Allison J. Pugh

Windfall Child Rearing Low-Income Care and Consumption

This article reports the findings of an investigation into how low-income families construct childhoods amid the growing marketization of services for children. Based on data from ethnographic work and interviews in low- and middle-income communities in Oakland, California, I found that income instability was as important as income scarcity in influencing how families consumed on behalf of children. For low-income families, the unpredictability of resources gave rise to a set of behaviors and outcomes that I term‘windfall child rearing’. I explore the origins of resource instability for these families and consider the impact of windfall child rearing on children’s lives, including their worldviews, their behavior and their relationships with caregiving adults.

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 fromthe 2000-2001holiday 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.

Stability and transformation in gender, work, and family: insights from the second shift for the next quarter century

Arlie Hochschilds The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home argued that the revolution toward gender equality in the USA has been stalled due to three factors: (1) women continue to do most of the ‘second shift’ – the unpaid work of childcare and housework; (2) insufficient flexibility in the workplace for accommodating family caregiving needs; and (3) a deficit of public sector benefits, such as paid parental leave. Since the books publication in1989, many aspects of the gender structure (how gendered opportunities, barriers, and cultural meanings are socially structured in the USA) remain the same. Yet many aspects have changed. This article looks at areas of stability in the gender structure and areas of transformation in the past quarter century. We then plumb the book for the analytical insights it generates for scholars today. We discuss how deep-seated cultural understandings of gender infuse all levels of analysis: macro-level policies, family and work institutions, and personal experiences of gender, intimacy, and moral commitments. These insights help illuminate paths forward for new research on how new economic developments, including economic insecurity, flexibilization (the increasingly reliance on temporary and contract labor), and the widening social class divide, continue to affect intimacy at home.

The planned obsolescence of other people: Consumer culture and connections in a precarious age

Recent scholars note that the hidden appeal of modern commodification is in its false promise to resolve our ambivalence about relationships and eliminate the anxieties and uncertainties of contemporary connection, care and intimacy. The rise of ‘insecurity culture’ – through the spread of job and relationship insecurity – increases the uncertainties that consumer culture must assuage. This article uses 50 in-depth interviews to explore the ways in which adults manage this uncertainty in relationships at work and with friends in the community through consumer culture. Compared with data presented elsewhere, in which informants use spending to convey care and connection in efforts to resolve the ambivalence of oft-insecure relationships, this paper documents a consumerist ideology that pervades their talk about relationships at work and with friends. I define this ideology by its component parts: choice, authenticity and peoples replaceability. While informants use material consumption to connect, then, the consumerist ideology in their talk frequently serves to dislodge their commitments, working paradoxically to subvert the very relationships they seek to forge.

Sleep in a Sleepless Age

In this paper, I explore the social dimensions of sleep as it relates to high-tech work and its cultural contexts. I discuss the implications of sleep, and its cultural vilification, for the families of high-tech professionals. In particular, I develop the notion of sleep as care, and of women as (still) the de facto care givers, and the ways in which these two persisting social facts interact with sleep’s denigration in the high-tech social world. I consider the emerging trend of what proponents call ‘co-sleeping’ in light of these concepts. My aim here is to develop a working theory of sleep as cultural venue for gendered expressions about autonomy, dependence, care, and need within a context of corporate capitalism in general, and information technology in particular.

Transformationen der Arbeit und das flexible Herz

Seit Arlie Hochschild vor mehr als vierzig Jahren die Diagnose der Emotionsarbeit aufstellte (1983), hat sich die Arbeitsorganisation in reichen Nationen in unubersehbar vielen Weisen verandert – mit wichtigen Folgerungen fur die Erfahrungen der Beschaftigten in Bezug darauf, wie sie ihre Gefuhle fur einen Lohn gestalten. Die Flexibilisierung der Arbeit hat in ihren vielen Dimensionen – u. a. Flexibilitat von Zeit, Ort, Funktion oder Laufbahn – zu einer neuen Nachfrage nach Gefuhlsarbeit mit neu erhohter Intensitat und in neuen Lebensarenen gefuhrt.

What Time Shows Us about Inequality, Gender, and Power at Work

backing that could bring right-wing ideas into public discourse. A follow-up study could explore a broader range of the anti-Muslim discourse that has permeated the political mainstream. Bail focuses mostly on terrorism, but issues of gender are also important. It is likely, for example, that one reason that anti-Muslim rhetoric can become acceptable in public discourse is its assertion of the need to protect women from purported abuse within Islam. Tracing the circulation of gendered antiMuslim discourse would open a lens into the interconnections of anti-Muslim organizations and the set of right-wing groups, politicians, and writers that position themselves in a fragile political space of women’s rights, racism, and nationalism. Finally, Bail studies cultural change after a major event. He shows that even an event of the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks did not itself prompt a drastic increase in unfavorable opinions about Muslim Americans, although it set the stage for anti-Muslim organizations to position themselves in the mainstream. Left open is the question of whether similar mechanisms of transition from fringe to mainstream (and vice versa) are likely to operate in the absence of extraordinary events. As an example, the recent history of the political right in the United States and, more dramatically, the mainstreaming of the traditional farright French National Front show that such transition is possible; but the specific mechanisms by which rightist organizations and movements enter and exit the broader cultural environment are largely unexplored.

Book Review: Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage

narrative analysis. In addition, the chapter situates narrative analysis within theories of motherhood and reflexive modernity. According to Anthony Giddens, with late modernity comes freedom from structural constraints and increased individualization, which require individuals to reflexively create their selves. Miller argues that periods of change, such as the transition to first-time motherhood, provide opportunities to view practices of selfreflexivity through women’s narrative constructions. She notes, for example, that one aspect of reflexivity apparent in women’s narratives was the practice of self-monitoring. She writes, “But this practice was not undertaken because rules no longer exist to guide action. . . . Rather, self-monitoring arises in response to the continued dominance of morally underpinned discourses of ‘good mothering’” (p. 142). Her analysis thus offers both an application and a critique of Giddens through careful attention to the ways in which women’s mothering narratives reflect elements of self-reflexivity but also simultaneously highlight the persistent structural limitations placed on individuals. These structural limitations, she argues, include the dominant cultural scripts that guide individuals through life events including the transition to motherhood. Miller employs the concept of cultural scripts to illuminate the different ways of knowing about motherhood and the different cultural processes at play in the transition to motherhood. Drawing on anthropological work by Bridgett Jordan and others, she examines the different authoritative knowledges of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, the knowledge that counts in any given cultural sphere and that therefore shapes a woman’s transition to motherhood. Drawing on her cross-cultural field research, Miller examines the differing cultural scripts available to new mothers in Bangladesh, the Solomon Islands, and Western countries. Whereas in Bangladesh and the Solomon Islands, women’s own embodied knowledge about pregnancy and birth is honored in its own right, in Western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, medical knowledge takes precedence over women’s own embodied knowledge. “Self-reflexivity and being a mother is, then, always more than playing a part and performing an individualized biography. This is because of the materiality and real fleshy bodies and conventional expectations of ‘being there for others’ that shape women’s lives as mothers” (p. 137). Making Sense of Motherhood is a well-written and sophisticated investigation of identity transformation among first-time mothers. The book makes use of and critiques theories of reflexive modernity through a careful analysis of women’s personal narrative trajectories. The text should appeal to scholars of reproduction and motherhood and to those interested in narrative analysis as a sociological method. It would prove a useful addition to courses on families, reproduction, or qualitative methods at both the graduate and the undergraduate levels.