Dual-earner parents’ work-family time: the effects of atypical work patterns and non-parental childcare

Finding time to both earn money and raise children is demanding. Within the constraints and opportunities of their employment and social policies affecting work and family, parents seeking to manage their time may use a number of strategies. For example, they can outsource childcare or adopt atypical work patterns: non-standard work schedules, self employment, working from home. In this paper we compare the effects of these measures on the household time use and gender division of labour of dual-earner couples with children, using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey, 2006 (n?=?772 couples). We find that these strategies do help households manage their work and family time. However, this is almost exclusively a result of women changing their time use. Such measures generally enable mothers, not fathers, to adjust paid work around family commitments, and offer little amelioration of gendered divisions of labour. This reinforces normative gender-role expectations and is probably a result of institutional constraints, including sparse social policy and workplace support for mothers?? full-time employment and for fathers?? involvement in childcare.     

Diversion From the Juvenile Justice System: Observations of a Teen Court Program

Teen courts are a multidisciplinary intervention used to divert youth with minor offenses from the juvenile justice system. Observations were conducted at 13 hearings in an urban jurisdiction, with information gathered about the youth respondent, peer jurors, and adult volunteers. Peer jurors engaged in the majority of communication with the respondent during hearings. Adult volunteers, often members of the legal or judicial community, fulfilled supporting functions. Findings suggest that a youth-oriented process with support from adult volunteers can result in active participation from youth, and that teen courts provide opportunities for community involvement.     

Non-parental childcare,time pressure and the gendered division of paid work,domestic work and parental childcare

What impact does out-sourcing childcare have on the time parents spend on paid work, domestic work and childcare, and how they share these tasks between themselves? Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) 2006 we investigate the effects of formal and informal non-parental childcare on the time use of couples with children aged 0–4 years (N=348). We examine associations between non-parental care and (1) couples' combined time in paid work, domestic work and childcare, (2) parents' time separately by gender in paid work, domestic work and childcare (subdivided by activity type) and (3) parents' self-reported time pressure. Total workloads (the sum of paid work, domestic work and childcare) are neither higher nor lower when non-parental care is used, either for households combined or for each gender separately. The way time is spent, and how activities are divided by gender does differ, however. For mothers the use of any non-parental care and more hours in formal care is associated with more paid work hours, less childcare time and higher self-reported time pressure. Fathers' time is more constant, but they report higher subjective time pressure with increasing hours of formal non-parental care.     

Socially disadvantaged women's views of barriers to feeling safe to engage in decision-making in maternity care

BackgroundAlthough midwifery literature suggests that woman-centred care can improve the birthing experiences of women and birth outcomes for women and babies, recent research has identified challenges in supporting socially disadvantaged women to engage in decision-making regarding care options in order to attain a sense of control within their maternity care encounters.ObjectiveThe objective of this paper is to provide an understanding of the issues that affect the socially disadvantaged woman's ability to actively engage in decision-making processes relevant to her care.Research designThe qualitative approach known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to gain an understanding of maternity care encounters as experienced by each of the following cohorts: socially disadvantaged women, registered midwives and student midwives. This paper focuses specifically on data from participating socially disadvantaged women that relate to the elements of woman-centred care-choice and control and their understandings of capacity to engage in their maternity care encounters.FindingsSocially disadvantaged women participants did not feel safe to engage in discussions regarding choice or to seek control within their maternity care encounters. Situations such as inadequate contextualised information, perceived risks in not conforming to routine procedures, and the actions and reactions of midwives when these women did seek choice or control resulted in a silent compliance. This response was interpreted as a consequence of women's decisions to accept responsibility for their baby's wellbeing by delegating health care decision-making to the health care professional.ConclusionThis research found that socially disadvantaged women want to engage in their care. However without adequate information and facilitation of choice by midwives, they believe they are outsiders to the maternity care culture and decision-making processes. Consequently, they delegate responsibility for maternity care choices to those who do belong; midwives. These findings suggest that midwives need to better communicate a valuing of the woman's participation in decision-making processes and to work with women so they do have a sense of belonging within the maternity care environment. Midwives need to ensure that socially disadvantaged women do feel safe about having a voice regarding their choices and find ways to give them a sense of control within their maternity care encounters.     

Difficulties in Shifting from Individualistic to Socio-political Policy Regarding Disability in Canada

An individualistic conception of disability has been replaced by a socio-political definition. The socio-political model implies that disability stems from the failure of the social environment to adjust to the needs of people with disabilities rather than from the inability of disabled individuals to adapt to societal demands. This paper will examine the extent to which Canadian policies have changed to embrace this new definition. There has been some progress in policies related to shelter, transportation and recreation. However, policies related to income and employment are still individualistic in nature because policy change in these areas requires a major shift in governmental approach to unemployment and fundamental reform of the Social Assistance system. In a period of high unemployment, people with disabilities are viewed as surplus labour, and the Canadian government has found that high unemployment is politically tolerable. Obstacles to an increase in income support include a strong work ethic, the philosophy that social assistance benefits should be less than could be earned in the work-force, and the private insurance and litigation industries which benefit from the current income system. Other barriers to change are the lack of power of disabled groups and the dominance of professionals.     

Imagining community and hoping for recognition: Bicentennial celebrations in 1976 and 1988

Bicentennial celebrations were held in the United States in 1976 and in Australia in 1988. Here, I compare talk about national identity by organizers of bicentennials in each country. The commemorations were similarly designed to enact unity while attempting to avoid apathy and dissension. They show a common repertoire of cultural claims which help address the shared constraints of their cultural production. There were also differences in the way different sorts of claims were developed. For Australians, international recognition was much more important than for Americans; for the Americans, founding moment history was much more important than for the Australians. Americans treated political values as foundational in imagined community, and the land had low salience; the reverse was true for the Australians. But both sets of organizers stressed diversity and shared spectacle to recognize, coopt, and imaginatively transcend salient cultural and political difference. The analysis suggests that there is an internationally available repertoire of claims about national identity which includes themes of international recognition, history, abstractly inclusive characteristics like political values or the land, and claims about diversity and spectacle.     

Texts,Bodies, and the Memory of Bloody Sunday

We examine here recent arguments that embodied experience is an important site of collective memory, and related challenges to the standard emphasis on discourse and symbols in collective memory research. We argue that although theories of embodied memory offer new insights, they are limited by (1) an overdrawn distinction between embodied memory and textual memory that neglects the complex relations between the two, (2) an overemphasis on ritual performance at the expense of collective conversation, (3) an oversimplified view of performativity, and (4) an underestimation of the ambiguity in embodied performance. Theories of embodied collective memory should be narrowed and specified with focused comparisons examining the influence of embodied experience in the formation of collective identities, in conflicts over collective memories, and in the persistence and malleability of memories across generations. We illustrate our argument throughout with examples drawn from the collective memory of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972.     

Culture’s Coherence: How the Trees Compose the Woods

In cultural sociology, the concept of culture refers to processes and products of meaning-making. This concept sustains coherence while also encompassing empirical complexity and theoretical difference. Much of the variety in the way cultural sociologists talk about culture is simply attributable to inconsequential terminological difference, and the remainder is attributable to differences of empirical angle and theoretical emphasis within the field which are encompassed by this core idea. Cultural sociologists understand meaning as transcending biology, irreducible to social structure, and public rather than private. These conceptual boundaries provide a firm foundation for empirical research and guide the development of cultural theory. Further exploration of the concept of “meaning” is better pursued in the analytic philosophy of meaning, but such exploration is unnecessary and potentially counter-productive for cultural sociology.     

Closing the gap between planning and control

Top management responsible for setting objectives, determining organizational purpose and developing appropriate structures are almost always far removed from the harsh realities of implementing plans and subsequent operational control. This paper explores two traditional responses to the problems of planning and control before explaining ways and means for integrating the functions through using the Expectations Approach which appears to offer a bright future for a career in planning and control, and also a constructive aid to the Board wishing to translate strategy into detailed operational programmes. Furthermore, it must be emphasized that in a rapidly changing social, political and industrial relations environment, the integration of planning and control becomes more critical unless planning is to become merely an expression of pious hope rather than a means of achieving the desired future.