Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
620
result(s) for
"Pugh, Allison J."
Sort by:
Families Across the Income Spectrum: A Decade in Review
During the past decade, scholars continued to focus on how larger economic trends impacted families across the income spectrum. From income and wealth inequality to economic insecurity, the gaps between the haves and the have nots remained, and some widened during this period. The authors' comprehensive review found the following three major takeaways: first, the biggest economic divides run through families with children; second, low‐income families face concentrated disadvantage marked by insecurity and precarity; and third, inequality and insecurity shaped the “dynamism” of family life, including how families respond culturally and emotionally to economic changes, and how these responses unfold over time. They examine active areas of research, including parenting trends and the transition to adulthood. They also document a new scholarly emphasis on uncertainty and instability along with the forces that exacerbate or mitigate them, such as job quality, economic volatility, wealth, and incarceration. Research during the past decade focused on the experience and consequences of dynamism, reflecting not only the reality that families evolve but also that they face continual change in their economic, social, and political contexts. The authors highlight research investigating how families “do dynamism,” work that looks over time or offers in‐depth examinations of how families adapt to and cope with dynamism every day. This research reveals that inequality and insecurity are not only matters of levels and gaps but also ongoing matters of meaning‐making, identity, and feeling. The authors conclude by highlighting some strengths and weaknesses of these research streams and pointing out new avenues for future scholarship.
Journal Article
Longing and belonging
Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children \"feeling normal\". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong.
eBook
What good are interviews for thinking about culture? Demystifying interpretive analysis
This article evaluates the claims of a small but active group of culture scholars who have used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege important methodological implications for research in culture. These scholars, whom I dub ‘cognitive culturalists’, have dismissed the utility of in-depth interviewing to access the visceral, causally powerful level of ‘practical consciousness’. I argue these scholars are misguided in their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access people's after-the-fact rationalizations), and their vision of a solution (culture scholars need to access the ‘snap judgments’ that map onto the subterranean level of practical consciousness). I contend these flaws are tied to a limited understanding of the kind of information available in interviews, particularly the in-depth interview subjected to interpretive analysis. Using data from a recent book project on commitment, I elaborate on four kinds of information harbored in interviews: the honorable, the schematic, the visceral and meta-feelings. I rely on these forms of data to argue for scholars to expect, and to use analytically – rather than strive to ‘solve’ theoretically – the contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince. Furthermore, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows researchers access to an emotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation.
Journal Article
The theoretical costs of ignoring childhood: rethinking independence, insecurity, and inequality
Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in \"the social studies of childhood,\" sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology's relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars—who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field—and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline—about independence, insecurity, and inequality—I argue that children's perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children's perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory.
Journal Article
The Paradox of Constrained Well-being
With some exceptions, children’s lives in the United States and other developed nations have become more intensely surveilled over the last 30 years, thanks to the intensification of parenting, the spread of surveillance technology in schools, and increased restrictions upon children’s use of public space. Yet childhood scholars argue that children’s autonomy and self-efficacy are important not just as basic human rights, but also because they help children improve coping skills, learn better, and, and become trusting and trustworthy. Existing scholarship, then, might predict that trends of heightened surveillance negatively impact children’s well-being. Instead, contemporary children are doing better, as measures of abuse and assault, physical health, educational achievement, and other outcomes attest. Given childhood studies scholarship, how do we understand children’s decreasing autonomy and increasing well-being? We call this puzzle the “paradox of constrained well-being.” We explore four possible explanations: stratification of childhood, safe bondage/risky freedom, mental-health-as-SOS-signal, and mental-health-as-harbinger. Presenting evidence, we evaluate the capacity of each to explain the paradox of constrained well-being. We conclude by suggesting all four have considerable purchase, and that our penchant for easily measurable and reportable metrics blinds us to the costs of constraints on children’s agency, liberty, mental health, and equity.
Journal Article
The divining rod of talk: Emotions, contradictions and the limits of research
All this work generates plenty of payoff for the kinds of questions cultural sociology has long considered important - for example, how do working-class men 'draw the lines between the worthy and the less worthy' (Lamont, 2000, p. 4); how do competing cultural schemas limit and shape the choices of women executives (Blair-Loy, 2003); how do 20-something women navigate the 'paradox of sexual freedom' (Bell, 2013) - but I think there is also some untapped value here for the CCs, even starting from the kinds of questions they like to ask. [...]if, as many culture scholars agree, people both bring culture with them and meet it where they are, then perhaps we should be focusing on what happens in the ensuing collision, rather than making universalizing claims about the importance of one or the other.
Journal Article
Selling Compromise: Toys, Motherhood, and the Cultural Deal
The turbulent social conflict over what counts as good-enough mothering and the greedy institution of work leaves many women trapped in what Joan Williams called the gender system of domesticity. Like self-help books, advertisements can lead mothers toward a culturally sanctioned compromise. This article looks at the \"cultural deals\" being offered for mothers by toy catalogs. The author examined the marketing of more than 3,500 toys in 11 catalogs from the 2000-2001 holiday season. She found that the catalogs presented toys as solutions that would allow mothers to be good mothers without having to physically be there, even as the advertising copy evoked images of companionship and togetherness. Catalogs also emphasized skill building over fun, defined only certain skills as skills in the first place, and dismissed nurturing as feelings at best worth of expression and not of practice. The author argues that the toys promise to perpetuate for the children the same contradictions the catalogs purport to solve for their mothers.
Journal Article
