sales

Abstract

Our article considers the possibilities and perils co-existing within entrepreneurial reproductive labor, a context easily dismissed as devoid of alternative economic possibilities due to its adherence to neoliberal ideals. Seasonal consignment sales involving the communal processing and reselling of used children’s goods provide a particularly compelling case of economic innovations drawing upon entrepreneurial reproductive labor. Rather than resting at an easy conclusion that seasonal consignment sales practices are determined by neoliberalism, thus precluding alternatives to capitalism, we highlight their ambivalences. Industry leaders’ authoritative discourses—centering on languages of entrepreneurialism and self-regulation—maintain a gendered division of labor, promote a neoliberal version of ‘mompreneurship’, and advocate moralized consumption, care, and labor practices. At the same time, we argue that seasonal consignment sales provide glimpses of alternative structures of value creation outside of the wage relationship. In highlighting the case of seasonal consignment sales, our study contributes critical consideration of the contested status of entrepreneurial reproductive labor within alternatives to capitalism.

Feminist theorists have long highlighted the immense production of value by women’s domestic, household, and reproductive labor. Debates over the status of women’s reproductive labor within alternative economies have renewed relevance as contemporary forms of capitalism increasingly seek to carve out these very activities for capitalist expansion. From the commodification of ‘mom blogs’ to the rise of ‘mompreneurship’, reproductive labor is increasingly subject to capture by novel forms of economic activities. Much research argues that reproductive labor is colonized by the market, thereby locating possibilities for alternative economies in what are seen as radical practices, such as communes, worker cooperatives, and separatist movements. Such an emphasis minimizes the potential within normative organizing contexts that downplay or reject political aims. Feminist scholars such as J.K. Gibson-Graham and Silvia Federici position women’s unwaged reproductive labor as a critical terrain of political struggle, with immense potential for theorizing alternatives to global capitalism.

This article considers the possibilities and perils co-existing within entrepreneurial reproductive labor, a context easily dismissed as devoid of alternative possibilities due to what is seen as its adherence to neoliberal ideals. Seasonal consignment sales (SCS), involving the communal processing and reselling of used children’s goods, provide a particularly compelling case of economic innovations drawing upon entrepreneurial reproductive labor. SCS describe an emergent and often informal set of organizing practices involving the processing, pricing, sale, and purchase of used goods for children, such as clothing, shoes, toys, books, equipment, and furniture. In the US context, SCS have expanded from ad hoc, stand-alone events to comprise a coherent industry, with nationally branded and franchised businesses and events in all 50 states. SCS events have evolved from their roots in 1970’s American middle-class and working-class suburban culture of garage sales. SCS exemplify trends in second-hand and resale markets, which now comprise a multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States (ThredUp.com, 2016). As significant spaces of economic innovation, SCS highlight the contested status of entrepreneurial reproductive labor as one of the alternatives to capitalism.

Our article engages feminist debates over the political potential of reproductive labor in light of recent literature on women’s entrepreneurship and the commodification of motherhood. While the analysis examines the particular case of US-based entrepreneurial forms of reproductive labor associated with seasonal sale events, our arguments are informed by a critique of the uneven globalization of reproductive labor (Acker, 2004; Duffy, 2007; Federici, 2012; Glenn, 1992, 2002; Weeks, 2011). The analysis centers on seasonal sales industry discourses to outline how the SCS phenomenon capitalizes upon women’s unwaged reproductive labor, including their relationships and community-making practices. Rather than resting at an easy conclusion that SCS practices are determined by neoliberalism, thus precluding alternatives to capitalism, we highlight their ambivalences. SCS discourses—centering on languages of entrepreneurialism and self-regulation—maintain a gendered division of labor, promote a neoliberal version of ‘mompreneurship’, and advocate moralized consumption, care, and labor practices. At the same time, SCS provide glimpses of alternative structures of value creation outside of the wage relationship. In highlighting the case of SCS, our study contributes critical consideration of the contested status of entrepreneurial reproductive labor within alternatives to capitalism.

Women’s entrepreneurial reproductive labor

While the critique of gendered work relations within capitalism has taken many forms over the past half-century, feminists have recently revived the multinational Wages for Housework movements of the 1970s to locate women’s unpaid reproductive labor as a critical terrain of contemporary political action (Federici, 2012; Weeks, 2011). Reproductive labor describes the necessary caring work involved in maintaining existing life and ensuring social reproduction, including forms of domestic work, childcare, and eldercare (Duffy, 2007). Importantly, feminist theorists note the critical—although undervalued—role that reproductive labor plays in the cycle of capitalist accumulation and expansion. As Federici (2012) and others argue, capitalism depends upon the unpaid ‘housework’ that reproduces both life itself and labor power. Historically unpaid, informal, undervalued, and naturalized as women’s work, reproductive labor expands beyond the domestic and the physical structures of the home. The work of social reproduction is conducted throughout neighborhood, community, and common spaces (Federici, 2012; Gibson-Graham, 2006), with uneven contributions from men (Coltrane, 2000).

Transformations in workforce composition stemming from women’s widespread entry into formal market employment have created a demand for care work outside the home or community (Dwyer, 2013) as waged employment. Simultaneously, capitalist production increasingly takes place in private spaces (Gregg, 2011; Hardill and Green, 2003; Neff, 2012). Developments in information and communication technologies have dramatically altered possibilities for the transition of productive work activities into the home, car, and other ad hoc informal locations and consumptive spaces (Gregg, 2011; Neff, 2012). The movement of paid labor into the home and unpaid labor into the formal market blurs conceptual distinctions between labor processes historically divided into formal/informal and public/private spheres. As the distinctions between work and nonwork, production and reproduction, become increasingly obscured (Weeks, 2011), there is a need for theories of alternative, creative, and experimental economic activities that can open possibilities to enable struggle over historically devalued forms of women’s labor. SCS bridge informal and formal workspaces and modes of production and consumption and involve spatial and temporal blurring between labor and leisure, and home and work (Carrigan and Duberley, 2013; Gregg, 2011; Hochschild, 2001; Neff, 2012).

Reproductive labor, point zero, and the making of the common

Reproductive labor, as a contested site of waged and unwaged value production, is a vital part of reimagining alternative economies in at least two ways. First, reproductive labor can function as a ‘point zero’ or a collective space from which feminist struggle can create new forms of solidarity based on social contributions from engaged community members (Federici, 2012). Here, the multiple, diverse, varied forms of social reciprocity, social knowledge, culture, traditions, social networks, bonds, trust, and capital produced within and through reproductive labor provide a medium for political agency. The term point zero aptly describes a ‘post-home’ zone of interaction that spans reproductive/productive, home/public, and in-person/online spaces. These interlinking spatial categories allow for a refusal to concede labor-intensive, non-home interests to capitalist accumulation.

Second, reproductive labor largely figures in theories of the common involving the recognition of labor value for activities conducted outside traditional, formal market and wage settings and inside ‘common’ spaces (Gibson-Graham, 2006). The common is understood as a powerful platform for the remaking of economic practices and as a foundation for anticapitalist struggle (Federici, 2010; Hardt and Negri, 2009). In making the work of social reproduction visible, entrepreneurial forms of gendered reproductive labor have the potential to contest the conditions of capitalist exploitation. Contestation occurs, for example, as women’s innovative and entrepreneurial practices and perspectives blend private and public distinctions without (re)instantiating the role of wages as the dominant social relation under capitalism (Weeks, 2011). The modes of experimentation seen within entrepreneurial forms of reproductive labor can challenge and expand possibilities for diverse community economies (Gibson-Graham, 2006).

The entrepreneurial reproductive labor of SCS participants is particularly ripe for an analysis of their potential for theorizing alternative economic politics in the making. SCS provide public recognition of the shared, collective value of women’s reproductive labor, a possible ‘point zero’ of collective interests (Federici, 2012). Conceived as a reproductive commons, the events make reproductive labor both visible and concrete. SCS are able to publicize—draw into public discourse—common experiences of collective production through communal, cooperative enterprise spanning traditionally distinct spheres. SCS depart from relegating women’s unpaid labor solely to the private space of the home. In creating a common space for labor and consumption, SCS refuse strict public and private distinctions. Here, the visibility of the labor of individuals invested in SCS—their lives, skills, and relationships—can become a catalyst that draws from, and helps sustain, diverse valuations and modes of being in common.

Mompreneurship as commodified entrepreneurial reproductive labor

At the same time, modes of capitalism increasingly carve out women’s reproductive labor as a site of accelerated expansion. Feminists have long noted that capitalism depends upon racial-ethnic women’s unpaid, conscripted, and undervalued reproductive labor (Glenn, 2002). Mompreneurship has become perhaps one of the most visibly maligned examples of what many see as the crass commodification and exploitation of reproductive labor. It has emerged as a prevalent popular culture neologism, describing activities of women workers who challenge historically separated work and domestic spheres by materially merging motherhood and work (Carrigan and Duberley, 2013). Since the term’s inception and predominant popularity, myriad networking-based websites, informational forums, women-led organizations, and delegate-attended conferences have emerged to attend to needs and goals of mompreneurs (Ekinsmyth, 2011). Academic studies have begun to show interest in discourses depicting emerging trends of mompreneurs as an international phenomenon. Experiences of mompreneurship in the United States (Worthington, 2005), Canada (Jean and Forbes, 2012), Ireland (Costin, 2011), and Denmark (Korsgaard, 2007), as well as activities of ‘mumpreneurs’ in the United Kingdom (Duberley and Carrigan, 2012; Ekinsmyth, 2011), France (Richomme-Huet et al., 2013), and Australia (Nel et al., 2010), are sites where scholars recognize significant intersections of gender, entrepreneurship, and the attempt to integrate family and work demands (for an extensive list of international scholarship, magazines, websites, and associations devoted to mompreneurship, see Richomme-Huet et al. (2013)). Popular discourses celebrate this so-called blurring of care and work practices across private and public domains, defining a mompreneur as ‘a multi-tasking woman who can balance both the stresses of running a business as an entrepreneur, and the time-consuming duties of motherhood, all at the same time’ (TheMompreneur.com, 2016). Critics contest the ‘mompreneur’ identity category, arguing that the term delegitimizes businesses led by women entrepreneurs as not ‘real’ (Casserly, 2011). Studies exploring experiences and discourses of mompreneurship converge around a critical reading of contributions and challenges amid a backdrop of gendered consumption, care, and labor practices (Costin, 2011; Duberley and Carrigan, 2012; Ekinsmyth, 2011; Jean and Forbes, 2012; Korsgaard, 2007; Richomme-Huet et al., 2013).

Mompreneurship is a key example of entrepreneurial reproductive labor or creative economic activities that take previously informal and unpaid elements of reproductive labor and monetize them. We recognize that discourses and practices of entrepreneurship can function as ideological cover for the expropriation of the common (Jones and Murtola, 2012). At the same time, when seen through a lens of feminist theories of the commons and diverse economies, such practices have potential for theorizing alternatives to the exploitative capture of surplus labor. Although little research addresses the phenomenon of SCS, the critiques of mompreneurship anticipate an understanding of these events as a form of neoliberal governance affecting mothers’ consumption, care, and labor practices. Instead, we draw upon the case of SCS to trouble the tendency to downplay the openings that reproductive entrepreneurial labor may also create. Building on prior calls to focus on entrepreneurship as a field of contestation over the status of production in common (Jones and Murtola, 2012), we consider how entrepreneurial forms of reproductive labor may also constitute, rather than simply preclude, possibilities for alternative economic practices.

Locating discursive practices

The study traces the discursive construction of an emergent SCS industry. Online spaces are rich sites of discourse production, allowing for the analysis of meaning-making around work and labor, including gendered prescriptions and assumptions (Worthington, 2005). In order to note recurring patterns and tensions in national-level SCS discourses, we examined over a dozen top business websites, email lists, and online community forums. Industry websites included SCS event websites, business directories, and distribution company websites. These websites employed a common structure with menus centered on the ‘how to’ of seasonal consignment, including how to understand the purpose and process of events; learn requirements, responsibilities, and benefits of participation; join online community platforms; locate an event geographically and temporally; find news coverage; and identify charity partners. Email lists provided another view into seasonal consignment processes, with content directed at community members. Postings on community forums, such as Facebook and mom blogs, offered a partial glimpse into community-building functions and interpersonal meaning-making practices. While online blogs and forums are not collectively organized around a shared political agenda, they provide insight into diverse ways individuals articulate views, indicating genres of potential action.

Our analysis also draws on news reports at the local and national level. Media periodicals are key producers of popular ‘expert’ knowledge about business practices and trends (Nadesan, 2001; Nicholson and Anderson, 2005). We conducted electronic database searches with the term ‘seasonal consignment sale(s)’ and variants like ‘seasonal kids’ sale’ and ‘seasonal consignment event’. Searches focused on locating key temporal shifts and thematic trends in the SCS industry’s emergence, historical context, and current state. This extensive reading revealed intersections between mainstream media and industry publications as two sets of discourses that complemented one another.

The analysis primarily focuses on commercialized seasonal consignment activities within the US English-speaking context. Three for-profit actors have garnered financial success, popular acclaim, and loyal participants. They are Consignment Mommies, Kids Exchange, and Rhea Lana. Consignment Mommies, launched in 2009 by a mother–daughter team, is the SCS industry’s most comprehensive online sale directory, social network, and blog site designed to facilitate industry interactions. Consignment Mommies and its associated website offers free sale-related resources and tools, a nation-wide sale search engine, myriad ‘how to’ dictionaries and best practice guides, and access to read and write customer reviews of sale events. Consignment Mommies also hosts a consignment sale advice blog centered on helping moms become ‘savvy’ spenders, time savers, efficiency experts, and event entrepreneurs (ConsignmentMommies.com, 2013b). A second focus includes Kids Exchange, also established by a mother–daughter duo. Kids Exchange claims to be the nation’s largest single-site seasonal sale, boasting over 3000 registered consignors with more than 30,000 shoppers (KXConsignment.com, 2013c) at their twice-yearly event. In its home location of Raleigh, North Carolina (NC), the Kids Exchange event spans two buildings of the NC state fairgrounds. Kids Exchange franchises operate in four states. Finally, Rhea Lana, established in 1997, is one of the first organized for-profit sales. It is credited with pioneering core aspects of the seasonal consignment industry’s current business model, such as systemized barcode scanning. Rhea Lana franchises operate 80 events in 24 states (RheaLana.com, 2015c), supported by extensive business guidelines and access to proprietary real-time sale tracking software.

The analysis highlights fundamental ambivalence characterizing SCS discourses, including how they oscillate between instantiations of neoliberal logics and creative, collective spaces contesting the relative status of paid and unpaid, formalized and informal gendered reproductive labor. In detailing the both/and of these discourses, our analysis works against a tendency to dismiss the political potential of so-called normative forms of entrepreneurial reproductive labor in broader discussions of alternative economies.

SCS as entrepreneurial reproductive labor

SCS first appeared in mainstream American popular culture in the mid-1990s, with frequent mention in print starting in the late 2000s. ¹ Since their emergence in the mid-1990s, SCS have transformed from temporary, single-day events to regular week-long events, boasting tens of thousands of shoppers organized around seasonal events. SCS events have evolved from their localized, temporary, and ad hoc roots into incorporated businesses with longstanding fund-raising goals.

SCS provide a rich case of alternative economic practice because their modes of exchange are not based solely around the wage relation. SCS comprise a mix of paid, unpaid, and alternative reproductive labor taking place in myriad locations from private households to public spaces. Furthermore, SCS events depend upon short-term, unpaid volunteer labor and bartering systems. Together, these characteristics impede formal market assessment of employment rates, organizational profitability, and the full value of the types of labor involved.

SCS events rely on complex interactions between organizers, consignors, shoppers, vendors, and volunteers. These roles often overlap, and individuals may hold multiple positions. Organizers are responsible for all operational aspects of a sale, including motivating consignors to increase inventory, marketing events to local communities to draw shoppers, and soliciting vendors to gain their financial support. Vendors are typically local businesses who contract to rent space within a venue to advertise or sell their products and services. The presence of vendors likens SCS events to familiar shopping experiences in the formal market and exemplifies the intersection of productive and reproductive entrepreneurial labor.

Consignors are individuals who register to sell used goods at an organized event in exchange for set commissions—a percentage of their sales—paid to the organizer. They pay organizers from 20% to 50% of the price for sold items (ConsignmentMommies.com, 2012). They each sign agreements that outline expectations and rules of role-specific engagement. Cultural and social norms of SCS dictate that consignors engage in a cycle of labor and consumption. Consignors apply skills and knowledge to preserve the integrity of children’s goods from the initial point of sale in anticipation of future consignment. For instance, consignors are encouraged to ‘save the owner’s manual or the original box’ to make items more appealing. Well-cared-for items, such as ‘like-new’ clothing and intact toy sets, sell faster and at higher prices. Consignors also contribute skills and expertise as they prepare items for consignment. Preparation includes sorting toys, washing clothing, and matching and pricing items. Pricing draws on individual skill as well as collective knowledge, as it is the consignors, rather than sale operators, who determine the sales price of each item in accordance with community standards of pricing and expectations of goods’ quality. Consignors most familiar with community expectations of second-hand items’ economic value sell more items. Pre-set pricing by consignors eliminates bartering practices common within garage sale culture. It also enables consignors to ostensibly control potential for profit.

Each sale event has specific requirements and recommendations that coordinate consignor participation. For instance, recommendations help consignors to prepare, package, price, and deliver items. Some preparation requirements dictate sale operations at an event. Color-coded tagging indicates items that will have price reductions throughout the event or be donated at the end of an event. Event organizers determine price reductions; consignors determine whether to donate unsold items at the end of a sale. Sale operators may also use color-coded tags to sort remaining goods that will be returned to consignors who retain ownership of all items submitted to the sale. The ability to catalog items efficiently is essential since rental facilities where the sales are held typically require participants to vacate quickly. Requirements to include a detailed description, price, and consignor identification number are aimed at reducing theft or loss. SCS materials also counsel participants about how to increase perceived value of goods, such as by using particular display techniques like hanging clothing in the same direction and using clear plastic bags to increase visibility of a packaged item. Sale organizers often design incentives like early or extended shopping hours to encourage consignors to simultaneously sell, shop, and volunteer.

Volunteers engage in a parallel cycle of labor and consumption, exchanging unpaid work hours or bartering goods or favors for privileges. SCS discourses offer insight into competing motivations for volunteers. Volunteers are often dual-participants as consignors, shoppers, or both. Volunteers can work off consignor fees, which are usually around US$10. Operators justify consignor fees as necessary for sale expenses, such as renting space, advertising, insurance, credit card transaction fees, and supplies. Most sales offer early admission as an incentive to volunteers motivated by a desire to shop before the public. Early admission is often defined as a form of payment and is highly valued in a setting where the best items, defined in terms of quality, cost, and scarcity, sell most quickly (KXConsignment.com, 2013b). Finally, volunteers can work to earn a higher percentage of profit from consigned items in the form of a reduction in the organizers’ commission. The number of hours a volunteer works and the unique rules of each individual sale determine commission scale. This reward system encourages volunteers to work multiple shifts so that the commission owed to the sale owner is further reduced, with consignment earnings rising to 75% (Conway.RheaLana.com, 2014a) or more of their tag price depending on the event. Finally, volunteering creates camaraderie and cultivates community relationships. SCS often align themselves with a particular local charity or philanthropic cause, providing an outlet for participants to enact their espoused values. As indicated by the complex processing of goods described above, SCS capitalize upon the informal knowledge and communication comprising women’s reproductive labor. In so doing, they capture surplus value within the realm of reproductive labor. Each phase in the consignment cycle mandates specialized expertise about goods and their uses, as well as familiarity with the overall cycle of consumption. Necessary knowledge across roles includes determining reasonable pricing for second-hand goods, identifying product functions and safety, and determining which sales offer worthwhile investments based on ratings and reviews from, as one industry leader puts it, ‘other mommies just like you’ (ConsignmentMommies.com, 2015).

Finally, technological advancements have aided the rapid expansion of the seasonal consignment industry, allowing SCS to tap into existing cooperative networks. Blogs, social media websites, and online forums provide essential communication platforms for SCS. SCS organizers utilize these digital outlets to market events, generate awareness of consignment culture, and cultivate community connections. Individuals share experiences, ask questions, post comments, write reviews, and participate in online communities based on shared interests. Industry websites offer online sale registration systems that enable opportunities for advertising and connectivity. For example, ConsignmentMommies.com consolidates and publishes information about more than 1500 seasonal sale events (ConsignmentMommies.com, 2013a). Furthermore, industry businesses offer networked data entry systems, computerized transaction programs, barcode scanning packages, equipment rental options, and online training seminars and videos that support flexible connectivity and expand participation by making sale events more accessible, efficient, and reliable (ConsignTech.net, 2013; MyConsignmentManager.com, 2013; MySaleManager.net, 2015). In these ways, SCS of all sizes depend upon community legitimacy gained through national consignment directories, online customer reviews, localized forums, and word-of-mouth recognition.

SCS discourses as neoliberal governance

SCS discourses draw upon themes of neoliberal governance to celebrate enterprising, self-regulating participants. Websites construct women’s participation as overwhelmingly positive, fulfilling a ‘calling’ to consignment entrepreneurship. The ideal consignment entrepreneur participates in all aspects of the industry, including buying, selling, volunteering, and organizing. Together, these aspects blur production, consumption, unpaid, voluntary, and paid labor. All resources and tools necessary to operate a sale or participate in an event are ceaselessly available. Women can become expert ‘savvy moms’ by engaging with how-to guides, step-by-step planners, in-person and online training sessions, software programs, and information-sharing avenues, such as blogs, customer review outlets, and in-person networking. Through these resources, the industry touts participants’ ability to work at their own pace without having to neglect community building and family caretaking. SCS construct participants as mother entrepreneurs or mompreneurs, benefiting from self-management, freedom, and choice.

Industry leaders themselves position seasonal sales as sidestepping formal capitalist markets through second-hand purchasing and through user-generated pricing. Company discourses frame women’s individualized participation as vital to overcoming economic and social problems of high commodity prices, low incomes, and growing family needs. Here, SCS discourses emphasize the ability to reconcile unpaid domestic labor with income-earning labor. Industry materials define participants as moms supplementing family income through their consignment and sales activities. For example, Rhea Lana claims that by ‘working only two or three months out of the year’, moms can earn as much as a ‘regular paying’ full-time job while taking advantage of more ‘time and flexibility’ (RheaLana.com, 2015c). Discourses support a cycle of labor and consumption, counseling participants to earn income while making smart purchasing choices for their families.

SCS discourses also frame participation as a way to help moms teach economic, social, and moral lessons to their children, such as those of a Protestant work ethic and environmental sustainability. Women can make good parenting decisions (Duberley and Carrigan, 2012) by involving children in age-appropriate consignment activities. They can also promote community wellbeing by donating unsold items or contributing to sale-sponsored charities. Such discourses lead to three central consequences. First, SCS discourses normalize women as primary caregivers within a gendered division of labor. Second, they encourage a neoliberal work/life balance, and, finally, they moralize women’s participation in SCS.

Naturalizing a gendered division of entrepreneurial labor

Recent studies question men’s underrepresentation as value-generating, at-home domestic workers involved in caring activities (Coskuner-Balli and Thompson, 2013; Duckworth and Buzzanell, 2009), or ‘dadpreneurs’ (Ekinsmyth, 2011). Seasonal sale discourses contribute to the normalization of domestic reproductive labor as women’s work with an emphasis on their maternal responsibility and ‘natural’ proclivity for housework and childcare (Hochschild, 2012a). SCS websites are laden with heteronormative language and normative assumptions about childcare responsibilities and division of reproductive labor that reassert narrow definitions of family as based on a heterosexual marriage, nuclear family structure, and inequitable gender roles. Throughout industry discourses, wives care for children inside the home, while husbands work for wages outside the home.

Although SCS websites intersperse gender-neutral language of ‘parents’, they predominantly address ‘women’, ‘mothers’, ‘moms’, ‘grandmothers’, and ‘sisters’ as their central audience invested in children’s consignment. Paternal terms such as ‘fathers’ and ‘dads’ are rarely present. Website images parallel this trend—with photographs of men almost entirely absent—emphasizing maternal relationships through the display of multigenerational images of mothers, sisters, children, and families. While women sale owners are referred to on a first name basis, husbands are rarely referenced by name and are explicitly identified in relation to their wives. As ‘husbands’ or ‘spouses’, men’s participation is limited to masculinized roles as technological experts and physical laborers. Within these dominant discourses, men are not responsible for day-to-day involvement in sales preparation and organization.

Sale websites also reinforce a gendered division of labor. For instance, Rhea Lana Riner credits her husband for having ‘rescued’ her by developing proprietary software and computerizing SCS events while emphasizing her mother’s day-to-day involvement (RheaLana.com, 2015b). Occasionally, sales announce special incentives where women can ‘bring your husband’, but generally, they compel women to bring a ‘friend’ or ‘sister’. When men are identified, they are usually referred to as secondary ‘helpers’, while women are responsible for coordinating any involvement. In fact, some sales restrict tasks requiring physical labor to ‘men only’ where women are encouraged to ‘volunteer their husbands’. In order to become a ‘Mighty’ or ‘Mega Mom’, for instance, ‘husbands can work a shift for you’ to gain enough volunteer hours to qualify for pre-sale access (TTBKidZ.com, 2015). These jobs can include setting up the sale by building racks, carrying heavy items to cars, removing trash, guarding doors as event security, or breaking down temporary structures at the conclusion of an event (Conway.RheaLana.com, 2014c; KidCycleNC.com, 2013a; TTBKidZ.com, 2015). As primary registered account holders, wives receive credit for their husband’s volunteer hours and retain all responsibility for every other aspect of participation. Rather than questioning women’s role as responsible agents, SCS discourses emphasize methods on ‘how to get your husband to understand consignment’, with answers that reinforce a gendered perspective on mothers’ innate desire to bargain shop.

Moreover, individuals taking part in each event role, from consignor to consumer, are defined as ‘entrepreneurial’, so long as they maintain the necessary skills of ‘self-presentation, self-direction and self-management’ (Rose, 1999: 117). Within the seasonal consignment industry, techniques of self-management can be learned through adherence to expert advice, recommendations, and guidelines published online or presented in seminars. For example, SCS discourses recommend that moms team up to watch each other’s children so that they are able to volunteer in shifts. Within SCS, female friendship and family networks are central. They provide labor, support, and a sense of camaraderie as women navigate sale procedures. Yet a fundamental assumption behind organizers’ recommendations presumes that husbands are unavailable for daytime volunteering—men are at work during the traditional work day—and only provide childcare when it becomes necessary: during shopping hours, when mothers are already involved in another family care task.

Furthermore, while sales encourage mothers to supplement family income with consignment earnings, they do not acknowledge that many women involved with SCS events also have jobs in the formal market. This disregard for other types of work is juxtaposed against mothers’ responsibility for family caretaking as the backdrop to sale participation. Rather than depicting these gendered responsibilities as difficult to manage, commercialized SCS discourses emphasize mothers’ ability to ‘have it all’ through ideological depictions of ‘good mothers’ as those who successfully manage work and care duties (Buzzanell et al., 2005; Johnston and Swanson, 2006; Medved and Kirby, 2005) as mother entrepreneurs. ‘Having it all’ is defined as ‘pursuing a career and managing to fit with the traditional mother ideology, where a good mother is at home full time with her children’ (Duberley and Carrigan, 2012: 1–2). In the context of SCS, having it all entails a seamless integration of sale duties with childcare and childrearing activities.

Promoting a neoliberal model of work/life

In addition to naturalizing a traditional, hetero-centric, gendered division of labor, SCS discourses promote a neoliberal model of flexible work/life balance centered on self-regulation, family commitment, and entrepreneurial drive. Research notes the ideological functions of work and life balance (Hoffman and Cowen, 2008), including the temporal conflicts women navigate as both mothers and paid workers (Carrigan and Duberley, 2013). According to SCS discourses, work/life balance is an effortless outcome of sale participation. Women, conceived of as preoccupied with the busy schedule of ‘being a mom’, are promised the ability to earn income from home through flexible work hours that do not interfere with childcare duties. For instance, sale resources, combined with efficiency and creativity, enable sale participation to not disrupt the ‘flow of the household’. Some sales offer volunteer shifts ‘that can be done while ‘wearing’ a baby in a sling or wrap’ (KidsCloset.biz, 2012) or with a baby carrier (DkDkGoose.com, 2015a). Other sales allow children to stay with moms while they complete volunteer hours or even complete their own volunteer shifts as long as they are accompanied by an adult or meet a minimum age requirement. Participants are encouraged to self-regulate so that no time away from family—or additional labor—is necessary in this model. By taking advantage of contemporary household technologies (Cowan, 1983), mothers can integrate consignment preparation ‘into their daily routines’ by sorting washed clothing into ready-made size bins as part of their usual laundry cleaning process. The reliance on a daily routine as a commonsense approach to achieving work/life balance is problematic. As Medved (2004) argues, the notion of ‘daily routine’ is a means by which everyday relational maintenance—including the exchange of childcare services and social support—becomes embedded as gendered work.

To ensure successful integration of consumption, care, and labor duties, consignment organizations provide tools for entrepreneurial involvement, including access to online networking groups, consulting services, how-to books, website and internet marketing resources, pricing guidelines, franchise listings, software solutions, and tax code guideline sources (ConsignmentMommies.com, 2013c). These solutions support a very narrow subset of mothers—stay at home caretakers—promoting traditional constructions of motherhood (Johnston and Swanson, 2003) and indicating a raced and classed dimension to entrepreneurial participation (Gill and Ganesh, 2007; Gill, 2012). Although SCS discourses claim that women with a ‘real job’ can still participate during ‘a wide variety of shifts’ late at night or on weekends (DkDkGoose.com, 2015a, 2015b), women who engage in paid work outside of the domestic context, especially single mothers, find ‘third shift’ participation more difficult (Hochschild, 2012b), despite prolific success stories promoted within SCS discourses. The ambition of sale ownership—under the promise of meaningful work, increased family time, and extended consumption capabilities—becomes another driving force compelling women to work harder at roles they already hold, as enterprising individuals (RheaLana.com, 2015c). Such drives provide insight into neoliberalism’s gendered consequences, shaping ways in which women are increasingly tasked with managing work/home relationships.

Moralizing discourses of work

As a final consequence, seasonal sale websites employ moralizing discourses of self-motivated and regulated participation, with clear reliance on Christian values, family obligations, civic duties, and sustainable living responsibilities. Many sale websites brand themselves as Christian businesses. Many sales are church-run or religiously affiliated. Sales that are not affiliated with a specific church employ similar rhetoric by integrating Bible verses, claiming faith-based initiatives, crediting successes to what they represent as God-given traits, partnering with charities, and emphasizing volunteer service as well as charity donations. For instance, Rhea Lana credits God with ‘blessing’ her business endeavors, depicting her enterprise ‘as a ministry to young families’ with the enduring desire to help women ‘mature personally, professionally, spiritually and emotionally’ (RheaLana.com, 2015a). Kids Exchange also has an explicit Christian affiliation, stating they ‘believe that God has opened the door for them to serve others’ (KXConsignment.com, 2013a). Moreover, community volunteerism is articulated on sale websites as a Christian and community imperative. Event participation is depicted as an essential ‘opportunity’ for philanthropy (KXConsignment.com, 2013c), where women have the ability to ‘save the planet’ (KidCycleNC.com, 2013b). Many sales offer incentives, such as permitting pre-sale admission and other non-monetary rewards, in exchange for charity donations. In fact, SCS advertise not only the names of affiliated charities but also the exact sums of money generated for those charities.

Another outcome of moralizing discourses are the pressures on mothers to put familial obligations before their own desires, as part of an ‘ethics of care’, where women feel constrained by the need to be ‘good mothers’. Mothers are encouraged to involve their children. Sale websites provide training blogs and manuals on how to prepare items for consignment while instilling a sense of responsibility in children through ‘teaching moments’ for ‘consignment trainees’ with ‘family activities’ of washing toys and sorting items in preparation for consignment (Freeman, 2012). By following morally centered industry recommendations, SCS discourses assert that ‘children who grow up in families who shop and sell at consignment sales learn the value of hard work, as well as the reward of being paid for those efforts’ (Renfroe, 2013a). Taking self-regulation a step further, sale discourses define consignment events as ‘pro-community’, simultaneously emphasizing mothers’ roles in the wellbeing and ethic of care of the self, the family, and the global community.

Sustainable living, another morally defined aspect of sale activities, is a core prerogative of industry discourses. While scholars have problematized the limitations of individual behavior changes proposed by ‘Going Green’ discourses (Moloney and Strengers, 2014), particularly when they present environmental change as possible through everyday actions that implicitly undermine the complexity and uncertainty of global environmental issues (Macnaghten, 2003), additional critique in the context of seasonal sale discourses is necessary. Sale events claim to be inherently environmentally conscious endeavors, as green enterprises that encourage the resell and reuse of children’s items through eco-friendly processes. Variations of the motto of ‘reuse, recycle’ are common in sale names, slogans, and advertisements. The term ‘reduce’ is often absent, as reduced consumption goes against the foundation of the SCS business model. For example, Kids Exchange employs the slogan ‘buy, sell, serve’, backed by a recycle symbol, and Kidscycle’s slogan is ‘clear clutter, make money, and save the planet’ juxtaposed against a cartoon woman in a Zen pose. ‘Green’ reporting is also commonplace. A Consignment Mommies blog highlights a study of over 750 events to demonstrate ‘how much our community of green mamas are keeping out of the landfills’ (Freeman, 2013). While that study is an example of the emphasis sale organizations put on being ‘green’, it also assumes that, if not sold, the children’s items would be thrown away instead of handed down or donated. Amid their assessments of inherently ‘green’ practices, websites also encourage mothers to create daily routines that are environmentally responsible, such as re-wearing and hang-drying children’s clothing. Blog postings, written and read by mothers, commonly provide information on which products are sustainable purchases, such as cloth diapers (Renfroe, 2013b). Moreover, staying current on such information is a time-consuming task delegated to mothers in the name of good citizenship and personal responsibility. Through these dictates and recommendations, SCS discourses forward a moralizing imperative of mothers’ responsibility for self-motivated participation and contribution.

The value of entrepreneurial reproductive labor and questions concerning work

Although SCS discourses reproduce neoliberal governance structures concerning self-regulation and gendered consumption, care, and labor practices, the scope of SCS discourses extends beyond their functions as disciplinary mechanisms, dictating expectations of personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism. SCS draw upon and instantiate collective capacities, with potential to unsettle assumptions about reproductive labor and categories of paid and unpaid, informal and formal work. Seasonal sales also function as vital spaces of cooperation, coalition, and community, along the lines of Federici’s (2012) theory of collectivized ‘commons’. According to Federici, the neoliberal emphasis on individual entrepreneurship, moral duties, and self-governing tendencies creates shared social relations that can form a ‘point zero’ of collective interests. Collective interests are simultaneously localized and networked, within which women can demand recognition of and increased participation in the shared work of the reproduction of society (Federici, 2012). The demand for recognition of the value of reproductive labor is a precursor to the demand for contesting dominant wage relations under capitalism, such as seen in calls for wages for housework.

The business model of SCS events reflects collective negotiations by hundreds of thousands of participants. These cooperative practices prompt renewed critical attention to the valuation of reproductive labor, including women’s economic participation outside of waged relationships. Seasonal sales involve collectivized work organized by industry leaders, with social and community-building benefits beyond purely consumptive goals. The collectivized work consists of a mix of paid and unpaid cooperative activities of networking, judgment, evaluation of value, feedback, and word-of-mouth promotion. For example, SCS contest the undervaluation of particular forms of gendered communication and networking by valuing women’s conversations on social media, information-sharing interactions in communities, and physical labor at sale events, alongside professionalized labor such as website and graphics design (KidsEveryWear.com, 2013a). These multiple forms of value are produced through amorphous activities exceeding individual abilities. Participants’ collective efforts have the power to contest the naturalized divide between real work as public, market-oriented work and not-real work as private, domestically oriented work that continues to dominate discourses of women’s work (Bourne and Calás, 2013). Contributions from everyday spaces form the ‘point zero’ of SCS and include domestic spaces where childcare takes place, virtual spaces where participants network and engage in knowledge creation, and community and commercial spaces where events appear and disappear in a matter of days.

Therefore, SCS events contain potential to challenge a public–private labor dichotomy. As political entities, SCS events blur boundaries between paid productive labor and unpaid reproductive labor. These events expand normative notions of the workplace across multiple locations, including the home. While feminist rethinkings of the ‘whole economy’ largely attempt to organize in reproductive labor (Cameron and Gibson-Graham, 2003), the convergence of digital, physical, and professional labor and the transient nature of events preclude clear-cut cataloguing. There is no code for cataloguing SCS organizations within the North American Industry Classification System, which classifies consignment shops and uses merchandise stores that are permanent establishments (SICCODE.com, 2016). Of special interest, The Association of Resale Professionals, the largest US professional membership organization that supports education, development, and public recognition of resale store owners (NARTS.org, 2016a), prohibits seasonal sale operators from entry (NARTS.org, 2016b). Through their liminal status, SCS discourses and practices contain the potential to reintroduce debate over the value of reproductive labor and—perhaps more controversially—contest the dominance of the wage relation. As Kathi Weeks (2011) argues, the central problem with work hinges on the naturalization of the wage relationship and its exploitative labor process. SCS participation effectively extends reproductive labor tasks across public and private lines and promotes the worth of unwaged labor by inventing ways to prevent the surrender of surplus value, discussed next.

Challenging binaries

Seasonal sale events blur boundaries between public, paid, productive labor and private, unpaid, reproductive labor, distorting long-held distinctions between work and life as dichotomous spheres of activity (Fincham, 2008). While naturalized conceptions treat reproductive labor as a form of work conducted in the physical home space, seasonal sales draw attention to reproductive tasks that extend into public places. Furthermore, as social media and new technologies continue to engineer novel possibilities for the location and modality of labor, seasonal sale events advance a profound integration of private, public, and virtual workspaces (Gregg, 2011). Following Ekinsmyth (2011), we note how SCS discourses challenge ‘the production/reproduction dualism and associated physical boundaries blur, and spaces of domesticity and home life … become places where business gets done’ (p. 106). By extending across private and public spaces, SCS make visible otherwise unnoticed reproductive labor. For instance, consignment franchising, organization, preparation, and transaction practices extend into homes, neighborhoods, and church buildings, in addition to storefronts and shopping malls. Consignment events require months of preparation, during which time labor tasks predominately take place in the home. Sale operators purchase materials and advertise online, while participants research product pricing, monitor safety recalls, and prepare items for sale. Volunteers distribute marketing materials, publish sale information and personal photographs on social media sites, and promote through word-of-mouth, well in advance of sale dates.

As sale events draw near, additional tasks appear in public spaces. Operators build racks and storage in pop-up store locations, while volunteers network at daycares and schools and participants transport inventory to local sale sites. The location of each task is transient, inconsistent, and movable, and, according to discourses, essential to the existence of the children’s consignment industry. In this context, SCS discourses raise awareness of the performance of profit-earning work through depictions of myriad tasks necessary to participate in an event—from private caring practices to public business initiatives and virtual dialogues—as equally essential for event success. SCS activities do not easily assimilate into the existing economy calculations, rejecting the possibility of a ‘politics of wholeness’ and thus precluding formal capture of that ‘whole’ economy (Cameron and Gibson-Graham, 2003). The potential of SCS to reach the point of recognition without the coinciding process of ‘counting’ supports our argument for thinking of entrepreneurial reproductive labor as having potential for envisioning alternative economies.

Redirecting surplus value

Within these varied forms of work performed in private, public, and virtual spaces, sale events further contest the valuation of particular forms of work by promoting the worth of unwaged labor and by inventing ways to prevent complete surrender of surplus value to larger capitalist structures. Although SCS organizers retain a percentage of consignors’ profits, we define surplus value as the personal, community, and consumptive benefits of labor above and beyond monetary rewards, mutually agreed upon within the unique approach to exchange in SCS. First, while some SCS events offer paid volunteer shifts, the industry predominantly emphasizes unpaid labor. Events describe individuals engaging in unpaid labor through a variety of terms, including ‘volunteer’, ‘teammate’, and ‘exchange worker’. These forms of labor are contractually agreed upon for a given sale between the participant and the organizer, yet largely unregulated outside the sharing economy of SCS. Participants manage their labor investments by selecting the particular tasks, number of hours, and time of day from organizers’ posted schedules. It is readily apparent in digital texts that individuals and sale organizers find mutual value in exchanging labor hours for sale benefits. SCS websites describe volunteers as invaluable (KidsEveryWear.com, 2013b), state that their business model would almost certainly fail without the aid of ‘free labor’, and place heavy consequences on individuals who fail to appear for a work shift, including monetary fees (DkDkGoose.com, 2015c) and ‘black listing’ from future sale participation (GrowingKidsSale.com, 2013; KidsCloset.biz, 2012; KidsEveryWear.com, 2015; TTBKidZ.com, 2015). Individuals, in return, commend seasonal sale operators for new opportunities afforded to their families through early shopping privileges and endorse the exchange value of unpaid labor in these growing, influential sale systems. Given the wide range in quality and price of consignment items, online interactions attest to the worth of ‘getting in early’, emphasizing the difference in selection on an event’s start date and first discount day.

Second, while SCS operate under many of the same principles as capitalism, such as mechanisms of supply, demand, and profit-driven goals, event practices redirect surplus value accumulation. When the ‘wage’ relationship is defined by bartering practices, individuals who volunteer time or resources for personal benefits are able to retain more of the surplus value of their labor and redistribute it among the community of participants. Sale events are systems of exchange based on localized community exchange and interaction. Within this system, consignors who volunteer to advertise SCS events on social media, blogs, and in-person are not only promoting the organizer’s business but also working to expand the customer base for their own used goods. Event organizers and community members benefit from each other’s labor investments. Loyalty to the cyclical model of second-hand exchange supersedes identification with a particular sale, with continued participation tightly linked to community-captured contributions. SCS discourses recognize this subversion of capitalism, describing consignment as a reprieve from dominant structures. For instance, sale websites advertise second-hand goods at one-third the cost of market prices. Social media postings by shoppers confirm the accuracy of those prices. Although SCS events promote increased consumption due to low prices, their core business model assumes that participants will engage in the full cycle of exchange, shopping for as well as selling used goods, with an overall reduction in the need for new goods. The above discussion of de-growth proclivities provides a counter-example to analysis of entrepreneurs as discursively ‘positioned as owners in and supporters of capitalist growth’ within entrepreneurial discourses (Gill, 2012: 62).

Finally, particularly prevalent in informal discourses of seasonal sale events, participants provide novel and renewed justifications for the performance of work—valuing intrinsic rewards, community interaction, and personal satisfaction—in conjunction with monetary rewards. Often, SCS discourses focused on the extra-financial benefits of the industry, including community bonding and social collaboration, rather than a primary focus on resource or monetary growth. The creation of a sense of community beyond the individualized space of the household is an important precondition for the emergence of forms of solidarity based on social contributions from engaged community members. In the context of SCS, participants build local communities while working with ‘fellow moms, grandmas and even dads’ (KidsEveryWear.com, 2013b). During volunteer shifts, for example, women can ‘get a little exercise and a break away from the kiddies’ (TTBKidZ.com, 2015), make new friends, (Conway.RheaLana.com, 2014c), or simply ‘enjoy a mom’s night out’ (Conway.RheaLana.com, 2014b). These examples indicate a recognition of shared interests in the status and value of reproductive labor. The prospect of solidarity through shared social networks, bonds, and cultural traditions (Federici, 2012) is a defining feature of engaging as consignment entrepreneurs. In this context, reproductive labor expands beyond a narrow vision of mother-centric tasks of childcare in the home to involve larger systems of community building, cooperative exchange, and valuation. The ambivalent discourses of seasonal sales converge around an acknowledgment of the value of home-based and family-centered labor. Recouping discourses valuing reproductive labor assists in changing policy and practices aimed at repairing, transforming, or redressing capitalocentric motives (Cameron and Gibson-Graham, 2003). SCS discourses have the potential to reintroduce debate over the valuation of reproductive labor and to question contemporary assumptions naturalizing the wage relation.

Discussion

Debates over the status of women’s reproductive labor within alternative economies have renewed relevance as contemporary forms of capitalism increasingly seek to carve out these very activities for capitalist expansion. This article considers the potential for women’s reproductive labor to become a critical terrain of political struggle in spaces that are explicitly consumption-oriented, with potential for theorizing alternatives to global capitalism. We have highlighted the possibilities and perils co-existing within women’s entrepreneurial reproductive labor, a perhaps unlikely context given assumptions that such spaces are easily colonized by the market (Acker, 2004; Duffy, 2007).

Responding to the ongoing interest in the politics of reproductive labor, our study highlights practices considered normative and not typically included in current theorizing about alternative economies. By drawing on key texts surrounding SCS activities, our findings address how industry discourses centering on languages of entrepreneurialism, self-sufficiency, and individual responsibility maintain a gendered division of labor with women as primary caregivers within a normalized nuclear family structure, promote a neoliberal version of ‘mompreneurship’, and advocate self-regulation and moralized consumption, care, and work practices. The SCS discourses examined here reflect the peculiarities of a US-based context characterized by a lack of State-sponsored social welfare policies such as national health care, paid parental leave, childcare, and eldercare. In addition, SCS rest on a patriarchal gendered division of labor, with women as maternal caregivers and men as paternal breadwinners (Duckworth and Buzzanell, 2009). It may be that many of the participants in SCS are able to participate because they can rely on a (male) breadwinner working within the capitalist, paid economy, providing income and insulation from risk. Along those lines, SCS perpetuate patriarchal capitalism by reproducing material inequalities within existing forms of capitalism. Although SCS discourses have the potential to frame reproductive labor as alternative economic practice outside the wage relationship, they also reinforce traditional constructions of motherhood, materially shaping the ways in which women are increasingly tasked with managing work/home relationships.

In addition, ongoing legal arguments between Rhea Lana Riner and the US Department of Labor regarding the classification of sale workers as employees, independent contractors, or volunteer staff (CauseofAction.org, 2014; Klein, 2013) demonstrate both opportunities for recognition of reproductive labor and how readily corporatized SCS businesses can drive accumulation in the form of corporate profit and tax exemptions that preempt public contributions. Ironically, the very practices of solidarity and recognition of shared conditions of labor we highlight are being mobilized by Rhea Lana Riner to organize against labor regulations and protections. Here, a major SCS actor is working against governmental classifications that would assign monetary value to their reproductive labor tasks. We recognize, therefore, the lurking danger of capitalist colonization of second-hand communities, particularly given the increasingly transnational scale of used-clothing trade networks (Brooks, 2013). Here, it is important to acknowledge the scale and aspirations of SCS events, which range from one-time events designed to benefit specific community-defined needs to multi-state franchises designed to maximize individual profit.

However, we believe it also remains important to acknowledge agentic capacities of SCS participants that can confirm or deny possibilities for political protest against capitalist expansion. While critical assessment of gendered entrepreneurial reproductive labor remains important, it is also necessary to consider how ambivalence indicates potential for alternative possibilities. SCS discourses contain conditions for reclaiming suppressed conflicts over the value of entrepreneurial reproductive labor and the status of the wage relationship. As a vibrant site of consumption, care, and labor practices, SCS merit analysis from multiple perspectives. Our study has highlighted this ambivalence, constructing dual perspectives on the impacts of an emerging space of economic innovation. In recognizing this potential, we hold open possibility.

Feminist analysis of the seasonal consignment industry provides a productive opening to consider the industry’s potential to generate recognition of unwaged labor involved in the reproduction of society. SCS practices renew debate over the political potential of entrepreneurial reproductive labor as a terrain of political action, particularly in light of recent critical literature on entrepreneurship and the commodification of motherhood. At the heart of our argument is the notion that the recognition of reproductive labor value in SCS and by extension similar ‘normative’ activities that may be too easily dismissed as completely captured by capital requires notice. As significant sites of meaning-making, seasonal sale discourses both constrain and create abilities for reimagining alternative economies and redefining women’s entrepreneurial reproductive labor. By making the work of social reproduction visible as a common space of knowledge generation and labor activities outside of the wage relation, participants contest capitalism’s undervaluation of their labor. SCS comprise alternative, innovative, entrepreneurial practices that blend private and public distinction without demanding a wage, thereby challenging the taken-for-granted role of the wage as the dominant social relation under capitalism (Weeks, 2011). Moreover, the analysis points to benefits of moving beyond the analysis of discourses according to their ready adherence to neoliberal frameworks of self-governance, and to maintain their simultaneous potential for alternative, creative, and experimental economic activities. Rather than assuming complete capture, such a move reflects Gibson-Graham’s (2006) call for multiple, alternative representations of the economy based on practices of solidarity and shared recognition that are able to open up new possibilities for theorizing.

While indicating a need for continued analysis of entrepreneurial reproductive labor, our findings invite a broader consideration of activities bridging formal and informal sectors, public and private realms, and work and home sites as socially constructed binaries (Carrigan and Duberley, 2013). In line with this Special Issues’ call to ‘develop innovative insights into the way alternative economies produce noncapitalist modes of value allocation’, a question emerges: how is entrepreneurial reproductive labor discursively, symbolically, and materially enacted, and to what extent does its analysis challenge classic distinctions of work as divided along public/domestic, male/female, and capitalist/non-paid dichotomies? Such questions highlight the ongoing relevance of reintegrating ‘work’—concrete, material, and embodied work practices—into organization and management studies, beyond this article’s attention to SCS discourses in particular (Ashcraft, 2011; Barley and Kunda, 2001). These questions also highlight the ongoing need to consider wider conceptualizations of the spatial distinction between work and home, with consideration of the multiplicity of work sites and labor forms that go beyond conventionally accepted workplace boundaries and into non-traditional places and times, and are organized across myriad sites of cultural activity (Gibson-Graham, 2006). Such a consideration also includes further questioning the broader structural and social conditions of entrepreneurship (Dempsey and Sanders, 2010; Gill, 2012; Jones and Murtola, 2012) that produce and reproduce assumptions about reproductive labor and meaningful work. Ultimately, the focus on alternative economic practices should enable a reimagining of work outside of the wage relationship and the labor process it commands (Weeks, 2011). Reimagining involves questioning the valuation processes within broader political economies of capitalism, including what counts as work, where and by whom, and how much value it commands. In this, we remain hopeful that entrepreneurial forms of reproductive labor also constitute possibilities for alternative economies.