Jane Gray

Ties that Bind? The Social Fabric of Daily Life in New Suburbs

The greater Dublin conurbation has now reached the 1.5 million mark. Over the last 15 years, most urban growth has taken place not at the core of the city, but on its periphery. The word ‘suburbs’ refers to those residential areas that are found around the periphery of urban centres. Suburban residents were previously thought to depend upon the urban core for work, shopping, and recreational and cultural pursuits. But this dependence on a centre is no longer seen as a crucial feature of suburbs. As Figure 11.1 clearly illustrates, Dublin has been characterised by peripheral urban development since the early 1990s. While the Dublin urban core grew only minimally between 1991 and 2002, the city expanded into the hinterland creating new suburban neighbourhoods. The further one travels from the city centre, the more marked this suburban growth. A negative view of the suburbs infuses the sociological literature and the public imagination. The suburbs are frequently represented as places of homogeneity and uniformity, of stifling conformity, of social atomisation and isolation, of withdrawal from public life into the privacy of domestic life. Indeed, although people move to the suburbs in order to enhance the quality of family life, sociologists and other commentators have portrayed suburbs as negative environments for the family, due to the isolation of the nuclear family from the support that wider kinship networks provide, both in inner city and rural environments. This portrayal of suburban life is found in some of the specialised literature on the subject (for instance, Baumgartner, 1988; Fishman, 1987, and, less directly, Sennett, 1970), but

Gender composition and household labour strategies in pre-Famine Ireland

This paper examines the relationship between gender composition and rural household strategies in Cavan, a county in north-central Ireland, during the first half of the 19th century. I show that the ratio of adult females to males was highest in small farm households that depended for their survival on intensively deployed family labour in agriculture, flax-cultivation and spinning. By contrast, households without land or with micro-holdings relied on the income from mens employment as agricultural labourers, supplemented by womens work as spinners. More substantial landholders employed men as agricultural labourers. In both of the latter categories household labour strategies centred on mens activities, with womens work representing an important supplement, whereas in the small-farm category household labour strategies centred on a strategic balance between mens and womens labour input. Amongst households engaged in linen weaving the ratio of women to men was lower across all landholding categories. Differences in gender composition resulted from a complex interplay amongst household labour and inheritance strategies in a changing socio-economic environment.

Rural Industry and Uneven Development: The Significance of Gender in the Irish Linen Industry.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Irish linen industry grew on the basis of unequal relations of exchange between spinning and weaving households. This regional division of labour in turn depended on unequal relations of production between women and men within rural industrial households. The ‘proto‐industrialisation’ thesis has tended to obscure this process by focussing on the household as a bounded entity, and by failing to recognise the significance of inequalities within the household production unit. Once gender relations are made central to the thesis, it can be expanded to explain regional differences in rural industrialisation and deindustrialisation.

The circulation of children in rural Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century

This paper analyses the interactions amongst family, household and extended kin through an examination of two ‘circulations’ of children within rural Irish communities during the first half of the twentieth century: (1) the daily journey from home to school; (2) going to live with relatives other than parents. Drawing on life-history narratives, the article develops a new perspective on the stem-family system in Ireland by showing how ‘incomplete’ family households formed integral parts of local kinship circles and were deeply engaged in the veryday lives of ‘complete’ family households, including the promotion of extended family survival and social mobility.

Education and Class-formation in 20th Century Ireland: A Retrospective Qualitative Longitudinal Analysis

The article presents a retrospective qualitative longitudinal analysis of experiences of education and class amongst three cohorts of Irish people who started out in difficult financial circumstances. It shows how the intersection of education and class-formation in modern Ireland was ‘realized’ in different historical periods during the 20th century. Some groups accumulated economic and cultural resources allowing them to convert education to upward social mobility during key periods, whereas others were ‘shut out’ from the project of the state. We argue that the concept of ‘experience’, understood as the realization of historically situated macro-sociological processes, provides a useful way of linking agency to structural change, bringing the strengths of macro-sociological quantitative analysis together with those of micro-sociological qualitative analysis within a longer temporal frame.

Gender and Plebian Culture in Ulster

Colonial products, such as tea and tobacco, were still considered luxury items in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century, but their consumption by spinners and weavers of linen yarn and cloth increased from about 1780 onward. The changing cultural meanings that Irish linen producers attached to tea-drinking are explored in this article through an analysis of poems and songs written by weavers (and one spinner) around the turn of the nineteenth century. Conspicuous luxury commodity consumption formed part of a new, collective identity among rural industrial producers in Ireland and throughout Europe.

Family Rhythms: Re-visioning family change in Ireland using qualitative archived data from Growing Up in Ireland and Life Histories and Social Change

The Family Rhythms project examined the Irish experience of family life over an extended period of time, in which we traced evolving relationships and practices against a backdrop of immense social, cultural and economic change, from the early years of the Irish state to the present day. We combined qualitative data from Growing Up in Ireland (GUI), with Life Histories and Social Change (LHSC) to construct a longitudinal, qualitative database with a distinct focus on family relationships. Family Rhythms demonstrated the potential for bringing data from two major qualitative studies into dialogue to develop new insights into the motives, feelings and rationalities behind Irish people’s family practices and experiences in changing social contexts. Combining the data from two unrelated studies presented methodological challenges, namely how to consolidate these data and how to compare the retrospective life story data in LHSC with the prospective data in GUI. To overcome this, we worked ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’ across the two collections to specify patterns of continuity and change in key dimensions of family relationships. The strengths of this dynamic approach were that we could examine family relationships across an extended timeframe and from different generational standpoints.

Using reflexive lifelines in biographical interviews to aid the collection, visualisation and analysis of resilience

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates the use of a reflexive lifeline instrument within a study oriented towards documenting and explaining resilience from a sociological perspective. Informed by both life course and biographical perspectives, our research design comprised two interviews incorporating recursive co-construction of the participant’s lifeline. We aimed to meet three objectives with this method: (1) to collect accurate retrospective data about the timing of lives; (2) to garner biographical data that allowed us to explore lives as wholes and (3) to elicit participant reflexivity on turning points associated with resilience. Our approach was distinctive in its explicit use of the lifeline both as a means to bring life stories into dialogue with life histories, and as a dynamic prompt to engage participants in the reflexive co-construction of turning points as fateful moments. We illustrate our approach through a case presentation and analysis of the reflexive lifelines co-constructed with two men who participated in our study. We also show how the reflexive lifeline interview generated opportunities for participant-led researcher reflexivity.

Glossary of key concepts

A Active agents: see human agency. Active fathering: the ‘hands on’ involvement by fathers in the day-to-day care of their children. Adaptation view: see classic demographic transition theory. Agency: see human agency. Agnatic systems: see patrilineal system. Agrarian societies: societies that are characterized by sedentary agriculture that is productive enough to support classes of people who are not directly involved in subsistence production, such as political rulers, priests, soldiers and craftsmen. Alliance: see rules of alliance. Ambivalence/ambivalent relationship: intergenerational relationship in which roles and boundaries have to be constantly negotiated, resulting in mixed feelings and contradictory expectations. Ascending familialism: intergenerational relationships characterized by the flow of resources from younger to older generations, for example from young adults towards their elderly parents.