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Situated at the intersection of the Sociology of Death and Sociology of the Family, this paper argues that the organization and funding of funerals is an overlooked and available lens through which to examine cultural and political norms of familial obligation. Drawing on interviews with claimants to the Department for Work and Pensions' Social Fund Funeral Payment, the paper shows how both responsibility for the organization and payment of a funeral is assumed within families, and how at times this can be overridden by the state. In highlighting the tension between reflexive choice and political norms of family espoused in this policy context, it supports Gilding's () assertion that understanding family practice through reflexivity alone neglects the institutions and conventions within which 'doing' family takes place. In so doing, the paper further makes a case for families and relational negotiations and tensions to be more explicitly included within sociological understanding(s) of death more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the group identity is constructed in the process of individualization by reconstructing the public life of square‐dancing groups. The study finds that, on the one hand, groups whose members retired from the work‐unit and whose family structure is waning obtain institutional identities and group membership through external forces. On the other hand, groups play different roles, relying on three types of capital including power, ability, and relationships, and they ultimately reshape the collective identity of the groups with the internally made identity consensus and the externally assimilated identity mechanism. With the social changes in China, the groups have achieved identity construction during the interaction between the state and the individuals. The mutual influence of the reflexive actions of individuals and the support of the state system is also addressed in this paper. Thus, in the interaction between the state and the individual, the basic question of whether free individuals can achieve a universal connection that allows them to maintain public life is answered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on an analysis of qualitative interview data from a study of formalized same‐sex relationships (civil partnerships) this paper examines the enduring significance of marriage and family as social institutions. In doing so, it intervenes in current debates in the sociology of family and personal life about how such institutions are undermined by reflexivity or bolstered by convention. Against the backdrop of dominating sociological frames for understanding the links between the changing nature of marriage and family and same‐sex relationship recognition, the paper analyses the diverse and overlapping ways (including the simple, relational, strategic, ambivalent and critical ways) in which same‐sex partners reflexively constructed and engaged with marriage and family conventions. My analysis suggests that instead of viewing reflexivity and convention as mutually undermining, as some sociologists of family and personal life do, it is insightful to explore how diverse forms of reflexivity and convention interact in everyday life to reconfigure the social institutions of marriage and family, but do not undermine them as such. I argue the case for recognizing the ways in which 'reflexive convention', or reflexive investment in convention, contributes to the continuing significance of marriage and family as social institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploratory analysis of the impact of current and anticipated parenthood on cohabitation and remarriage among those formerly living in marriage-type relationships. The focus on children is embedded within a broader analysis of repartnering which takes account of other factors, including gender. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are used, with a multivariate analysis of repartnering patterns,using data from the General Household Survey, being complemented by in-depth interview data examining the attitudes of the formerly married to future relationships. The paper demonstrates that parenthood has a statistically significant effect on the likelihood of formerly married women repartnering, with a higher number of children being associated with a lower probability of repartnering. The presence of children can work against repartnering in a variety of ways. Children place demands on their parents and can deter or object to potential partners.Parents may see their parental role as more important than, and a barrier to, new relationships. However, mothers are typically looking for partners for themselves rather than fathers for their children. Among formerly married people without children,the desire to become a parent encourages repartnering. The paper concludes that parenthood should be a key consideration in analyses of repartnering.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Much of the literature on the urban middle classes describes processes of both affiliation (often to the localities) and disaffiliation (often from some of the non‐middle‐class residents). In this paper, we consider this situation from a different position, drawing on research exploring whether and how children and adults living in diverse localities develop friendships with those different to themselves in terms of social class and ethnicity. This paper focuses on the interviews with the ethnically diverse, but predominantly white British, middle‐class parent participants, considering their attitudes towards social and cultural difference. We emphasize the importance of highlighting inequalities that arise from social class and its intersection with ethnicity in analyses of complex urban populations. The paper's contribution is, first, to examine processes of clustering amongst the white British middle‐class parents, particularly in relation to social class. Second, we contrast this process, and its moments of reflection and unease, with the more deliberate and purposeful efforts of one middle‐class, Bangladeshi‐origin mother who engages in active labour to facilitate relationships across social and ethnic difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly after coming to power in Britain, the Conservative- Liberal Democratic alliance placed family life at the heart of their political agenda, and set out their plans to reform adoption. The paper draws upon debates about the reforms and considers them in articulation with concerns about health of the nation expressed in political pronouncements on 'broken Britain' and the failures of 'state multiculturalism'. The paper considers the debates about domestic (transracial) and intercountry adoption, and uses feminist postcolonial perspectives to argue that we can only understand what are expressed as national issues within a transnational and postcolonial framework which illuminate the processes of state and institutional race-making. The paper analyses three key instances of biopower and governmentality in the adoption debates: the population, the normalizing family and the individual. The paper argues that we need to understand the reforms as part of a wider concern with the 'problem' of multicultural belonging, and that the interlocking discourses of nation, family and identities are crucial to the constitution and regulation of gendered, racialized subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the value of a normative account of the relationship between agents and institutions for contemporary efforts to explain ever more complex and disorganized forms of social life. The character of social institutions, as they relate to practices, agents and norms, is explored through an engagement with the common claim that family life has been de-institutionalized. The paper argues that a normative rather than empirical definition of institutions avoids a false distinction between institutions and practices. Drawing on ideas of social freedom and creative action from critical theory, the changes in family life are explained not as an effect of de-institutionalization, but as a shift from an organized to a disorganized institutional type. This is understood as a response to changes in the wider normative structure, as a norm of individual freedom has undermined the legitimacy of the organized patriarchal nuclear family, with gender ascribed roles and associated duties. Contemporary motherhood is drawn on to illustrate the value of analysing the dynamic interactions between institutions, roles and practices for capturing both the complexity and the patterned quality of social experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of union formation and the context of childrearing have profoundly changed with the spread of cohabitation in the last few decades. It is only recently that some attention has been paid to the implications of these changes for family ties. This study considers, with reference to Italy, a specific relationship between individuals in couples and their family of origin – childcare by grandparents. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, we investigate whether children of cohabiting couples are cared for by their grandparents to a lower extent compared to children of married couples. Second, the current study examines whether potential differences decrease over time. The data used are from two rounds of cross‐sectional and nationally representative survey conducted in Italy in 2003 and in 2009. Our results show that in 2003 both in the provision and the intensity of grandparents' childcare, children of cohabiting parents were less likely to have their grandparents involved than children of married parents. However, the differences between marriages and cohabitations disappear in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move within British sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of individuals; the creation of lacunae that will be (partially) filled by other disciplines; and engagement with policy developments and professional practices that focus on 'family' as a core, institutionalized, idea. While repudiating the necessity (and indeed, pointing out the dangers) of providing any definitive answer to definitions of 'family', the paper calls for critical reflection on the implications of these conceptual moves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper data from a nationally representative British longitudinal study are used to analyse exchanges of support between Third Age parents (aged 55–75) and their adult children. Results show that between two thirds and three quarters of parents in this age group were involved in some sort of exchange relationship with at least one of their children. Generally, more Third Age parents were providers than recipients of help, but there was a strong reciprocal element to intergenerational exchange with, for example, married parents who provided support to at least one child being twice as likely as those who did not to receive support from a child, after allowance for a range of relevant parental and child characteristics. Parental characteristics associated with higher probability of providing help included higher income, home ownership and being married or widowed rather than divorced. Higher income and home ownership were, however, negatively associated with odds of receiving help from a child, again after adjustment for other co-variates, suggesting socio-economic differences in the balance of support exchanges. Children seem responsive to parental needs in that receipt of help from a child was positively associated with older parental age and with parental disability. The paper shows that in Britain, as in the USA, the balance of intergenerational exchanges involving Third Age adults is downward rather than upward, in contravention of depictions of older adults as‘burdens’ on younger generations. Current demographic and social changes are, it is argued, likely to increase support demands from adult children to Third Age parents in coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that Bourdieu's stress on early familiarization for the highest value of cultural capital is closely linked to his idea, strongly emphasized inDistinction, about the role of family and domestic life for individual development and social positions. The role of women, as mothers and homemakers, is crucial in this process. Yet, Bourdieu defines social origin as deriving from the father. The centrality to Bourdieu's thinking of a resilient traditional pattern of masculine domination and feminine submission constitutive of the Western gender habitus explains both his stress on‘normalcy’ for the production of legitimate dispositions, and his resistance to incorporating into his thinking the implications of recent transformations in home family living, which have destabilized the gender order. It is thus important to consider contemporary feminist analyses of the family and home life and their significance for a renewed theory of cultural capital.The paper considers two sets of literature. Firstly, it addresses the manners in which home and family are conceptualized in Bourdieu's key texts where these issues were prominent in the development of his thinking on cultural capital. The second set of literature includes texts by feminist academics in the fields of family, gender and the body, which analyse the destabilizing of the gender order and everyday family living in contemporary society. Two questions are addressed on the basis of these reflections: (1) Is cultural capital an individual or a household resource? (2) How does cultural capital relate to personal interdependencies at the level of family and households? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with the way in which the individualization thesis– in which it is assumed that close relationships have become tenuous and fragile– has become so dominant in‘new’ sociological theorizing about family life. Although others have criticized this thesis, in this paper the main criticism derives from empirical research findings carried out with members of transnational families living in Britain whose values and practices do not fit easily with ideas of individualization. It is argued that we need a much more complex and less linear notion of how families change across generations and in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this era of reflexive sociology it is commonplace that subjectivity is of great sociological concern, and that the comprehension by social researchers of their own subject position is essential. Still, old habits die hard. Focusing on selected texts in the sociology of the Australian family, this paper traces the effects of failing to focus the sociological gaze on subjectivity and its variation across society. Highlighted are some patterns of analytic misconstruction of subjectivity, especially the substitution of measurement for a theory of practice, and the projection by sociologists of their own class-specific subjectivity onto society at large. Ultimately, this misconstruction turns works like those discussed in this paper into a powerful denial of alternative subjectivities, and a reinforcement of the socially dominant perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses some of the implications of one of the major social changes to have taken place in the West during the second half of the twentieth century—that is, the increased employment of women, together with normative changes in gender relations and in women's expectations. These changes have been linked to an increase in individualism, which itself is associated with the transcendence of 'first modernity'. Thus it is suggested that new approaches to social analysis are required (Beck). Here it is argued that, rather than develop completely new approaches in order to grasp the changes that are under way, the 'economic' and the 'social' (that is, employment and the family) should be seen as intertwined, rather than approached as separate phenomena. Past debates in feminism, changes in the family, and flexible employment are critically examined. The growing tensions between employment and family life are discussed. It is argued that these changes are associated with the intensification of capitalist development, rather than reflecting a fundamental transformation of society. Existing approaches to the analysis of social change, including Polanyi's analysis of the development of 'counter-movements' against the 'self-regulating' market, will, therefore, still be relevant to our enquiries. In the concluding section, a programme of research that would examine these changes is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observing that the violent realities of family life belief the social rhetoric of harmony, most sociologists recommend 'demythologizing' the family. This paper challenges that view, arguing that social rhetoric must be analysed rather than debunked. The sense-making activities of actors who engage in violent family events are identified as a strategic site for such an analysis. The paper explores the ways in which the rhetoric of family harmony is routinely sustained and reproduced. Two kinds of supports are considered (i) macrosocial supports, which sustain family rhetoric by integrating it into a wider system of collective representations; and (ii) microsocial supports which sustain family rhetoric by embodying it in the accounts of family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent commentary on working-class life has emphasised its 'privatisation', the restriction of networks of everyday relationships to the immediate family and its home. This marks a distinctive shift from earlier characterisations in terms of 'communal sociability' in which the extended family and a web of neighbours and friends are prominent. This paper presents evidence from a study of people living in a post-war suburb of Coventry which points to a considerable degree of communal sociability in an (apparently unlikely) locality. Privatisation is wholly inapt as a description of the contact with relatives, sources of help, neighbourliness, membership of organisations and recreation reported by respondents. The empirical basis of claims put forward by advocates of the privatisation thesis is examined and an alternative approach to the issue is sketched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary expectations of good parenting hold that focused, intensive parental attention is essential to children's development. Parental input is viewed as a key determinant in children's social, psychological and educational outcomes, with the early years particularly crucial. However, increased rates of maternal employment mean that more parents are juggling work and family commitments and have less non-work time available to devote to children. Yet studies find that parental childcare time has increased over recent decades. In this paper, we explore the detail of this trend using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics ( ABS) Time Use Survey ( TUS), 1992 and 2006. To investigate whether discourses on intensive parenting are reflected in behaviour, we examine a greater range of parent-child activities than has been undertaken to date, looking at trends in active childcare time (disaggregated into talk-based, physical and accompanying care activities); time in childcare as a secondary activity; time spent in the company of children in leisure activities; and time spent in the company of children in total. We also investigate whether the influence of factors known to predict parental time with children (gender, education, employment status and the age of children) have changed over time. We contextualize our analyses within social and economic trends in Australia and find a compositional change in parental time, with more active childcare occurring within less overall time, which suggests more intensive, child-centred parenting. Fathers' parent-child time, particularly in physical care, increased more than mothers' (from a much lower base), and tertiary education no longer predicts significantly higher childcare time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to M. Bittman and J. Pixley's paper "Equality and Gender, Divided Versus Multiple Subjectivity: A Response to Allon J. Uhlmann's The Sociology of Subjectivity, and Subjectivity of Sociologists" in volume 55, issue number 3 of the "British Journal of Sociology." The criticism of Bittman and Pixley's book "The Double Life of the Family" focused on a number of selected texts in order to expose some of the analytical dynamics that prevail in the sociology of the Australian family. The book served as an example of a class-unconscious discussion of the family. It was argued that the book overlook systemic differences in subjectivity across class and gender, and did not consider the sociological significance of the variation in the contexts in which members of different classes lead their lives. Bittman and Pixley's response skirts the main issues which have been the focus of the critique.

Parental role models are often put forward as an explanation for the choice of gender-atypical educational routes. This paper aims to test such explanations by examining the impact of family background variables like parental education and occupation, on choice of educational programme at upper secondary school. Using a sample of around 73,000 Swedish teenagers born between 1972 and 1976, girls' and boys' gender-atypical as well as gender-typical educational choices are analysed by means of logistic regression. Parents working or educated within a specific field increase the probability that a child will make a similar choice of educational programme at upper secondary school. This same-sector effect appeared to be somewhat stronger for fathers and sons, while no such same-sex influence was confirmed for girls. No evidence was found that, in addition to a same-sector effect, it matters whether parents' occupations represent gender- traditional or non-traditional models. Parents of the service classes or highly educated parents - expected to be the most gender egalitarian in attitudes and behaviours - have a positive influence upon children's choice of gender-atypical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explains why so many people exercising freedom of choice and living in a world of privatized religion, elect to make use of religious rites of passage, in the form of religious rituals associated with birth, marriage and death, while at the same time rejecting other social forms of religious action. The phenomenon is a complex one and therefore any simple causal explanation will probably be inadequate. Moreover, the undergirding of rites has changed with the course of time, no longer are they upheld by legal or quasi-legal sanctions. Recognition has to be given to the social setting of rites of passage. A crucial mark of differentiation between rites of passage and other rituals is that such rites directly involve, or are intended to involve, family and kin groups, extending even to the local community, that is, participants stand in a socially structured situation. Rites have some religious significance for participants. To actors, occasions related to rites of passage, the birth of a child, marriage and death, are in themselves times of personal importance, although not necessarily of crisis proportions.

This article analyzes the patterns of social life of youth in the social structure of Israel. A large part of adolescents in Israel participate in patterns of behaviour and social organizations specific to them. The predominance of groups of age-mates in immigration countries has been for long noticed and analysed by some American sociologists and this tendency can be even more strongly discerned in Israel. Moreover, this paper will discuss a proposition that the emergence of youth culture is closely related to the prevalence of the second type of social division of labour. The traditional oriental family may be seen as an example of the first type of division of labour. Almost the whole social organization has been organized on the basis of patriarchal families. The families were the units of occupational specialization. The cooperative-settlement and the moshava are less pure and extreme examples of a division of labour based on the family. In fact there is some degree of discrepancy between some important social roles and the familial roles. The second type of social division of labour is most clearly discernible in the urban sector, in which the family does not function either as a full economic or cultural and political unit. In the communal settlements (Kibbutzim) the clearest correlation between the unfamilial division of labour and a very intensive and formalized youth culture is discernible.

This article addresses the sustainability of extensive paternal involvement in caregiving by applying a temporal approach to understandings of the journeys of primary‐ and equal‐carer fathers and their families. Drawing on a second phase of interviews with UK fathers first spoken to 5 years earlier, we explore continuities and changes in their roles, identities and outlooks as their caregiving journeys progressed and their children became older. Specifically, we explore how fathers and their families negotiated significant moments of change that had the potential to prompt reflection or reorientation, moments that we term caregiving crossroads. Through doing so, we highlight how, in spite of shifts in their arrangements and understandings, the embeddedness of fathers' caregiving routines, bonds and identities had apparently enabled their commitment to counter‐normative roles to endure through such crossroads. We also outline, however, how gendered limitations to some aspects of the scope of their caregiving seemed also to persist as their journeys as fathers progressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between university graduation and liberal values is well‐established and often taken as evidence that higher education participation causes attitudinal change. Identification of education's causal influence in shaping individual preferences is notoriously difficult as it necessitates isolating education's effect from self‐selection mechanisms. This study exploits the household structure of the Harmonized British Household Panel Study and Understanding Society data to tighten the bounds of causal inference in this area and ultimately, to provide a more robust estimate of the independent effect of university graduation on political attitudes. Results demonstrate that leveraging sibling fixed‐effects to control for family‐invariant pre‐adult experiences reduces the size of higher education's effect on cultural attitudes by at least 70%, compared to conventional methods. Significantly, within‐sibship models show that obtaining higher education qualifications only has a small direct causal effect on British individuals' adult attitudes, and that this effect is not always liberalizing. This has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between higher education and political values. Contrary to popular assumptions about education's liberalizing role, this study demonstrates that the education‐political values linkage is largely spurious. It materializes predominately because those experiencing pre‐adult environments conducive to the formation of particular values disproportionately enroll at universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts the transformation, between 1997 and 2021, of the family visa and immigration permit infrastructure from a public into a commercial service in the United Kingdom. In doing so, it reveals a process of state‐market hybridization underpinning the commercialization of migration regulation. Drawing on the analysis of legal archives, policy reports, and marketing materials directed at family migrants spanning 1997–2021, it presents fresh, systematic evidence of how, since 2007, a commercialized state‐market hybrid migration infrastructure for visas and immigration permits has developed in the UK. We show how the trend of state‐market hybridized commercialization has cascaded through three dimensions of migration infrastructure, as follows: (1) state and public immigration agencies, (2) outsourcing visa application firms, and (3) private immigration advisers. Predicated on this hybrid public–private commercial infrastructure, application procedures for visas and immigration permits have become increasingly reconstituted as commercial, rather than public, services. This transformation has created a new transactional logic that stratifies individuals' right to family life along socioeconomic lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income inequality in Great Britain grew more rapidly during the past three decades than in any other industrialized nation. This article discusses several issues related to income inequality in Great Britain. The article examines the relationships between population and household change, on the one hand, and labor market/employment change, on the other, and considers how these relationships have contributed to the growth of inequality. The perspective of the paper is sociological, although much of the work done, in this area have been carried out by demographers and economists. Areas where sociological research remains to be done are highlighted in this article. Developments in patterns of fertility and in households are linked to the growth of individualism and to changes in the labor market, and to be implicated jointly in the marked growth of inequality in Great Britain. The article argues that future research must link households and labor markets, and work towards understanding emerging new relationships between working and private lives, between living arrangements and labor supply, and between individual freedom and social integration.

The history of social mobility has been a study of male mobility experiences. That is, not only have females been excluded by intention from these investigations, but, more importantly, it is argued that this omission is justifiable and legitimate. This is particularly so in relation to the British Isles where the heated defence of the traditional position, presently labelled the conventionalist approach, continues to rationalize and justify the exclusion of over one half of the British and Irish population. Drawing together recent North American, British and Australian research, this paper challenges both the theoretical and empirical assumptions of this conventionalist position. Arguing that a woman is neither simply a summation of domestic identities nor is her status one of complete dependency, national and international evidence on the unique and important contribution of women to the occupational attainments of husbands and children, as well as the class reproduction of families in general, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the extent to which parental values differ between social groups in the UK at the start of the twenty‐first century. The study of parental values is an important area of sociological enquiry that can inform scholarship from across the social sciences concerned with educational inequality and cultural variability in family life. We draw on data from the Millennium Cohort Study to show how parent's social class, religion, religiosity, race and ethnicity, and education are related to the qualities they would like their children to have. Our rank‐ordered regression models show that parents in service class occupations place significantly more importance on 'thinking for self' than 'obey parents' compared to those in routine manual occupations. We also show that although class matters, the relationship between education and parental values is particularly strong. Parenting values also differ by parental racial and ethnic background and by levels of religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how people who live apart from their partners in Britain describe and understand 'family'. It investigates whether, and how far, non-cohabiting partners, friends, 'blood' and legal ties are seen as 'family', and how practices of care and support, and feelings of closeness are related to these constructions. It suggests that people in LAT relationships creatively draw and re-draw the boundaries of family belonging in ways that involve emotionally subjective understandings of family life, and that also refer to normative constructions of what 'family' ought to be, as well as to practical recognitions of lived family 'realities'. This often involves handling uncertainties about what constitutes 'family'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following up on the prediction by classical sociological theorists that neighbours will become irrelevant as societies become more mobile, this research examines the strength of people's social ties with neighbours and the associations thereof with residential, physical and virtual mobility using longitudinal data for Germany. Unlike previous studies, the research considers the three forms of mobility simultaneously and contrasts its effects on social ties with neighbours to those with family. The results show that residential and physical mobility are negatively associated with social ties to neighbours and positively with ties to family. Virtual mobility does not weaken social ties with neighbours but ties with family. The positive association between mobility and social ties with family may not be strong enough to ascertain that people maintain as close social ties to others in the future as it does not outweigh the negative association with visiting neighbours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working-class adolescents of French urban peripheries are key figures in a new social debate that reactivates the nineteenth century spectre of 'dangerous' classes to be controlled. Since the 1990s, French social counselling has privileged two modalities of response: taking account of suffering and government by listening and speech. We hypothesize that the contemporary moral economy allows for social interactions that go beyond social control and institutional domination. This is partly because professionals engaged in this moral undertaking may keep a critical distance, and partly because the concerned populations aren't necessarily devoid of resources to advance their interests or incapable of resistance. The concept of moral economy, coupled with the ethnographic method, is heuristic for fully comprehending the complexity of these issues and their stakes. Our fieldwork was centred on a French Adolescent Centre in an impoverished commune in Paris's periphery, from January 2010 through March 2011. These institutions were established in the early 2000s to respond to adolescent 'suffering' by crossing social work and psychiatry. Adolescents, parents, and other institutions (especially schools) solicit the professionally diverse staff for assistance, which in turn may take on cases and/or make referrals to other support institutions. By paying attention to all the scenes upon which the story of a counselled adolescent evolves, and bearing more general social evolutions in mind by applying the concept of moral economy, we can consider the multiplicity of seemingly contradictory processes as a whole. We see the destabilization of parents and their loss of symbolic capital, partly due to the norms of contemporary parenthood and partly due to the stigmatization of working-class adolescence. But we also discern possibilities for expressing sentiments of injustice and humiliation, for increasing symbolic capital, and in some cases a reappropriation of the system, particularly in trajectories marked by a will for social ascension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the differential effects of changes in family formations on men's and women's economic vulnerability. The motivating question is whether investments in education provide sufficient resources to escape the risk of poverty in the low-income sector or if changes in household characteristics are more important determinants of one's living standard. Changes in household characteristics are defined in terms of partners' entry into and exit from households and partners' different labour market profiles. The analysis focuses on households in the low-income sector in Germany, a population that is at high risk of poverty in a social welfare state that is expected to mitigate the effects of changes in family formation independent of gender. Findings from panel regression analysis demonstrate that women, in contrast to men, benefit economically as much as or more from investing in traditional family formations than in their own labour market position. This is especially the case for women with lower levels of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that in the historical transformation to modern industrial society, the integration of women into the economy occurred everywhere as a three-phase process: in pre-modern societies, the extensive integration of women into societal production; then, their wide exclusion with the shift to industrial society; and finally, their re-integration into paid work during the further course of modernization. Results from the author's own international comparative study of the historical development of the family and the economic integration of women have shown that this was decidedly not the case even for western Europe. Hence the question arises: why is there such historical variation in the development and importance of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family? In the article, an explanation is presented. It is argued that the historical development of the urban bourgeoisie was especially significant for the historical destiny of this cultural model: the social and political strength of the urban bourgeoisie had central societal importance in the imposition of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family as the dominant family form in a given society. In this, it is necessary to distinguish between the imposition of the breadwinner marriage at the cultural level on the one hand, and at the level of social practice in the family on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologist Catherine Hakim argues that two problems undermine author's critical assessment of preference theory. First, that the longitudinal study of first-time mothers upon which author base that assessment does not provide a valid test of preference theory; and second, that the results of that study generally support preference theory. A key issue over which Hakim and the author appear to have few differences is the role or purpose of theories that is, to explain something of interest. They also agree that theories can be judged by their fruitfulness--their ability to give rise to new ideas or testable hypotheses; and by their robustness when tested empirically. It is not clear whether they agree that theories can he mistaken. Although in her new work on models of the family Hakim states that theory is not right or wrong, it is either useful or not useful, she goes on to say that human capital theory is clearly wrong in its treatment of educational qualifications. It seems likely that Hakim accepts that theories succeed, and can fail, on the basis of accumulated evidence.

The article presents information on the relationship between the family breakdown and social networks in the United States. Scholar C. J. Bott terms the relationship between community and family as complex and indirect. Internal structure of conjugal families is different in rural and urban settings. Families with loose-knit social networks lead to instability and ultimate breakdown within urban communities in the United States. Middle-class families have more close-knit social networks. In rural communities the family breakdown factor is limited.

The number of married women workers has increased greatly in Scotland, as in England and Wales. It seems likely that this trend will be maintained and even be strengthened. This raises questions of policy for the government and practical difficulties for employers, who can no longer afford to ignore domestic responsibilities of their workers. It confronts society with the need to consider whether the employment of married women, especially mothers, is compatible with a satisfactory family life and with the healthy physical and psychological development of children. The relationship between employment of mothers and the quality of family life is not a simple one and the accumulated evidence suggests that the reasons why a mother goes out to work or stays at home may be more important than the fact that she does so. Mothers who go out to work do not form a homogeneous category. The decision to go out or to stay at home depends upon a complicated interplay within the family of economic, social and psychological factors, and this takes place in the wider context of local customs and industrial conditions.

Social history in Great Britain ceased long ago to be a description of manners and customs although traces still survive as, for example, in a war-time best-sellers reference to the history of people with the politics left out. It has now become the history of men and women in their social relationships and groupings. As such, the subject derived from economic historians driven to seek explanations of the causes and consequences of economic change in fields outside their own immediate province. Two examples within the field of interest of this Conference may serve to illustrate some limitations of the traditional approach to the period which experienced the transition to industrialism. First, for forty years or more economic historians have been investigating the mechanisms of eighteenth-century population growth. Defective data have been interpreted with such sophistication by students concerned to relate demographic change and economic development that, an increase in of population seems the only remaining certainty today. Second, historians have been providing contradictory answers to the question, on the standard of life of the working classes in the late decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries.

The article discusses the significance of extra-familial kinship among the inhabitants of a rural area in South Wales known as the Vale of Glamorgan. The discussion is based on field material obtained in the course of anthropological inquiries carried out between 1957 and 1960. Childbirth, marriage, illness and death are the most common and universal of such situations. In conclusion, brief mention must be made of the relevance of this discussion of the ceremonial and evaluative functions of extra-familial kin ties to any study of their supportive function in crisis situations. The mobilization of extra-familial kin to fill supportive roles is usually restricted to those who were once members of the same elementary family, together with their affines. It is here that the elementary family, in Raymond Firth's phrase, juts out in a prominence which has been recognized by the overwhelming attention paid to it by social scientists. Even where genealogically more remote extra-familial kin support individual relatives in times of crisis they commonly express their feelings of obligation to do so not in terms of a larger kin unit but in terms of their role as deputies for pivotal kin.

The article focuses on umemployability in Jamaica. In Jamaica the term unemployable is frequently applied to many unemployed, although it is recognized that what is called unemployability may be simply lack of interest in getting or keeping a job. Lack of response to economic incentives is statistically measurable in cases where increases in wages have resulted in increases of unemployment, but the common opinion of economists, nevertheless, is that lack of response is not normal and is to be explained by special circumstances or is not worth any comment. Increased family instability, crime and juvenile delinquency, the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the growth of extremely emotional religious sects are some of its symptoms. Along with these goes the appearance of great timidity or of its opposite, exhibitional behaviour, especially among the young: deviant conduct generally. The nature of the Jamaican family system in the lower economic classes is something of an obstacle to the expansion of standards of living, and in two quite different respects.

The article discusses problems related to housing needs. Housing conditions are commonly measured in terms of density of occupation, the number of persons per room, or reciprocally, the number of rooms per person. The average density of occupation in England and Wales in 1951 was 0.74 persons per room, but for one-person households it was 0.30 and for households of ten or more persons it was 1.90. The number of persons per room ratio increases steadily with increasing size of household. So far as the number of requisite houses are concerned, the relief of overcrowded families will, involve no addition to the total, provided that sufficient public control is retained over the new supply to permit of the necessary redistribution, and that sufficient forethought is exercised in regard to the size of the new houses to render that redistribution physically possible. Redistribution could only solve the overcrowding problem if there were sufficient dwellings of the size required and if control were exercised over the allocation of housing space. A rise in the real income of old people may increase the number wishing to live separately. A general rise in the standard of living may make physically fit houses socially obsolete.

Stereotypes die hard even among sociologists. The purpose of this article is to see how far the stereotype is upheld in social legislation. Whether "the family" conceived simply as a small isolated unit of parents and young children, or is the reality of the wider family acknowledged and how far are kinship rights and obligations recognized outside of the "immediate family." If people are to judge by a recent authoritative book, the legal conception generally deals with the "family" in the more limited sense. The Master of the Rolls, in his foreword to "A Century of Family Law," says "in popular conception, as in the eyes of the law, the family unit of the husband, wife and children of the marriage remains the essential social component, and he goes on to say that the book is limited by the scope of the conception of the family. The greater part of "family law" in Great Britain is indeed concerned with relations between husband and wife, and to a lesser extent between parents and dependent children, and has little to say about wider kinship rights and duties. In particular, if one considers the kinship obligations enforced by law the conception is certainly limited in this way.

This article discusses the distribution of income within the family. It is obvious that the growing knowledge about the distribution of the national income between families has not so far been matched by a growth in knowledge about the distribution of the family income between its members. In place of knowledge, the assumption has often been made, though not stated, that the family, while no longer generally considered a unit for the purposes of earning, can still be treated as a unit for the purposes of spending. It has been taken for granted that some members of a family cannot be rich while others are poor. Half a century ago Rowntree formulated the concept not only of primary poverty but of secondary poverty. Families were considered to be suffering from the former where their total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency, and from the latter where their total earnings would be sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were it not that some portion of it is absorbed by other expenditure, either useful or wasteful. The hypothesis behind the changes in the distribution of income within the family since the early years of the war is that wives' housekeeping allowances have not increased as much as husbands' earnings.