This article analyses the meaning and significance of skills from the perspective of those who acquire and use them, going beyond dominant approaches to skill development as a strategy to enhance employability, productivity and economic benefit. With a study of home-based women entrepreneurs, who prepare food for delivery to customers’ homes, the article examines how entrepreneurial skills relate to gendered identity. While men operate with a market-savvy, commercial logic, women are animated by an ethic of personalized care and a family ethos of involvement in their customers’ everyday domestic life. They cast themselves as expert practitioners of an inherited culinary tradition as well as being skilled in exercising a superior and inherent gendered capacity to forge emotional, nurturing and fictive kinship bonds with customers. Although this reproduces gender distinctions and may constrain the growth of women’s business, they nevertheless cultivate these skills as a powerful mode of self-realization and developing a sense of self-worth. Bearing in mind the conception of human development as advancement of human flourishing, the article concludes that, in approaching skill development, it is critical to consider the identity and perception of those who use skills, and the subjective, affective meanings attached to skills in a given social context.

中文翻译：

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当代印度的技能、工作和性别认同：为国内消费提供家常食品的业务

本文从获得和使用技能的人的角度分析技能的意义和意义，超越了将技能开发作为提高就业能力、生产力和经济效益的战略的主流方法。通过对在家做饭准备送到顾客家中的女企业家的研究，本文探讨了创业技能与性别认同之间的关系。男性以市场洞察力和商业逻辑运作，而女性则被个性化护理的道德和参与客户日常生活的家庭精神所激励。他们将自己塑造成继承烹饪传统的专家从业者，并且善于运用卓越的和内在的性别能力，与顾客建立情感、培育和虚构的亲属关系。尽管这会再现性别差异并可能限制女性企业的发展，但她们仍将这些技能作为自我实现和发展自我价值感的强大模式进行培养。铭记人类发展是人类繁荣进步的概念，文章总结道，在接近技能发展时，考虑使用技能者的身份和感知，以及附加到技能中的主观、情感意义至关重要。给定的社会背景。