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Childhood and Markets : Infants, Parents and the Business of Child Caring
\"This book explores how young children and new families are located in the consumer world of affluent societies. The author assesses the way in which the value of infants and monetary value in markets are realized together, and examines how the meanings of childhood are enacted in the practices, narratives and materialities of contemporary markets. These meanings formulate what is important in the care of young children, creating moralities that impact not only on new parents, but also circumscribe the possibilities for monetary value creation. Three main understandings of early childhood - those of love, protection and purification - and their interrelationships are covered, and illustrated with examples including food, feeding tools, nappies, travel systems and toys. The book concludes by re-examining the relationship between adulthood and the cultural value of young children, and by discussing the implications of the ways markets address young children, also examines the realities of older children in consumer culture. Childhood and Markets will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, childhood studies, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, business studies and marketing.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
What's in a Name: ‘Client’, ‘Patient’, ‘Customer’, ‘Consumer’, ‘Expert by Experience’, ‘Service User’—What's Next?
This article challenges the terms we use to describe the relationship between those who assess and commission services and those who are the recipient of those services. In particular, the article identifies the different terms that have been used in British social work, including ‘client’, ‘customer’, ‘consumer’, ‘service user’ and ‘expert by experience’, highlighting their assumptive worlds and the relationships the terms suggest and signify. Service user (the most popular term at present) is highlighted and critically analysed and found to be increasingly problematic and unable to describe the complexities of the service–recipient relationship. Alternative terms are discussed and found wanting, whilst a possible way forward is suggested to avoid the negative connotations of any one particular term.
Journal Article
Tony Blair, the promotion of the 'active' educational citizen, and middle-class hegemony
Tony Blair's period as Head of the Labour Government from 1997 until 2007 has been heralded as a period of increased parental power and growing choice within education. However, beneath the rhetoric, Blair's legacy has been one of consolidating and re-inforcing previous Conservative policies that stressed parental responsibilities whilst operating with a white middle-class norm. As a result, inequalities between parents have grown under Blair as working-class parents are positioned as failing, and middle-class parents monopolise educational initiatives initially set up to benefit the disadvantaged.
Journal Article
'I Heard It on the Grapevine': 'hot' knowledge and school choice
This paper is one of a number of related pieces which address the issue of parental choice through a careful Straussian analysis of interview data. The focus here is upon the structures and processes underlying the use of grapevine' knowledge, which parents elicit and disseminate in choosing a school. It is argued that this immediate or 'hot' knowledge is of particular importance to many parents and is set over and against the 'cold' formal knowledge produced by schools themsebes or published as examination results or league tables. Grapevine knowledge is socially embedded in networks and localities and is distributed unevenly across and used differently by different social-class groups. The paper concludes by suggesting that the stress and anxiety involved in choice for many parents is a product of unstable cultural values, and the slippery signs systems now surrounding 'school' at a time of increased economic uncertainty.
Journal Article
Adoption Support and the Negotiation of Ambivalence in Family Policy and Children's Services
In this paper ambivalent commitments to parenting and family life by the New Labour government are explored by reference to the example of adoption support. Developments in adoption illuminate contrasting expectations in family policy and children's services more generally. Traditional normative concerns to support family status and parental autonomy are unsettled by contemporary anxieties about child outcomes and social mobility. Impatience with the attitudes and behaviour of parents has led to a 'progressive universalism' in which enhanced parenting services and expectations for all are combined with increasingly insistent and targeted interventions for the particularly needy, reluctant or recalcitrant few. At the same time demands for greater service modernization and professional effectiveness have led government to position parents as (potential) consumers too. The paper discusses these policy and practice tensions and concludes that new spaces are being opened up for the negotiation between parents and professionals about rights and responsibilities in family life and its support.
Journal Article
School choice and competition
In 1993 the UK Economic and Social Research Council funded the Parental and School Choice Interaction (PACSI) Study into the marketisation of education, conducted by the author along with Philip Woods and Ron Glatter of the Open University. The findings from the PACSI study highlighted the localised and complex nature of markets in education and reported the ways in which senior school managers adopted a variety of strategies to respond to the local competitive arena in which they found themselves. In more than ten years since this study the UK Government has changed from Conservative to Labour and policy discourses on choice and competition have been situated alongside those of collaboration and partnership. In this shifting policy landscape the paper utilises analytical tools and findings from the original study to revisit one of the case study areas and examines the market environment in which senior school managers find themselves today. The findings reveal a stronger `parent as consumer' marketing orientation and responsiveness on behalf of schools and an environment in which competition and rivalry has intensified and continues to discursively predominate. (DIPF/Orig.).
Journal Article
Uncertain Aims and Tacit Negotiation: Birth Control Practices in Britain, 1925-50
Evidence from oral history interviews is used to suggest the need to reevaluate our understanding of the dynamics of fertility decisions and behavior in the first half of the twentieth century. Those interviewed stressed their vague and haphazard approach to contraceptive use, in sharp contrast to the dominant depiction in studies of fertility decline that emphasize the degree to which individuals made deliberate and calculated choices about family size based on an assessment of the costs and benefits of childrearing. Details of individual contraceptive strategies elucidate the complexities of birth control behavior: couples, lacking explicit aims for family limitation, adopted diverse methods of birth control, using them for different reasons, at different times, with varying degrees of determination and confidence and frequently with very little direct discussion or planning. Explicit articulation of aims was not a necessary prerequisite of the spread of birth control; accepted gender roles meant that responsibilities and obligations emerged gradually and tacitly. As a result, nevertheless, low fertility was effectively achieved.
Journal Article
The rise and decline of the 'male breadwinner family' in Britain
This paper examines changes in the historical 'compact' around the male breadwinner family (MBWF) in Britain. The rise of the MBWF produced a 'compact' covering the sexual division of labour, the economic support of family members, the distribution of time and the regulation of marriage and parenthood. Its decline has been accompanied by an erosion of each dimension of this compact, which has reduced gender inequalities but produced other problems. The author argues that a new compact is required if solutions to these problems are to be combined with an extension of gender equity. Particular attention is paid to the role of shorter working hours as a component of different social arrangements over time.
Journal Article
Infant Mortality in Victorian Britain: The Mother as Medium
An integrated framework is developed for analysing infant mortality. Mothers' health, fertility, sanitary and housing conditions, female employment levels, food supplies are quantified for a large sample of towns, c. 1860-1905. The relationship between family size, fertility, and infant mortality is analysed. The results suggest that the health of mothers, especially their resistance to disease, played a strong role in the differences in infant mortality across socio-economic groupings and in its decline. The framework developed can account for the large long term trend decline in (non-diarrhoea) infant mortality in textile towns and the modest decline in mining areas, with rural areas coming midway.
Journal Article
NBC NIGHTLY NEWS for September 13, 2022, NBC
The Dow nosediving more than 1000 points, the worst day for stocks in more than two years. Inflation is soaring hotter than expected with 8.3 percent in August. Ukraine's military is pushing on with a stunning counteroffensive that Ukraine says has driven Russian forces for more than 2000 miles of territory. Many thousands paying their respects as Queen Elizabeth's coffin arrived back home to Buckingham Palace.
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