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This paper explores whether and how documented and undocumented migrant parents communicate with their children about the threats posed by the intensified enforcement of 1996 and 2001 US immigration reforms; whether parents facing potential detention and deportation plan for the care of their children; and whether their children learn from other sources about detention and deportation. The focus of this paper emerged in the context of a multiyear participatory and action research (PAR) process as one effort to understand the multiple meanings and divergent perspectives on parental -child communication that arose among and between participants and coresearchers. The aim is to better understand, in parents' own voices, their embrace of and resistance to direct communication with their children about the threat of deportation. Data are triangulated from in-depth interviews with 18 Central American immigrant coresearchers (Study 1), responses of 132 Latino/a immigrant parents to a survey with open-ended questions (Study 2), and conversations in a series of community meetings and workshops. Findings confirm the importance for advocates, service providers, and researchers to understand migrant parents' decisions about communication within the context of family and community values; gender expectations; lived and psychological experiences of being criminalized; and strategies to manage daily challenges of living without documents while parenting US-citizen children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how individuals from eight middle class suburbs in the US expressed the social and civic dimensions of the meaning of work during interviews conducted for Boston University's Middle Class Morality Project. A modified grounded theory approach was used to analyze the interviews from this project, which incorporated aspects of both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The paper first examines where individuals located their social ties and discusses the recentering of social ties in work and work organizations among these suburban North Americans. Stories and talk of work are then analyzed to illustrate individuals' constructions of the civic and social meaning of their work. The conclusion considers more broadly how the movement of women into the formal labor force, the growth of nonprofit sector jobs, and the increasing prevalence of team-based organizations relate to these dimensions of the meaning of work. I suggest that culturally constructed divisions between the spheres of home, work, and community that emerged during industrialization may be weakening as the social and civic dimensions of work become more salient in a post-industrial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply a ‘gendered lens’ to research that has sought to understand how private firm practices and public policies shape employment conditions. We report on a study of the realities facing a highly female-dominated job, that of waiter in low-end chain restaurants. Through interviews with managers at 16 sites of two international restaurant chains located in Seattle, Washington and Chicago, Illinois, we examined how the gender and family caregiver compositions of waiter workforces intersect with private employers’ practices related to waiter wages, fringe benefits, and staffing and scheduling and preferred job qualifications, on the one hand; and with mandated minimum wage regulations, on the other. Male waiters were most heavily concentrated in the chain with more generous benefits and input into scheduling, while the largest proportions of women were found in the chain offering few or no benefits and little scheduling control. Sites with the most waiter–caregivers came from both chains but were mostly in Seattle, aligning with a US state policy context assuring a higher minimum wage. Paralleling those findings, we observed that managers in especially male-heavy settings stressed intellectual and experience qualifications for waiter positions, while within more female and dependent caregiver employing sites they prioritized factors such as personality and ‘good hygiene.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States (US) deportation system and its recent applications have profound implications for the integrity and well-being of immigrant families. Since harsh policies were adopted in 1996, millions of non-citizens, mostly from Mexico and Central America, have been forced to leave the US. Despite the large numbers of people directly threatened by the deportation system, little is known about how it affects Central American immigrant children and families. A participatory action research project was designed in collaboration with local immigrant organizations to (1) document the impact of deportation policy on Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrant families and (2) collaboratively develop services and advocacy that reflect local constructions of needs and strengths within these families. This paper reports analyses of interviews with 18 families; interviews explored participants' experiences and meaning-making of detention, deportation, and other forces that threaten their families. Analyses of interviews demonstrate how participants construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the significance of current risks posed by the US deportation system; how these risks intersect with other threats to families, including poverty, state-sponsored violence, and previous migrations; and participants' responses to these risks. Implications for sustaining collaborative relationships toward enhancing human service work, community organizing, and redressing injustices are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a series of intervention projects in the conditions and design of work geared to increasing gender equity in organizations and the ability of employees to integrate their working lives with their personal lives. It shows that approaching work with a work-family lens tends to lead to changes in the temporal conditions of work, in what has come to be known as flexibility in the workplace. With a gender lens, more nuanced aspects of the institutions governing the workplace come into sight allowing the possibility of greater actual change in the way that work is designed and accomplished, thus leading to a better fit between the current workforce and the workplace. Although such intervention projects are being done in multiple countries, the discussion is most relevant to the USA, with its limited - almost non-existent - national support for the reconciliation of work and family needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on church-sect theory, this paper asserts that midwifery is much like an established sect in relation to its church equivalent: Western medicine. We find that midwifery can endure in this form - as both protest movement and established institution - because of its ability to maintain its central oppositional values while being accepted as a legitimate, if marginalized, profession. Using interview data from 25 Florida midwives, we draw an analogy between the liminal status of midwifery and three of the most important characteristics of the established sect: limited institutionalization, acceptance and opposition, and a unique value set. This comparison sheds light on both church-sect theory and midwifery, which also leads us to suggest that similar analogies be used for analysis across other sub-fields in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are organizational work-life initiatives endorsed in some countries such as the US or the UK, while they generate little interest in France and other non-Anglo-Saxon environments? In a qualitative theory-building approach, this paper assesses the gap in workplace practices adoption among the US, the UK, and France and analyzes in-depth interviews with 44 human resources (HR) officers, employee representatives, unions, and work-life service providers in France. Five main factors explain the adoption of organizational work-life initiatives in France and potentially other countries: (1) employer versus State legitimacy in the nonwork sphere of life, (2) industrial relations and unions' stance toward work-life practices, (3) the complexity of the legal framework, (4) the awareness of work-life issues within HR departments, and (5) the framing of work-life as a business or a social issue. With reference to prior research, a model is built to account for the influence of the national context on employees' expectations and employers' leeway at the macrolevel, and for strategic choices made by employers at the mesolevel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike many European countries, the US has no national paternity leave policy giving fathers the right to take paid time off work following the birth (or adoption) of a child. Despite this, prior research suggests that many fathers do take some time off work after a child is born. However, little is known about the determinants, circumstances or consequences of paternal leave-taking. In this paper, we use the first wave of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a new nationally representative panel study of over 10,000 children born in 2001, to examine these questions. We make use of ECLS-B questions asked directly of resident fathers pertaining to their participation in a range of child care-taking activities, as well as a rich set of measures about the father, mother and child. We find that the overwhelming majority of fathers take at least some leave at the birth of their child, but that the length of that leave varies a good deal. Our results also indicate that fathers who take longer leave are more involved in child care-taking activities nine months later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses issues raised by ‘welfare reform’ in the USA by using the example of Sweden's women activists in constructing a 'woman friendly' welfare state. In the USA, feminist advocates see a tension between the argument that motherhood should be valued by the provision of care allowances, and the view that work should be reformed to meet the needs of parents. This reflects debates about gender difference/equality, the possibility of commonality, and the individual. The Swedish ‘woman friendly’ welfare .state was built on the recognition, through social policy, of the interrelationship among care, material resources, and public voice. The interrelationship was embodied in what I call the 'social individual', and articulated in public child care and other policies and collective services. The adequacy of those universal policies and services was frequently judged by the situation of lone mothers, who ceased, being ‘deviant’, and often became a model for understanding the interrelationship. Cross-class solidarity among women was a prerequisite for, and was built on, the social individual. This solidarity is now threatened by neoliberal economic and social policies that fragment care, resources, and voice, and therefore the social individual. It is possible to challenge the downsizing of welfare states by moving the terms of discussion away from the poor as deviant other, acknowledging that all women have much in common with the targets of current policy making. This involves the creation of concrete social policies that embody the relationship among care, resources, and voice, and recognize the inseparability of community, work and family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]