Lynn Jamieson

Intimacy: personal relationships in modern societies

Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction. A Story of Intimacy?. The Wider Significance of Intimacy in Personal Life. Dimensions of Intimacy. Stories and Story Tellers. Conclusion. 2. From a The Familya to Sex and Industry. . The Making of the Conventional Modern Family. Visions of the Future. 3. Parenting and Intimacy. Mothers and Fathers as Intimates. More Shared Caring Between Mothers and Fathers?. Parenting: Trends in Intimacy and Democracy?. 4. Are Good Friends All You Need? . Friends, Kin and Intimacy. Gender, Heterosexuality, Friendship and Intimacy. 5. Sex and Intimacy. . Introduction. Stories of a Normal Sexa and Intimacy. The Realities of Sexual Lives. Stories, Practices and Social Change. 6. The Couple: Intimate and Equal? . The Heterosexual Couple: Still She the Housewife, He the Earner?. Domestic Violence and Forced Intimacy. Same--Sex Couples. Intimacy and Relationship Breakdown. 7. Conclusion. . Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Migration, place and class : Youth in a rural area

The claims that locality, kinship, and social class are no longer the basis of ties that bind and of limited significance for identity in late modernity, remain seductive, despite their critics. Those who remain rooted are then presented as inhabitants of traditional backwaters, outside the mainstream of social change. This article presents young peoples reasons for leaving or remaining in a rural area of Britain, the Scottish Borders. Young peoples views about migration and attachment demonstrate a contradictory and more complex pattern than that of detached late-modern migrants and traditional backwater stay-at-homes. These stereotypes have some resonance in local culture, for example in disdain for rootless incomers lacking real sympathy with ‘the community’ and in the common accusation of the parochial narrow mindedness of locals who have never been elsewhere. However, such stereotypes emerge from complex social class antagonisms and cross-cutting ties to locality. Many young peoples ties contradict the classifications these stereotypes imply. There are young out-migrants who are the children of ‘rootless’ in-migrants, but also, nevertheless, have lasting attachments to the locality of their childhood. Then there are young ‘stayers’ who are the children of ‘born and bred’ locals but yet feel serious disaffection from their locality. These ‘attached migrants’ and ‘detached stayers’ may not represent settled orientations to their locality of childhood, but they, nevertheless, contradict both certain local stereotypes and Baumanesque ‘late modernist’ sociological theorising.

Timespans and plans among young adults

This article uses data from a survey of young adults in Kirkcaldy, Fife, together with associated qualitative interviews, to throw empirical light on their sense of control over their lives and their perceived willingness and ability to plan their lives. Its principal conclusion, contrary to the suggestions of much previous literature, is that a majority of young adults of both genders do, by their early twenties at least, feel in control of their lives and able to exercise forethought over quite long periods of time with respect to many aspects of their futures. Far from seeing the future as simply ‘an extended present’, they see active opportunities for choice and for formulating their own lives in the years ahead. Only a minority, predominantly those who feel themselves in particularly insecure circumstances, live primarily for the present or think ahead only or principally for the very short term.

Friends, Neighbours and Distant Partners: Extending or Decentring Family Relationships?

Introduction1.1 There is a longstanding recognition that grasping the meaning and significance of any specific personalrelationship requires an understanding of the whole constellation of personal ties within which people areembedded. So for example, to understand kinship it is equally necessary to understand friendship (Allan,1979). This special collection brings together research which offers insight into personal relationships ofworking-age adults beyond or outside of the conventional domestic context of a co-resident couple with orwithout children. In comparison to the wealth of research on couple and parent-child relationships, otheradult personal relationships are relatively under-researched and it is hoped that this issue will encouragefurther work. Examples of the kinds of relationships considered here include sexual relationships andpartnerships between adults outside the family-based household (Holmes, Roseneil, Reynolds), thefriendships of those not living with a partner (Budgeon), the whole constellation of personal relationships ofsingle women (Simpson) and their negotiation of the identity ‘single woman’ (MacVarish), .neighbours(Boyce, Stokoe), and relations with paid carers who enter into family contexts (Pockney).1.2 These relationships are all outside the established package of partnership, parenthood and householdalthough all represent some aspects of intimacy: bodily, emotional and privileged knowledge of the otherperson. They have some affinities and overlaps with family practices while also having their own distinctcharacteristics. The detailed exploration of these different sets of practices, using a variety ofmethodologies, may help us understand their particular logics and rationales, as well as how they aredistinct from or have continuities with more regularly understood relationships of family and kinship. Theseindividual studies can also remind us of the significance and sources of the inequalities and externalstructural factors surrounding and shaping these relationships and limiting the degrees of freedom enjoyedby individuals.1.3 Having a more complete picture of the whole constellation of personal relationships is urgently neededto inform contested interpretations of social trends in personal life. One particular line of interpretation ofsocial change is that some of the non-familial relationships discussed in this collection are eclipsingfamilial relationships in their significance. In a review of research across personal relationships at the endof the twentieth century, Jamieson (1998, 1999) noted that although friendship was claimed theoretically asthe ideal intimate relationship, the couple remained the popular choice at the centre of adult personal life.However, at the time of this collection, a growing number of researchers, including contributors to thisissue, suggest the growing importance of adult friendships (Pahl and Spencer, 2004, Spencer and Pahl2006) and believe they are seeing the focus of personal life shift from the couple, and particularly thegendered, heterosexual, co-resident, family-founding couple, to a more fluid network of intimates includingfriends, lovers and neighbours (Budgeon, this volume; Roseneil, this volume; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004,Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst, 2005). The suggestion is that this more fluid network may be taking over,practically and emotionally, as the important relationships in people’s lives and undermining the culturaldominance of conventional family relationships as the idealized relationships to which we aspire. A numberof contributions in this volume add to a body of recent research which suggests that the boundary between‘familial’ and ‘non-familial’ relationships is increasingly blurred in everyday lives. One way of portraying thisis in terms of the elasticity and constant stretching of the boundary of what constitutes ‘family’ as theconstellations that people designated as ‘familial’ become increasingly diverse. Another way of portrayingthis is to say that the idea and ideal of family is losing ground to different understandings of how life shouldbe lived. These different ways of interpreting the same trends disagree about how fundamental a shift inactual practices has taken place.

European Identities: From Absent-Minded Citizens to Passionate Europeans

Conflicting prognoses for European identity are addressed using data from residents of Edinburgh, Scotland, on the everyday significance of being European; a theoretically informed focus on people in one city. A representative sample of established residents aged 18—24 years are compared with a sample of resident peers engaged in Europe-oriented work or study. Survey data provide an overview of their different understandings of Europe and patterns of identification with Europe, Britain, Scotland and Edinburgh. Using qualitative interviews, rationales for self-engagement with or disengagement from Europe are further interrogated and located in orientations to place of residence, nationality and citizenship.These data provide some further insight into the process by which some come to present themselves as passionate utopian Europeans, while for many being European remains emotionally insignificant and devoid of imagined community or steps towards global citizenship.

Confidence Amid Uncertainty: Ambitions and Plans in a Sample of Young Adults

The limited and sometimes contradictory published literature, mostly relating to younger age groups and non-British societies, suggests that planning and a longer time perspective are inhibited by economic insecurity, by tight structuring of the life course, and a track record of failing to achieve ambitions. This paper uses survey data, backed by qualitative interviews, to investigate planning and forethought in a sample of young adults in the Scottish town of Kirkcaldy in the late 1990s. Responses are compared with those of older age groups and of people of the same age twelve years earlier. Economic insecurity and failure to achieve ambitions had been seen by our older respondents as particularly characteristic of the lives of young adults. However, in spite of considerable sense of insecurity, the young adults we studied do in general feel in control of their lives, and do have well articulated ambitions and plans to achieve them with respect especially to work and housing. Indeed, conditions of modern life almost force many to seek to plan to some degree in these areas. Forethought and an element of planning, albeit often quite provisional in its nature, seems actually to provide some sense of security in an uncertain world. Respondents also show considerable commitment to future childbearing and partnership, though past experience of entry to both has often been fairly haphazard and there is evidence of cultural resistance to overly rational planning in such areas. Failing to achieve ambitions in the past does not affect ambitions but does limit willingness to plan for the future, especially for the long-run. Poverty and job insecurity, and also the presence of children, inhibit planning, in some cases to extreme degrees.

Solo-Living, Demographic and Family Change: The Need to know more about men

Solo-living is analytically separate from ‘being single’ and merits separate study. In most Western countries more men are solo-living than women at ages conventionally associated with co-resident partners and children. Discussions of ‘demographic transition’ and change in personal life however typically place women in the vanguard, to the relative neglect of men. We draw on European Social Survey data and relevant qualitative research from Europe and North America demonstrating the need for further research.

A Divided Working Class? Planning and Career Perception in the Service and Working Classes

The contrast between the service class and the working class is central to much class analysis. This structural distinction, based on differences in the employment relationship, is analytically powerful, has validity, and is not in question here. The working class, however, is not homogeneous in all respects. This paper focuses on a sizeable group within the working class who perceive themselves as having (or having had) a career. As well as having this perception, they exhibit a forward-looking perspective, both in the world of employment and with regard to more general planning. They demonstrate degrees of planning, in work and non-work areas, strikingly comparable to service class respondents, and significantly greater than working class respondents without career perceptions. They believe that they can achieve their plans and indeed some have done so successfully. This exercise of forethought is materially aided by this groups possession of rather greater resources of various kinds than the rest of the working class. But this is by no means the whole story. The findings suggest strongly that a willingness to exercise or not to exercise forethought sharply distinguishes two groups within the working class, and may indicate a significant and hitherto unreported cleavage worthy of further investigation.

Children and young people's relationships, relational processes and social change: reading across worlds

We begin by defining relationships and relational processes, before presenting childrens personal relationships, and the relational processes making them personal, as of particular significance in shaping selves and social worlds. This sets the scene for the relevance of children and young peoples personal relationships compared across Majority and Minority Worlds to debates about global social change. This includes claims characterising change in terms of ‘individualisation’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘commercialisation’. The authors’ work on childrens adult–child relationship in public places and on children and young peoples experiences of parent precipitated family household change in a Minority World context is briefly compared to insights from studies of Majority World street children and of children and young people with migrant parents in the Majority World.

Are We All Europeans Now? Local, National and Supranational Identities of Young Adults

The continued expansion and deepening of the European Union state raises important questions about whether there will be a corresponding development of pro-supranational feeling towards Europe. This paper is based on data drawn from a European Commission (EC) funded project on the ‘Orientations of Young Men and Women to Citizenship and European Identity’. The project includes comparative surveys of ‘representative samples’ of young men and women aged 18-24 and samples of this age group on educational routes that potentially orient them to Europe beyond their national boundaries. This comparison of samples is made in paired sites with contrasting cultural and socio-political histories in terms of European affiliations and support for the European Union. The sites are: Vienna and Vorarlberg in Austria; Chemnitz and Bielefeld in East and West Germany; Madrid and Bilbao in Spain; Prague and Bratislava, the capitals of the Czech and Slovak Republics; Manchester, England and Edinburgh, Scotland in the UK. This paper examines patterns of local, national and supranational identity in the British samples in comparison to the other European sites. The typical respondent from Edinburgh and Manchester have very different orientations to their nation-state but they share a lack of European identity and disinterest in European issues that was matched only by residents of Bilbao. International comparision further demonstrates that a general correlation between levels of identification with nation-state and Europe masks a range of orientations to nation, state and Europe nurtured by a variety of geo-political contexts.