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Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces, Work, families and organisations in transition illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees' experiences of work-life balance in contemporary shifting contexts.
This collaborative study provides a subtle and multi-layered understanding of the transition to parenthood within a cross-national comparative framework.
Based on qualitative research with young people aged from 18 to 30 in five European countries, this book examines young peoples pathways to adulthood, and their perspectives on their future work and family lives.
For more than a decade, Carol Smart has been at the forefront of debates about the sociology of the family. Yet she has become frustrated by the fixation of many commentators with the supposed decline of commitment, and even the decline of the possibility of family life. In this exciting new book, she puts forward a new way of understanding families and relationships. Breaking with conventional wisdom, her book offers a fresh conceptual approach to understanding personal life, which realigns empirical research with theoretical analysis. She gives emphasis to ideas of connectedness, relationality and embeddedness, rejecting many of the assumptions found in theories of individualisation and de...
In this beautifully-argued book, Karen Cristensen and Ingrid Guldvik provide a comparatively-based insight to the historical context for public care work and show how migration policies, general welfare and long-term care policies (including the cash-for-care schemes) as well as cultural differences in values in the UK and Norway set the context for how migrant care workers can realise their individual life projects. Through viewing migrants as individuals who actively construct their lives within the options and conditions they are given at any time, they bring to the discussion an awareness of what might be called ’a new type of migrant’ one who is neither a victim of the divide between the global north and the global south, nor someone leaving family behind, but individuals using care work as a part of their own life project of potential self-improvement.
This open access book explores an approach that connects individual and societal processes throughout history and shifting trends in sociological perspectives, influenced by C. Wright Mills’ theories of time and temporality. It traces its origins from American pragmatist thought and Chicago qualitative sociology in the early 20th century to the revival of biographical research in European and American sociology during the 1970s. The book shows empirical studies from this vibrant research approach can bridge methodological gaps between qualitative and quantitative biographical studies, applicable to various topics like class, gender, ethnicity, and intergenerational dimensions.
Fathers are often neglected in histories of family life in Britain. Family Men provides the first academic study of fathers and families in the period from the First World War to the end of the 1950s. It takes a thematic approach, examining different aspects of fatherhood, from the duties it encompassed to the ways in which it related to men's identities. The historical approach is socio-cultural: each chapter examines a wide range of historical source materials in order to analyse both cultural representations of fatherhood and related social norms, as well as exploring the practices and experiences of individuals and families. It uncovers the debates surrounding parenting and family life a...
Everyday Silence and the Holocaust examines Irene Levin’s experiences of her family’s unspoken history of the Holocaust and the silence that surrounded their war experiences as non-topics. A central example of what C. Wright Mills considered the core of sociology – the intersection of biography and history – the book covers the process by which the author came to understand that notes found in her mother’s apartment following her death were not unimportant scribbles, but in fact contained elements of her mother’s biographical narrative, recording her parents’ escape from occupied Norway to unoccupied Sweden in late 1942. From the mid-1990s, when society began to open up about t...
What does social equality mean now, in a world of markets, global power and new forms of knowledge? In this new book, Raewyn Connell combines vivid research with theoretical insight and radical politics to address this question. The focus moves across gender equality struggles, family change, class and education, intellectual workers, and the global dimension of social science, to contemporary theorists of knowledge and global power, and the political dilemmas of today's left. Written with clarity and passion, this book proposes a bold agenda for social science, and shows it in action. Raewyn Connell is known internationally for her powerfully argued and field-defining books Masculinities, Gender and Power, Making the Difference, and Southern Theory. This new volume gathers together a broad spectrum of her recent work which distinctively combines close-focus field research and large-scale theory, and brings this to bear on those questions of social justice and struggles for change that have long been at the heart of her writing, and will have wide-ranging implications for the social sciences and social activism in the twenty-first century. Visit www.raewynconnell.net
Collective identity, the emotionally powerful sense of belonging to a group, is a crucial source of popular legitimacy for nations. However efforts since the 1990s to politically support European integration by using identity mechanisms borrowed from nationalism have had very limited success. European integration may require new, post-national approaches to the relationship between culture and politics. This controversial and timely volume poses the logical question: if identity doesn't effectively connect culture with European integration politics, what does? The book brings together leading scholars from several of the disciplines that have developed concepts of culture and methods of cult...