Marit Haldar

Teddy Diaries A Method for Studying the Display of Family Life

In this article, we show how circulated diaries can be used as a source of knowledge about the display and normative standards of family life. The par ticular strength of the data lies in the circulation among members of a local public before reaching the researcher. This keeps researcher intervention low, while the data remain socially and culturally saturated. In addition, the method allows for comparative cultural research, which is illustrated by the examples taken from Norway and China. Having two sets of data from different contexts adds to the richness of the data by providing a contrast that is needed to illuminate the taken-for-granted.

Legitimating the illegitimate: How doctors manage their knowledge of the prestige of diseases:

Although the sociology of medicine has developed a rich body of research on patients’ experiences and how they handle their illnesses, few analyses have examined doctors’ concepts of disease. Building on previous research findings that doctors consider some diseases to be more worthy than others, this article focuses on how these differences in disease prestige are articulated and made logical. We presented a focus group panel of doctors a table of 38 diseases rank-ordered by prestige according to the results of a previous quantitative study of doctors. We prompted a lively discussion among the doctors by asking them whether they were familiar with this rank order. In analysing how they managed the prestige knowledge presented to them, we focused on how they handled the value conflict between this informal rank order and the formal value of equality of treatment. Using positioning theory as a theoretical premise and a methodological tool, we found that the focus group participants created positions in their conversations that allowed them to present and discuss views on disease prestige that would be considered illegitimate if they were declared directly. However, they were able to do so without being forced to take a personal stand. Thus, we demonstrate how informal disease rankings can be produced and reproduced.

Socializing relations in the everyday lives of children: Comparing domestic texts from Norway and China

The text material analysed in this article consists of 20 teddy-diaries that circulated between the families of 6-year-old children in Beijing, China and in Oslo, Norway. The circulation process makes teddy-diaries highly normatively saturated domestic stories from families with 6-year-old children. A quantitative analysis of these texts inspired by Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) developed by Harvey Sacks (1972) reveals what is deemed significant relations for children in each culture. By identifying actions and contexts that are described as relevant and appropriate for these significant relations, the researcher can also achieve a better understanding of how these relations are constructed as socializing relations in the everyday lives of children. The article finds that the learning styles and positioning of the child in everyday lives is participatory, play and peer oriented in Norway and instructional, encouraging and progress oriented in China.

Governing the liberated child with self-managed family displays

The 1990s witnessed the replacement of psychological perspectives seeing children as ‘becomings’ to a view of them as ‘beings’. This is challenged by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality understood as technologies of self-making actors capable of monitoring and controlling their own behaviour. This concept is central in the present study of so-called teddy-diaries, which are texts written by first graders and their parents and circulated among other families as part of the Norwegian school curriculum. A key finding of the analyses is that these circulated and displayed texts represent technologies for governing families – especially in reinforcing expectations about how ‘normal’ childhood and family life should be lived.

Knowledge of love: narratives of romance told by 12-year-old children

This article reports research on young peoples conceptualisations of love and romance through a gender perspective. The data are stories written by 12-year-old girls and boys in Norway who were asked to fantasise about their future love life. Their narratives are explored through discourse analysis and semiotics and analysed within a sociological framework. The article has two major aims. The first is to contribute to the methodology of collecting essays written by young people to gain knowledge of their conceptions of adult life. The second aim is to offer new findings on the specific subject of romantic love in contemporary society, by describing how to do love in young peoples fiction.

Social work and sociology: historical separation and current challenges

This special issue represents a continuation of work done in recent years in exploring the relationships between social work and sociology. Part of this work has been done at conferences around the world where historical as well as contemporary issues were discussed and where theoretical as well as practical areas became the focus of attention. During the World Congress of Sociology in Gothenburg in 2010, a group of persons interested in the relationships between social work and sociology gathered to discuss common areas of interest. Those participating in this gathering and others showing interest in its discussions shared educational backgrounds in either sociology or social work. The participants at this initial get-together included sociologists teaching in social work programmes and social workers teaching in sociology programmes and most of them published in journals known to ‘belong’ to the other disciplines. Common to all participants at this meeting was the feeling that their professional belonging was not solely related to one or the other of the disciplines. With this special issue, we wish to continue the discussion of how this relationship between these two disciplines can be looked upon today without deleting the historical experiences. Once upon a time, social work and sociology were one discipline and in this issue, we ask the question: What has happened with the division into two? Both disciplines focus on social problems, social structure, social integration and how individuals respond to and live within cultural and structural constraints. Today, both disciplines face a possibility of losing some of their most important characteristics to individualising trends, the disappearance of the importance of ‘the social’ and pressure towards solely evidence-based knowledge. Our aim here is not only to attend to disciplinary similarities and differences, but also to cast light on areas that have been in the shadows of the mainstream narrative. In addition, we hope that the articles in this special issue will raise new questions and will contribute to continuing discussions between and within each discipline. By defining one discipline as theoretical and the other as practical, shared achievements together with instances of interdisciplinary knowledge production become easily hidden or invisible. We hope that the articles will shed light on these, answer questions about interdisciplinary relationships and challenge predefined assumptions. First, let us look in the rear-view mirror and see what history can tell about this relationship.

The other Chicago school - a sociological tradition expropriated and erased

Occupying a central place in the creation myth of sociological science is the world’s first sociology department at the University of Chicago: a faculty hosting reform-minded men developing theories focused on process and change – especially involving immigrants and other poor urban dwellers. A special concern for these theorists was with investigating, measure and solving social problems of the city. The legend tells that these men relied for data collection on the women of Hull House, who then were launching social work projects among the poor. We challenge this long dominant tale with a subversive story about the theoretical and methodological achievements of these women. A central focus in our account is on dissimilarities between theories stressing individual agency promoted by the men of the department and theories of social structure as well as methods for measuring inequality and its consequences developed by these pioneering women of American social science. We conclude by pointing out that their long ignored theoretical understandings of the structural sources of human pain have particular relevance in today’s world.