Cohabiting couples: rethinking money in the household at the beginning of the twenty first century

This paper assesses the implications of existing research on the intra‐household economy for current debates about the emergence of new forms of radically democratic intimate relationships in ‘late modern’ or ‘world risk’ society. The different ways in which couples organise money are particularly important in evaluating these debates because as Pahl (1989 , 1997 , 1999 ) argues, money can be seen as a tracer for other aspects of a couples’ lives together, especially the power relationship between them. One of the groups currently thought to be in the vanguard of shifts to new forms of egalitarian and radically democratic intimate relationships are heterosexual cohabiting couples. So far however, there has been little, if any, research on the ways in which cohabiting couples organise money, particularly in Britain. This paper therefore assesses the possible implications of existing research on the intra‐household economy amongst heterosexual couples in the UK and elsewhere, for the ways in which cohabiting couples may possibly be organising household money in Britain today, and what light this sheds on current debates about shifts towards greater equality in new forms of intimate relationships. One of the main questions underlying the discussion concerns the extent to which trends towards individualisation in intimate relationships are coming to be associated with greater sharing and equality in the distribution of financial resources, as Giddens’ (1992 ) thesis would lead us to expect, or whether as Pahl (1999 ) and others ( Jamieson, 1999 ) have suggested, an increasing proportion of couples may now be coming to use individualised or privatised systems of money management which while enhancing individual control over finances, may nevertheless still be associated with the maintenance and reproduction of some very traditional gender inequalities between male and female partners, albeit in a new and apparently impersonal, ‘marketised’ form.     

Intimate relationships and changing patterns of money management at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Drawing on British data from two annual sweeps of the ISSP eight years apart in 1994 and 2002, for modules focusing on 'Family and Changing Gender Roles', this paper examines the extent to which changes in women's labour market participation, changing ideologies/discourses of gender and changing forms of intimate relationships are affecting the ways in which couples organize household money, and the implications of such changes for recent theories of intimate relationships. The analysis indicates that by 2002, the type of relationship respondents had established, together with their social class position, were both independently related to the ways in which they managed money, after controlling for socio-economic and cultural or discursive factors. Our findings also provide a degree of support for the thesis of a partial decline in the male breadwinner model of gender, as indicated by small declines in the use of the relatively inegalitarian female whole wage and housekeeping allowance systems which were most likely to be used by married couples and cohabiting fathers, expressing relatively traditional ideologies/discourses of breadwinning - and a slight increase in the use of the partial pool, which was most likely to be used by childless cohabiting couples in which male partners expressed less traditional ideologies of breadwinning and women were in middle-class jobs with incomes high enough to facilitate partially separate finances. We also suggest, however, that in so far as cohabiting couples earning different amounts define equality as contributing equally to household expenditure, it is possible that rather than being associated with shifts to greater equality in access to money for personal spending and saving, the partial pool may be associated with marked inequalities, because it may enable gender inequalities generated in the labour market to be more directly transposed into inequalities within households, despite the decline of traditional discourses of male breadwinning and the increasing importance of egalitarian ideologies of co-provisioning.     

God,family and money: Pacific people and gambling in New Zealand

Pacific people living in New Zealand are less likely to participate in gambling activities than the general population but those who do gamble are at greater risk of being problem gamblers. This difference remains when socio-economic variables are controlled for. To date, little research has investigated the reasons underlying these differences. The present exploratory study investigated Pacific people's thoughts about gambling through a series of focus groups involving 97 participants, including Pacific gamblers, non-gamblers, gambling venue workers, gambling treatment providers and church leaders. The results suggest that some Pacific people draw a distinction between ‘community’ and ‘commercial’ types of gambling, that gambling is understood by some to be an easy way in which to make money, and also that familial and church obligations can motivate gambling behaviour. These findings inform possible unique features of gambling in Pacific cultures in New Zealand and internationally. Moreover, together with the research approach the results inform further research on Pacific peoples' relationship with gambling, as well as those of other cultural groups.     

The financial practices and perceptions behind separate systems of household financial management

Qualitative research in the UK has revealed a diversity of financial arrangements underlying separate systems of household financial management. One factor, identified in previous work, is perceived ownership of money, with financial practices differing according to whether couples have distinct, blurred or shared ownership perceptions. The present work aims to build on and extend this research, using data from an online survey study with 190 cohabitants in the UK. The findings reveal that ownership perceptions transcend separate money management categories, and can be a significant predictor of the type of contribution cohabitants make towards joint household expenses.     

Shared or separate? Money management and changing norms of gender equality among Norwegian couples

Over the last generation the male breadwinner/housewife family has gradually become outdated as the dominant normative model for family households. The new ideal has become the adult worker family model, where gender equality defined as economic independence and sharing of household work and childcare between spouses/partners is the norm. The Nordic countries are the frontrunners of this development, and the Nordic welfare model is assumed to be well adapted to this new ideal. However, this ideal does not hold clear norms of how money should be managed and shared in family households, and Nordic families have to establish their own systems. Norwegian survey data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 1994 and 2002 are used to analyse patterns of money management in family households. Our study indicates that, even if sharing of economic resources and responsibility remains the most common pattern, a greater number of families are choosing separate and independent systems of financial allocation. This increase in divided systems of money management may lead to new gender inequalities because of the lack of recognition of the value of domestic labour and family care as part of the common provision.     

Gender Equality and Corporate Governance: Policy Strategies in Norway and New Zealand

Advancing gender equality in the labour market continues to be a policy objective in many OECD countries. Wide national variations are evident in strategies and accomplishments towards improving gender equality at all levels of the labour market, including senior management and corporate governance roles. This article compares policy strategies in Norway and New Zealand directed towards achieving gender equality in the governance of corporate institutions. A principal feature of the New Zealand strategy has been a soft regulation approach in the form of advocacy and encouragement of equal employment opportunity policies, awareness‐raising and benchmarking. For Norway the use of legislation in the form of quotas and affirmative action programmes has been the predominant strategy. Using empirical data collected in 2004–2005 on women's perceptions and experiences of corporate governance participation, this article critically examines these different policy strategies.     

Global networks of money and information at the crossroads: Correspondent banking and SWIFT

This article explores how transaction information is a fundamental element enabling and fostering global flows of money. Financial systems, constructed around account-based money, require infrastructure, which is separated into two parts: messaging and settlement, performed via trusted agents. This separation has allowed the geographical expansion of banking, and to this day constitutes a key architecture of increasingly global networks of money. Focusing on the correspondent banking system and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, this article demonstrates the workings of this infrastructure in cross-border payments and in enacting economic sanctions. This sociotechnical infrastructure is a crucial yet overlooked area of global banking, which makes global economic and financial activity possible in the first place. Importantly, by analysing the organizational architecture of the global payments system and including the actors and agencies within it, we elucidate the (changing) relationships between data/information, geographies and power, contributing to the formation of a literature that conceptualizes financial infrastructure.     

Ulster Protestants in New Zealand: A Bibliographic Essay

One of the most noticeable aspects of recent studies which examine Irish migration to New Zealand has been the identification of a sizeable contingent of Ulster Protestant settlers within that migrant stream. Their presence has proven to be a complicating factor in how the history of the Irish in New Zealand has been written and has made easy assumptions about the loyalty, identity, politics and ethnicity of that population impossible. This essay surveys the existing literature on New Zealand's Ulster Protestant population across a wide range of subjects while at the same time considering their apparent disappearance as a distinct ethnic grouping in the new world.     

Removing Macho Management: Lessons from the Field of Education

This article examines discourses of management and leadership in the light of gender inequalities in social relations and in educational administration in particular. It is argued that women's viewpoints and critiques of masculinist managerial perspectives are important in debates about alternative models of leadership. Interview data from a recent study of a group of six women working in teaching/managing positions in some primary and secondary schools in New Zealand is used to analyse a leadership style and philosophy which cuts across traditional gendered splits between private and public spheres, emotionality and rationality, teaching and administration. In this holistic approach, emphasis is placed on integrating such dichotomies through affiliation with others and power sharing. The paper concludes that such a management style must be supported and valued for the contribution it can make to improving organizational cultures and enhancing school learning and teaching environments. An original version of this paper was presented at the NZARE 13th National Conference at Knox College, Dunedin, New Zealand on 30 November 1991.     

Equality Management – Towards a Materialist Approach

Attempts to redefine equality initiatives to fit squarely within the enterprise culture serve only to mask an ongoing conceptual confusion in the area of equality management. This theoretical article attempts to show that this conceptual confusion lies within the narrowness of approaches which address labour market inequalities from both an equality of opportunity and an equality of outcome perspective. The inability of these perspectives to satisfactorily address systemic causes of labour market inequalities pulls our attention towards a more materialist approach which may be found (this side of a capitalist/patriarchal society) within an equality of condition frame of reference. This widens the perspective from which equality management can be pursued so that measures to address the differential distribution of resources, rewards, opportunities and treatment in the workplace are informed by all three equalities: opportunity, outcome and conditions. Such a theoretical approach is inevitably limited in that it only provides a framework for addressing those who are in paid employment, i.e. seeks to reform the capitalist/patriarchal system. However, by posing questions of the crucial pillars of such systems notably status, reward and with that power, the ‘long’ and ‘radical’ agendas of the equality project may once again be picked up.     

The unacceptability of money as a gift

In four studies, subjects were asked whether money was an acceptable gift. In the first study, students stated that they would find it less acceptable to give their mothers a cheque than a gift token or a selected present; and that if they had to send a cheque they would spend more than twice as much on it as on the other sorts of gift. The second study confirmed these results on a larger, non-student sample of young adults, and also showed that it made no difference whether a cheque or cash was specified. In the third study, students were asked about the reasons why they would find it unacceptable to give or receive a cheque as a present. The most important reasons focused on the time and effort that ought to be spent on selecting a present, and the possibility that money sent as a gift might be used for mundane purchases. In the final study, mothers of students were asked about the kinds of presents they would find it acceptable to receive: they indicated that a cheque would be less acceptable than a selected present of a gift token, but they did not expect more to be spent on a cheque than on other gifts. Taken together, these results strongly confirm casual impressions that money is unacceptable as a gift in some contexts, implying both that the element of social exchange is crucially important in gift-giving, and that even in modern societies money is not a universally acceptable medium of exchange.     

Sex,gender and money in African teenage conceptions of love in HIV contexts

In much of Africa, teenage sexualities are often understood through the optic of danger, violence and disease without much attention to love within relationship dynamics. There is a strong case to be made for the continued focus on African teenage sexualities within unequal relations of power. However, whilst focusing on the structural factors that expand sexually aggressive masculinities and limit teenage women's sexual agency, the expression of teenage love in the daily battle for power remains neglected. Drawing on an interview study of teenage Africans, aged 16–17 years, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, the paper focuses on the micro-dynamics of love, sex and gender. Teenagers account of love highlights changing discourses and include relationships based on care, negotiation and agency showing potential for equality. Such constructions however sit in tension with teenage women's vulnerability in relation to the sexual economy and money, masculine power and gender hierarchies. Intervention programmes that address teenage sexuality must pay careful attention to how love matters in their conceptualisation of relationships and requires consideration of the social and economic context within which they are located. The challenge is to build on equality, address gender hierarchies and ideologies within relationships which create vulnerability.     

People,land and the struggle for rangatiratanga/autonomy in New Zealand

This article interrogates indigeneity in the context of two New Zealand indigenous discourses, one of them land orientated and the other people orientated. It argues that the former has generally been emphasized over and above the latter, which it examines principally in terms of the struggle for the rangatiratanga (loosely translatable as autonomy) promised to Maori by the British Crown in the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. People-based discourse is seen as key to the resilience of Maoridom and its powerful assertions of agency in recent decades. But to argue in this way is not to discount the land discourse, which in the holistic Maori worldview is conflated with the people discourse and rangatiratanga     

The Effects of Pop-up Harm Minimisation Messages on Electronic Gaming Machine Gambling Behaviour in New Zealand

In New Zealand a simple pop-up message feature that provides gambling session information and forces a break in play is mandatory on all electronic gaming machines in all venues (EGMs). Previous research has demonstrated small effects of more sophisticated pop-up messages tested predominantly in laboratory environments. The present research examined gambler engagement with and views on the New Zealand pop-up messages and on the relationship between pop-up messages and EGM expenditure. A sample of gamblers was recruited at casino and non-casino (pub) EGM venues. Most participants were aware of pop-up messages (57 %) and many saw them often (38 %). Among gamblers who reported seeing pop-up messages, half read the message content, and a quarter believed that pop-up messages helped them control the amount of money they spend on gambling. Participants who reported being likely to stop gambling in response to pop-up messages spent significantly less money on gambling when variables that were independently associated with EGM expenditure were controlled for. A modest harm minimisation effect of the pop-up message feature that has been operating in New Zealand for 5 years was evident. Suggestions for improvement of the harm minimisation potential of the current pop-up message feature are discussed.     

Thinking systemically about fieldwork education—A third way

Abstract

This paper reviews fieldwork education initiatives in a number of Australian States and New Zealand and within the United Kingdom throughout the 1990s. This provides the context for a review of parallel developments of fieldwork education in Western Australia—including the development of a Joint Schools/AASW/Employing Agencies Coordinating Committee, a fieldwork syllabus, two levels of professional supervision training and an enhanced fieldwork assessment manual. As a contrast to the government-driven initiatives in fieldwork education in the UK and the prescribed profession/school of social work-driven requirements in the Australian/New Zealand literature, a community development model of working systemically with multiple stakeholders is presented as a third way in which a multi-layered change initiative is developed, implemented and reviewed. The writer argues for greater attention to core practice tasks and to rigorous assessment processes within fieldwork education, and the active involvement of industry, as essential for educating competent and confident social workers.     

What was Bitcoin,what will it be? The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology

In its first decade, Bitcoin has not proven to be a practical money form for most circumstances, but it has become a staging ground for debate around the cultural role of money in society. This debate is poised between two related but ultimately incompatible techno-economic imaginaries: infrastructural mutualism and digital metallism. Each offers a theory not just of money, but also of relations, identities, and the larger imaginaries we call ‘society’ and ‘the economy’. In particular, they offer distinct visions of what it means to be a ‘peer’ in a peer-to-peer money system, and perhaps, a peer-to-peer society. This article traces the pre-history of Bitcoin, as well as more recent developments, to inquire about its future, as well as the future of money more broadly.     

Perceived risk and the precautionary demand for money

Keynes contended that individuals hold money for fear of being unable to meet unforeseen future cash requirements. This ‘precautionary demand’ for money has long been an accepted part of monetary theory, but has played a subservient role because of our inability to measure an individual's degree of aversion to risk. This study, however, employs a risk taking scale, similar to that developed by Zuckerman, to empirically investigate Keynes's precautionary demand for money. The results are sufficiently encouraging to suggest that this scale might successfully be applied to other economics subfields in which risk plays a role.     

“I’m not a greenie but…”: Environmentality,eco-populism and governance in New Zealand Experiences from the Southland whitebait fishery

The experiences of nascent local institutions in regional resource management issues in New Zealand can help to inform the important analytical projects of considering the impacts of neoliberalism on environmental management as well as the meanings of governance as the new order in rural and natural resource management. This study considers how devolved governance shapes individual subject positions relative to the environment in a neoliberal context, deploying Agrawal's optics of “environmentality” to analyze a case study of the political ecology of the whitebait fishery in Southland, New Zealand. This research demonstrates that the devolution of resource governance in New Zealand has cultivated empowered, ‘accidental environmentalists’ and related environmental subjectivities. The extent and quality of individual involvement in governance influences whitebaiters’ perceptions of environmental change and resource management priorities. At the same time, a strong ‘eco-populist’ conceptualization of resource management infuses the fishers’ environmental subjectivities and potentially constrains the depth and degree of fishers’ opposition to environmental degradation.     

Beyond Bluff oysters? Place identity and ethnicity in a peripheral coastal setting

Studies of culture and place form a long tradition in geography but, within rural studies, less attention has been given to the ways in which contrasting ethnicities intersect with specific places and landscapes. Recently, an increasing number of authors have noted how dominant Anglophone, western, ethnicities (frequently labelled ‘white’) have been privileged in British, Australian and New Zealand settings and this paper engages that literature. We use a detailed case study of place identity in Southern New Zealand to show how a composite appreciation of ethnicity provides a deeper understanding of place identity. As such we demonstrate how place and ethnicity intersect via diverse landscapes, social interaction sites and cultural practices.     

Words speak louder than money

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual interaction. We nest our findings in the standard version of the investment game. Our data provide evidence that while both stand-alone mechanisms enhance trust, a gift performs significantly worse than a message. Moreover, when a gift is combined with sending a message, it can be counterproductive.