“Always there for me”: Friendship patterns and expectations among middle- and working-class men and women

Using data from semistructured qualitative interviews with 52 working- and middle-class women and men, this paper compares differences in both friendship patterns and expectations of friendship. Working-class respondents' friendships revealed a high degree of reciprocity and interdependence with respect to material goods and services. Norms of working-class friendship emphasized being able to rely on friends for such services. Middle-class respondents, in contrast, celebrated shared leisure and the existence of large networks of interesting friends. Middle-class friendships enhanced the individuality that characterizes contemporary middle-class life. As a result of class differences in the meanings and expectations of friendship, the potential strains and conflicts differed. Working-class respondents reported far more open conflict with friends over the exchange of services than did middle-class respondents. Middle-class respondents reported difficulties in asking friends for help, even though being able to do so was a widely shared ideal of friendship.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, Massachusetts, March 1993.     

Feminized cultural capital at work in the moral economy: Home credit and working-class women

One of the defining features of the home credit sector is the role played by its agents—workers who act as intermediaries between lending companies and borrowers to facilitate lending and collect repayments. There is a prevailing and pervasive narrative in the sector that women make superior agents, largely based on the belief that female agents can manage relationships with borrowers more successfully than their male counterparts. This article analyzes data from 349,078 home credit accounts (loans), as well as 71 interviews with home credit agents and lending company managers, to evaluate both the myths and realities of women's roles in home credit. The data is also used to explore the opportunities for—and potential constraints on—women's career progression in home credit work, based on an understanding of the moral economy in which they operate. By exploring the moral economy of low-income communities, the article highlights the role of working-class women's cultural capital within the labor market. Despite women forming the majority of the agent workforce in home credit, women's capital is undervalued in comparison with their male counterparts' capital. The analysis within this article allows a greater understanding of the highly classed and gendered nature of the moral economy of low-income communities and the exchange value of women's capital within the labor market.     

Friendship support patterns of older American women

Research during the past decade has firmly established the informal support of family, friends, and neighbors as critical in older people's health and well-being. The decade has also seen increasing attention to informal supports in social policy and services addressing the needs of older people. The support of friends in particular is agreed to be important but the details of its nature and consequence require more research. This article draws on field research of friendship among a population of older American women to ask: (1) How do older women themselves perceive their friendship involvement and its significance as a source of support?; (2) How do the friendship support patterns of later life compare and connect with those of earlier stages?; (3) How do friends relate to other sources of informal support in terms of support exchanged?; and (4) What are the implications for human service professionals concerned with effective use of informal support in later life?     

Psychosocial factors related to job stress and women in management

This literature review explores women in management and how the psychosocial factors they face in the workplace affect their job-related stress level. The psychosocial factors identified include tokenism, sexual harassment and discrimination, work-family conflict, and workload. Various studies are cited and solutions to decrease job-related stress level are included.     

Developmental origins of antihomosexual prejudice in heterosexual men and women

Antihomosexual prejudice, popularly referred to as homophobia, is a complex phenomenon whose roots traditionally have been traced to the cultural context. However, such theoretical explanations fall short of accounting for the power and endurance of this bias. By locating the threat of homophobia in the development of male core gender identity and female heterosexual object choice, the author suggests that heterosexual men's and women's responses to homosexuality may have different origins. She further argues that only by combining cultural with psychodynamic factors may the clinician develop a sufficiently empathic response to patients struggling with homophobic affects.     

Call centres and job satisfaction in Italy: employment conditions and socio-biographical patterns

ABSTRACT

The article examines job satisfaction in 21 Italian call centres. The results of research carried out on 1715 handlers indicate how dissatisfaction prevails among call centre representatives (CCRs) and how it is influenced by aspects related to some organisational characteristics (service delivered, size and organisational typology), on one side, and to different aspects of working conditions (contract, wage and tenure) and participants’ biographical and working profiles of CCRs (gender, age, educational attainment), on the others. However, the most interesting finding emerges by distinguishing different dimensions of job satisfaction (extrinsic and intrinsic-relational). In particular, the relationship between type of contract and job satisfaction is rather interesting. For non-permanent workers, in fact, the probability of being dissatisfied is decidedly greater if we consider the extrinsic dimension of job satisfaction. Instead, when the intrinsic-relational dimension is taking into account, atypical workers are no more dissatisfied than the permanent ones. Job insecurity and limited perspectives in terms of work alternatives, safeguards and rewards, seem to be the source of greatest dissatisfaction for Italian CCRs. This certainly does not surprise considering the Italian development model and its dualistic labour market, highly segmented between insiders and outsiders.     

Intimate partner violence, women, and work: coping on the job

Intimate partner violence is a significant health problem for women, with consequences extending to work as well as society at large. This article describes workplace interference tactics, how women cope with violence at work, and workplace supports for a sample of recently employed women with domestic violence orders (DVO; n = 518). Results indicate that violent partners used a wide range of work interference tactics, that women were more likely to tell someone at work about the victimization than they were to hide the information, and that coworkers and supervisors provided a range of supports to women who did disclose their situation. Implications for further research and practice are discussed.     

Day care in working-class ethnic neighborhoods: implications for social policy.

Implications for social service planning are contained in the findings of a survey to determine preferences in day care for children in working-class families of Polish and Italian extraction.     

Relationships between person and health factors and job characteristics in women with systemic lupus erythematosus

This study compared personal and health factors and job characteristics in persons with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) and a healthy control group and examined factors related to job characteristics. Fifteen women with SLE and 15 healthy controls completed a questionnaire regarding current employment, employer restrictions, job environment, type of work, and health factors interfering with work. Personal factors such as demographic information, disease severity, cognition, and degree of brain injury were also assessed. t-tests showed that persons with SLE worked significantly less than healthy controls but there were no significant differences between the groups for types of job or employee restrictions. In the group with SLE, health factors of mobility, dependence, musculoskeletal problems, neurological problems, and fatigue correlated with perceived social (r=0.53 to 0.67) and physical (r=0.56 to 0.87) work environments. None of the measures of cognition, brain injury or disease severity correlated with job characteristics. In the healthy controls, dependence at work correlated with physical environment and fatigue correlated with the social environment of the workplace. The results indicate that even persons with SLE who have mild disease are significantly different from healthy controls and might be at risk for discontinuing working.     

Mexican American women: impact of culture and education on work patterns

The lives of women of Mexican descent are being profoundly affected by their changing workforce participation. They are expected to make up the majority of the female workforce in service occupations by 2010. Based on the literature and personal clinical interactions two factors -- cultural values and education attainment -- consistently appear to have a strong impact on the occupational choices of Mexican American women. This article will explore the interdependence of work, culture, and education on women of Mexican origin.     

Invisible,undervalued and excluded: Practicing working-class girlhood in affective space

In contemporary culture of Empire and its ‘cult of the self’, to be a young person means to be recognized, and the display of the self is read as a display of value. However, working-class girls who are economically oppressed, marked by a history of racialization, colonization, and stigmatization are assigned no value, thus remaining unrecognized. In this article, I explore the affective economies circulating for female youth who are navigating both marginal social conditions and experiences of long-standing exclusion in urban Canada. This article draws from a two-year long critical and visual ethnography conducted at a drop-in social service center for youth and the adjacent neighborhoods, where I explored the everyday gendered youth culture of a group of Canadian, working-class girls who are marked as ‘a problem’. Here I uncover the role of affect in working-class girls’ attempts to be recognized in various aspects of their everyday life. I also discuss how affective economies operate as the present expression of the girls’ collective histories to reveal the structures in place that produce the abject girl.     

Drinking patterns, problems, and motivations among collegiate bisexual women

OBJECTIVE AND PARTICIPANTS: The authors compared the drinking behaviors, motivations, and problems of collegiate bisexual women with those of heterosexual women (N = 2,788; n = 86 bisexual women). METHODS: Data came from the 2003 Student Life Survey, a random population-based survey at a large midwestern university. The authors explored the hypothesis that bisexual women would be more likely than heterosexual women to report drinking motivations related to stress and coping as a result of sexual identity stigma. RESULTS: They found that bisexual women drank significantly less than did heterosexual women. There were few differences between the 2 groups in drinking motivations and problems. Bisexual women reported a comparable number of problems related to their drinking but were significantly more likely to report contemplating suicide after drinking than were heterosexual women. CONCLUSIONS: More research is needed to understand the finding that despite lower levels of alcohol consumption, bisexual women reported a comparable number of drinking problems. College health educators and health care providers need to be aware of findings related to heightened suicidal risk among bisexual women.     

The importance of job training to job satisfaction of older workers

If job training has positive impacts on worker satisfaction, then job training can have desirable consequences for an organization that result both directly through its effects on productivity and indirectly through its effects on job satisfaction. Furthermore, the aging of the workforce implies that older workers will become increasingly important to firms and to the economy. This study, therefore, seeks to examine the relationship between job training and job satisfaction, focusing in particular on U.S. workers born in 1964 or earlier. The results of ordered logit regression analysis indicate that availability and quality of training received directly affect job satisfaction.     

A longitudinal examination of the membership patterns of minorities and women in referral unions

In an examination of the membership patterns of minorities and women in building and nonbuilding trade referral unions between 1969 and 1979, results reveal that variations in referral union membership can be substantially accounted for by race and sex. Longitudinally, no meaningful changes in the racial composition of referral unions exist, while the sexual composition within building and nonbuilding trade union categories change significantly over time. More importantly, however, male / female representation patterns across both referral union categories over the ten-year period remain fairly constant relative to one another.