PERFORMING ARTS 87 assumptions is now familiar. That women head this list is now perhaps accepted at a high level of generality. It is much less obvious in its impact in the actual work produced. Familiarity does not make the inadequacies less relevant nor can it be allowed to cut off the important discussion of developing assumptions more closely related to the working lives of both men and women. Employment and Work The centrality of the wage relation in industrialised societies has dominated relations not only within industry but within the family, household, education system, and pervades the politics of public and-personal life. It is the core element in the creation of classes and in the accumulation of capital.. It is n6t only a material fact, but underlies the ideological constructions of relations in employment, the family and household. It is not possible to understand or explain any actual labour process in our society without recognising this. But people do not arrive and engage in this process mysteriously grown and knocked into shape. They are produced and reproduced physically and culturally within definite social formations. The equating of work with employment and nothing else which underlies so much industrial sociology is not surprising. As soon as one moves away from this conceptualisation that employment equals work, the question of drawing meaningful and useful boundaries arises. Since the late 1960s a large and growing literature has attempted to erode and alter the terms in which social science draws these boundaries. Much of this arose from the challenge of the women's movement which raised again the questions of gender relations and the sexual division of labour. To understand these, employment is only partially useful as an organising concept and can, unless carefully handled, lead to gross distortions of the' experience of women as social actors. A range of activities falling outside the employer-employee relationship are a necessary part of analyses which aim to encompass this experience. If we assume that any activity, within a capitalist society, which has a price in the market, is work, we begin to develop such an analysis. A whole range of tasks which are normally unwaged, if they are performed by wives, mothers or other female kin, can be, 3nd are, bought if performed by others. They have a price in the market. If we view it over time, we can also see that many activities now falling in the unwaged category once constituted significant areas of waged work, domestic service being an obvious case. It is not the nature of the task or activity which defines whether it is paid or unpaid, it is the social relationships which do so. The care and material support of children is central to these relationships, but so is the care and support of the sick, the elderly and the handicapped and the male employed population. This care can constitute unpaid work or waged work. Who performs it, under what conditions and what factors structure it as unpaid labour, income-generating labour, or waged labour, are some of the basic