The service transition as double fix: Mass low-end employment, gendered care economies, and the limits of global growth

This paper advances a geographic research agenda for the service transition, the global shift from manufacturing and agriculture toward services. Drawing on feminist geography and economic history, we show how low-end services expand across the Global North and South because they operate as a “double fix”: they absorb surplus labor to stabilize mass employment while sustaining strained systems of social reproduction. Our framework explains the core economic and social functions of low-end services, while highlighting their crisis tendencies—rooted in slow growth and labor restructuring—and the potential for service work to support more life-affirming futures.