The Reproductive Context of Cohabitation in the United States: Recent Change and Variation in Contraceptive Use

Drawing on data from 2 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 11,065), the current research addressed 2 overarching questions about the reproductive context of cohabitation in the United States. First, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabitors change during the last 2 decades of the 20th century? Second, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabiting women tend to vary by education or race/ethnicity? Results point to a growing resemblance between never‐married cohabiting women and those in first marriages in the likelihood of using a “very effective” contraceptive method and suggest that cohabitation is most “marriage like” with respect to reproductive behavior among the least educated.     

The Effects of Marital Culture and Social Structure on Marital Aspirations and Attitudes in “Fragile Families”

This research brings together insights from the fields of sociology and social work, providing an integrated study of marriage as a cultural and structural institution. The goals of the study are twofold: first, to empirically assess the predictive power of cultural versus structural elements of marital aspirations and attitudes among “fragile families”; second, to determine if the aforementioned relationship and outcomes differ by immigrant status. The results offer more support for the role of structure than the function of culture, suggesting that rather than demonizing disadvantaged families for having “defective” cultural values, policy planners and human service providers should recognize the importance of educational attainment and economic productivity in fragile families. Even populations most disposed to hold more “traditional” views of marriage and family life are constrained by the realities of structural disadvantage.     

“Anarchy all over Baščaršija”: Yugoslavia's new socialist culture and the New Primitives poetics of the local

The paper analyses Sarajevo's music movement of New Primitives and its “poetics of the local” as a struggle against the cultural hypocrisy of Yugoslavia's “new socialist culture” and its privileging of “external‐cosmopolitan” as apotheosis of cultured refinement and sophistication while denigrating “local‐parochial” as epitome of uncultured primitiveness. I argue that the movement's praxis is best understood as a call to reject externally‐imposed frames of reference as the basis for self‐understanding, and to embrace a socio‐cultural awareness that the only way to be in the world is to be authentically “primitive”– i.e. to exist as a distinct and autochthon socio‐cultural self.     

“I Try Not to Depend on Anyone but Me”: Welfare‐Reliant Women's Perspectives on Self‐Sufficiency,Work, and Marriage*

Welfare reformers sought to reduce “dependency,” or reliance on state‐supported cash benefits and deployed a discourse of “self‐sufficiency” to promote the legitimacy of efforts to remove welfare recipients from publicly funded cash assistance through either wage labor or marriage. We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women to examine what self‐sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self‐sufficient. Grounded theory analysis revealed that for these women, self‐sufficiency means formal independence from both the state (i.e., Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and men (i.e., marriage). Although they value marriage as an institution and would ideally marry, they do not consider marriage to be a likely route to self‐sufficiency given the pool of men available to them. Rather, they embrace their own market‐based wage labor as the means by which they can attain some measure of independence. Taking our lead from the women in this study, we challenge the emphasis on marriage in current welfare policy. We argue that employment training that results in better jobs for women and men and work supports that make low‐wage work pay are clearly the appropriate direction for policy aimed at the welfare‐reliant and working poor.     

HIV Prevention and Social Desirability: Husband–Wife Discrepancies in Reports of Condom Use

Greater use of condoms within marriage would help limit the spread of HIV in sub‐Saharan Africa. Using data from the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP), the authors examined the influence that the fidelity norm and the traditional association between marriage and reproduction have on condom use with a spouse. The sample included 749 married couples. The authors used latent class analysis to estimate a “true,” or latent measure of condom use by couples based on the individual reports of husbands and wives and to explore the reasons why individuals tend to misreport their use of condoms. They found that married couples with more children were more likely to use condoms and that having been informed by experts about AIDS prevention at home induced men and women to overreport condom use within marriage in a survey but may not necessarily increase the extent to which condoms are used.     

Fashion as consumer entrepreneurship: Emergent risk culture,social network markets,and the launch of Vogue in China

China has a reputation as an economy based on utility: the large‐scale manufacture of low‐priced goods. But useful values like functionality, fitness for purpose and efficiency are only part of the story. More important are what Veblen called “honorific” values, arguably the driving force of development, change and value in any economy. To understand the Chinese economy therefore, it is not sufficient to point to its utilitarian aspect. Honorific status‐competition is a more fundamental driver than utilitarian cost‐competition. We argue that “social network markets” are the expression of these honorific values, relationships and connections that structure and coordinate individual choices. This paper explores how such markets are developing in China in the area of fashion and fashion media. These, we argue, are an expression of “risk culture” for high‐end entrepreneurial consumers and producers alike, providing a stimulus to dynamic innovation in the arena of personal taste and comportment, as part of an international cultural system based on constant change. We examine the launch of Vogue China in 2005, and China's reception as a fashion player among the international editions of Vogue, as an expression of a “decisive moment” in the integration of China into an international social network market based on honorific values.     

Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop‐Motion Animation Programmes For Young Children

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self‐understanding, self‐examination and “self‐work”, and through which the “self qua self” is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as “excellence”, “total quality”, “performance”, “knowledge”, “play at work” and “wellness” in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of “human resourcefulness” as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management’s wider historical–cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term “derecognition of finitude”. It is the modern synthesis — with the “self” at the centre of its system of values — that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use “work” to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self‐expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self‐expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity.     

The New Normal1

The Great Recession has caused many Americans to reevaluate their consumption‐rich way of life. In response to the shrinking economy, they have spent less, saved more, and simplified their lives. This essay asks whether people will seek a return to their prerecession lifestyles—in particular a return to making the acquisition and consumption of consumer goods a major source of meaning and contentment—as soon as their economic condition allows or whether they will make their more austere lives their “new normal.” It evaluates existing research on contentment and suggests that if instead of choosing to return to their “old normal,” Americans learn to derive satisfaction from nonconsumerist sources, in particular social relations and transcendental activities (i.e., religious, contemplative, and cultural activities), they may find the new normal quite acceptable.     

Going the Distance: Individualism and Interdependence in the Commuter Marriage

Commuter spouses—dual‐income couples who live apart for their professional careers—have been the subject of relatively little scholarly research. Another, largely theoretical body of scholarship has explored the fundamental cultural tension generated by the simultaneous embracing of personal autonomy and the institution of marriage in the United States, although few scholars have explicitly sought to understand how these seemingly conflicting cultural goals play out “on the ground.” Drawing on data from in‐depth interviews (N = 97), the analysis finds that commuter couples indeed engaged in two discourses about their marriages that operated in tension. Although they positioned themselves as highly individualistic, interdependence was a key theme in their responses as well. Surprisingly, a substantial minority of respondents indicated that their noncohabitation enhanced their interdependence. These results not only shed light on this understudied population but also broaden our understanding of the evolving cultural meaning of marriage.     

Serial Cohabitation and the Marital Life Course

Using cohort data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this paper tracks the experiences of serial cohabitors. Results indicate that only a minority of cohabiting women (about 15% – 20%) were involved in multiple cohabitations. Serial cohabitations were overrepresented among economically disadvantaged groups, especially those with low income and education. They also were less likely than single‐instance cohabiting unions to end in marriage rather than dissolve. If serial cohabitors married, divorce rates were very high — more than twice as high as for women who cohabited only with their eventual husbands. The results suggest the need to balance the government’s current preoccupation with marriage promotion with greater support of “at risk” unions that marriage promotion initiatives have helped create.     

Toward a Radical Model of Social Work in Rural Communities

“Rural” areas as distinct from “urban” continue to be defined by greater personal interactions and less emphasis on formal systems of support. This reality rests in contradiction to the overwhelming majority of social work scholarship and theory development which takes place in an urban context. As such the present-day act of being a “social worker” in a rural community can, in many ways, feel like a bad fit, back-applying the model of an urban generalist into an environment whose organic community ties the social work model itself was originally designed to substitute for. In recognition of this, it is necessary to develop a “combined” model of practice for social work with rural communities and peoples. The fundamental distinction to be made is that rural social work, in its most radical form, is less concerned with adapting persons to the Gesellschaft than it is with strengthening the capacity of the Gemeinschaft to provide the kind of support capacity it historically has, taking into account changes and challenges resulting from factors such as globalization, urban sprawl, and cultural change.     

Japanese Education in an Era of Internationalization: A Case Study of an Emerging Multicultural Coexistence Model

Abstract: Responding to the pressure of internal internationalization, some local communities and schools in Japan started to generate and practice a new philosophy known as “multicultural coexistence” (tabunka kyousei). Based on a long‐term ethnographic research in one of the most progressive multicultural communities and elementary schools in Japan, this paper elucidates the shape of an emerging “multicultural coexistence” education model in Japan and provides some implications for its further development. By focusing on returnee and newcomer students enrolled, the paper argues the transformation of school culture, which will be delineated as an interaction among different agencies at the school: “the margin”, “the top”, “the outside” and “the inner core”. From these ethnographic findings, the paper draws five main features of the emerging model—three that are positive and two that are potentially problematic:

• 1 community‐based school reform movement,
• 2 teachers as decision makers, learners, and cooperators,
• 3 students’ knowledge and experience as a shared resource,
• 4 country‐oriented approach in difference/similarity framework,
• 5 treating all differences equally same.

Referring to the critiques of multicultural education in the United States of America, the discussion suggests that the issue of social justice should be addressed more in the model by highlighting the issue of ethnicity in Japanese society. Changing teachers’ attitudes toward such direction is vital and the paper proposes that coherent set of institutional changes, which centre around social justice, are necessary to raise teachers motivation.     

“Behind Every Great Man…”: The Male Marriage Wage Premium Examined Qualitatively

Studies across diverse national contexts reliably show that married men earn more than unmarried men, but the mechanisms responsible for this are still disputed. This article explores the male marriage wage premium from a new perspective, using longitudinal qualitative data from Russia (N = 94). Qualitative research is particularly suited to identifying underlying processes and, by analyzing men's accounts of the influence of their marital trajectories on their work, the authors were able to reexamine existing hypotheses and develop new ones. They propose 4 mechanisms that they hypothesize can influence men's work motivation and performance: premarital planning, 2 distinct “breadwinner” effects using expectancy and self determination theory, and monitoring by wives. They integrate these mechanisms within gender theory, arguing that the treatment aspect of the male marriage wage premium is an outcome of the “coproduction” of masculinity within marriage. Their recontextualization of existing theory also enables them to reveal weaknesses in the specialization hypothesis.     

Chuck and Pierre at the Welfare Office1

After an ethnographic vignette that encapsulates the typical trajectory of an applicant to welfare benefits observed during a year of collaborative fieldwork, this brief essay will put to work Tilly’s notion of “invisible elbow” and Bourdieu’s understanding of waiting as a strategy of power in order to clarify the cultural dynamics of a welfare waiting room in the age of neoliberalism.     

A postmodern theory of general economy: The contribution of georges bataille

One of the most important views concerning the post-industrial society is the return of the marketplace as the central economic institution. Although postmodernism has been viewed as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” the work of Georges Bataille (1879–1962) sheds light on the idea of postmodern business in terms of a cultural shift concerning the motive of business venturing. While his contributions to political economy and business ethics still remain unknown to many of the advocates of postmodern business in the United States, Canada and Europe, Bataille formulated “a Copernican transformation” of capitalism, changing the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of “general economy.”     

Rethinking Families and Community: The Color,Class, and Centrality of Extended Kin Ties1

Although a focus on marriage and the nuclear family characterizes much sociological research and social commentary, this article suggests that this focus ignores the familial experiences of many Americans, particularly those on the lower end of the economic spectrum for whom extended kin are central. African Americans and Latinos/as are more involved with kin than whites, but class trumps race in this regard: African Americans, Latinos/as, and whites with fewer economic resources rely more on extended kin than do those more affluent. The emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family may actually promulgate a vision of family life that dismisses the very social resources and community ties that are critical to the survival strategies of those in need. In contrast to those who have argued that marriage is the foundation of the community or even, in that overused phrase, the “basic unit of society,” this article suggests that marriage actually detracts from social ties to broader communities just as an emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family, to the exclusion of the extended family, distorts and reduces the power and reach of social policy.     

Genealogy of tabunka kyōsei: A Critical Analysis of the Reformation of the Multicultural Co-living Discourse in Japan

The Japanese government started to accept semi-skilled foreign workers officially under the newly established tokutei ginō status in 2019, and national policies for supporting foreign residents are gradually being developed. However, it is unclear how the principles of tabunka kyōsei (multicultural coexistence or co-living), the official slogan for supporting foreign residents since the mid-2000s, have changed as a result of recent policy trends. In this article, I examine the transformation of logics for legitimizing policies for foreign residents using discourse analysis of the official government documents on tabunka kyōsei. Previous critical studies have revealed that tabunka kyōsei is based on the logic of a binary opposition between “Japanese” and “foreigners”. This was combined with the neoliberal logic of “supports for self-reliance”, a paternalism that sees foreigners as being in need of support if they can live "just as" Japanese. This paternalism has prevented the development of recognizing the human rights and cultural differences of foreign residents as de facto immigrants. In addition, a logic has explicitly emerged in the tabunka kyōsei discourse at the end of the 2010s that sees foreigners as a threat to national security and that their acceptance should be strictly governed by the border control policy and socially controlled from the viewpoint of national interests. To deal with this situation, tabunka kyōsei must be recreated as a principle for recognizing foreign residents as immigrants and guaranteeing their human rights and cultural differences.     

Understanding Sheng Nu (“Leftover Women”): the Phenomenon of Late Marriage among Chinese Professional Women

In the past few decades, there has been a rise in the number of single, unmarried Chinese professional women, which is known as the sheng nu or “leftover women” phenomenon. Through an interactionist grounded theory method, this study has located the interactional constraints faced by 50 single Chinese professional women that were issued by their male romantic partners and parents, respectively. “Discriminatory” and “controlling” gendered constraints issued by the women's male suitors and partners reflected the persistence of the Chinese patriarchal structure, and this was found to be the leading cause of the women being “leftover” in the marriage market. Parents' traditional views continued to exert strong influences on the women's marital choices, but this was seen to conflict with their more “modern” views toward advocating and supporting the women's strong economic achievements. The four different types of Chinese professional women that were constructed based on their different partner choice strategies not only gave rise to an in‐depth and nuanced understanding of the sheng nu phenomenon in China, but could also be generalized toward understanding the marital choices of single professional women in other patriarchal societies who faced similar dilemmas in reconciling interactional constraints imposed by men and parents alike.     

Age at Coresidence,Premarital Cohabitation,and Marriage Dissolution: 1985–2009

Does the age at which premarital cohabitors moved in together explain why they have been found to have an increased risk of marital dissolution? Explanations for the increased risk of marriage dissolution among those who marry young center on marital role preparation; for premarital cohabitors, many, if not most, of these roles began at the onset of cohabitation, not marriage. Analyses of the 1995, 2002, and 2006–2010 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 7,037) revealed that age at coresidence explained a substantial portion of the higher marital dissolution risk of premarital cohabitors. In comparisons standardized by age at coresidence, the difference in risk of marital dissolution between premarital cohabitors and those who married without prior cohabitation (“direct marriers”) was much smaller than in comparisons standardized by age at marriage, and in some models this difference was not significant. Selection into direct marriage and premarital cohabitation was also examined.     

Sex Ratio Effects on Marital Formation and Dissolution, 1980–2000

Although marriage market characteristics are often used to explain in–out marriage transitions, Guttentag and Secord's sex ratio thesis provides a unique theoretical framework by which to elucidate marriage and divorce. The theory emphasizes the availability of “opposite” sex partners as an important factor, but hypothesized outcomes assume a gendered marriage market whereby males are more socioeconomically powerful than females. Using geographically standardized census tract data (N = 65,443), I examine the theory empirically across three decennial time points. After establishing that males, on average, hold a disproportionate amount of socioeconomic power, I conduct cross‐sectional regression analyses of marriage and divorce from 1980 to 2000. Results partially support the theory. While female marriage is consistently related to sex ratios as expected, sex ratios influence male marriage as expected only in some time periods and female and male divorce do not operate as expected in any time point. The findings imply that marriage entry and dissolution have distinctive causal mechanisms, suggesting the need for further theorization and research.