Introduction to the Special Issue: Flexibility: families, self and work

Abstract

Welcome to this special thematic issue of the Journal of Sociology, which brings together a cross-national series of contributions to the topic `Flexibility: Families, Self and Work'. The articles in this issue offer a variety of approaches to, and appreciation of, contemporary changes to the boundaries between and within families, paid and unpaid work, labour markets, gendered identities and social policy. The diversity and depth of articles in this issue provide meaningful insights into the nature of the changing relationships in these key social institutions. The articles presented here report research from a number of industrialized countries including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The changing articulation between state policies and family character and forms is explored in a number of articles. From Northern Ireland, the implications of the European Economic Union's agricultural policies, in the context of global economic and technological changes in farming, are explored in terms of women's work on and off farms. This in turn is shown to have clear implications for the masculine identity of farmer husbands, for the gender relationships within farming households, for the mental health of farmers, and for the care of dependent children. Kelly and Shortall's research on farmers' wives who are off-farm breadwinners in Northern Ireland will no doubt resonate with the situation of farming families in many other countries, including Australia. The growth of sole parenthood has been a feature of the demographic change characterizing household and family forms for some decades now. Two contributions deal specifically with the position of sole mothers. Baker and Tippin's article draws on interviews with 120 sole mothers in transition from welfare to work schemes in New Zealand. The article provides important insights into the problems encountered by these women who confront labour markets that are increasingly fragmented, casualized, and offer part-time, low-status and indeed often rigid and constraining workplace practices and environments. The qualitative data presented in this article shed important light on the tensions experienced by these women in terms of maintaining their identity as mothers, indeed as sole parents, and having to comply with the demands of return-to-work policies. There are clear differences between women whose training and experience allow them access to higher status jobs, and those who can only access the least desirable employment options, particularly in their ability to control various aspects, like hours, of their work environment. For all the women interviewed, there was anxiety associated with the need to meet state workfare demands, manage their economic survival and conform to their images of what constitutes a `good mother'. Those best able to manage these conflicting demands were those able to retain flexibility in their work patterns. For many, however, `the tensions sounding the mothering, work and welfare requirements [could] not be reconciled satisfactorily'. The argument that single mother households' welfare depends primarily on mo[hers having paid work is now widely made by policy-makers intent on encouraging single mothers into the paid workforce and containing welfare payments. Waiter's article uses recently collected Australian survey data to compare the effect of paid work on household economic well-being with that of other factors, notably whether or not the mother is partnered. Putting paid to the simplistic idea that having a mother in paid work necessarily improves well-being, Walter shows that the more complete the measure of economic well-being, the less likely it is that a woman's paid employment will help well-being. Indeed, in an echo of one of Baker and Tippin's findings, it appears that, on the most sophisticated measure of well-being, household welfare is improved by mothers working only if they obtain professional/administrative jobs. …