Marjorie L. DeVault

Comfort and Struggle: Emotion Work in Family Life

Though family life is typically associated with emotion rather than work, the concept of emotion work reveals the effort behind family feeling. Existing literature on family emotion work emphasizes caregiving and interpersonal support—activities associated with the housewife ideal of the industrial age. This article examines not only such caregiving and support activities but also several other forms of emotion work that become visible when we consider families whose lives diverge from this privileged ideal.

Producing Family Time: Practices of Leisure Activity Beyond the Home

Family life is conducted in public as well as at home, but the public aspect of family activity is seldom studied (a pattern that tends to reproduce “privatized” notions of family life). This observational study examines one site for public family activity, the community zoo. I show that visiting the zoo involves the group in a routinized activity that reinforces significant social boundaries, including those of family membership. Conceptually, the analysis identifies parental work practices—based on mostly implicit ideologies of family life—whose skills are treated at some moments as unremarkable and in other circumstances as key signifiers of “good parenting.” My aim is to bring into view the settings and circumstances within which parents pursue such activities with children, thereby illustrating an analytic approach that locates these practices within a broader social landscape.

ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE Racial-Ethnic Knowledge in Sociological Research

Analysis of an interview conducted by a white researcher with an African American nutritionist points to the significance of racial-ethnic dynamics in the conduct of qualitative research. Interviewers who follow the standard methodological rule—to let findings “emerge” from their data—may fail to hear the significance of race-ethnicity in the accounts of informants. Close analysis suggests that talk will sometimes reveal racial-ethnic dynamics even when these are not explicit topics and that active attention to such structured inequalities produces a more robust analysis. Institutional ethnography and narrative analysis are discussed as alternatives to the grounded-theory approach to qualitative analysis.

Families and Children Together, Apart

In discussing the construction of gender in family settings and in childrens lives, one must consider the relations of these separate but closely connected arenas. Easy assumptions of unity are wrong and inappropriate but studying children in isolation from family life—or vice versa—produces a flawed picture as well. This discussion suggests that literal joinings and separations in time and space should be integral to analyses in both fields because they are integral to the phenomena researchers want to illuminate.

Surplus and Scarcity: Hunger and the Origins of the Food Stamp Program

Hunger in the United States was largely ignored prior to the 1960s, when social conditions combined to make it a national issue. This paper looks at the history of the food stamp program and the ongoing competition between two definitions of hunger: one which focuses on the need for food, the other which emphasizes social inequality. We show how the food stamp program has evolved in response to legislative activity and social movements, and how changes in the food stamp program have in turn shaped the debate about hunger. We conclude that the food stamp program in the United States has provided only a partial solution to the problem of hunger, and has diverted attention from societal relationships that produce hunger.

Institutional Ethnography A Feminist Sociology of Institutional Power

In The Everyday World as Problematic (1987), Dorothy Smith outlined a sociology that would find its questions in everyday life—that is, ‘‘the world in which we are located physically and socially’’ (p. 89). Her sociology would address the ‘‘puzzles’’ that are ‘‘latent’’ in that experienced world (p. 91). Such puzzles included questions that feminists of the era had begun to ask (e.g., how do women’s troubles become ‘sickness’? how is their work obscured and devalued?). But Smith’s discussion made clear at the outset that the ‘‘sociology for women’’ she proposed could be a sociology for people, more generally, and that exploring the problematics of any group’s social standpoint would begin with narration. She presented the following example: ‘‘People who have lived for years in communities in the interior of British Columbia, in telling their lives and experiences, show us a typical layering sequence of change—the opening of the mine, the coming of the railroad, the market gardening enterprises established by local Indians to feed the miners, the closing of the mine, the decline of market gardening, the decline of the railroad, the dependence of the native people on the Indian Affairs Department, the building of a hydro plant, a brief period of employment for the native people while it is being built, the refurbishing of the railroad, the development of a small tourist trade, the transformation of the settlement into a retirement village for hydro engineers’’ (p. 94). People know and can tell of these changes, but ‘‘the logic of transformation is elsewhere’’ (p. 94)—that is, those living through the changes do not so easily see what drives them. As one teacher put it, in an institutional ethnographic study of curricular reform, ‘‘these things just happen’’ (Jackson 1995). Institutional ethnography was designed to open and explicate the extended social processes behind such changes. In the 1970s and 1980s, Smith and many other feminist scholars were exploring a distinctively gendered organization of work, in which women supported men, in varying racial and class locations, through Social Working: An Ethnography of FrontLine Practice, by Gerald A.J. de Montigny. Toronto, CAN: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 276pp. NPL. ISBN: 9780802077269.

Feminist Fieldwork Analysis By Sherryl Kleinman Sage Publications. 2007. 130 pages.

interpreted as the bloodless unfolding of structural imperatives or of the simple alignment and realignment of interests. Thus, too, a CBO’s reputation can be critical in determining how deeply its constituents experience poverty. Even amid this rich fare, there is room for further development. Marwell resists judgment throughout: Could the CBOs she studied have acted differently than they did? Might some have been more effective if they had organized themselves differently? There is also the subtitle: the term “entrepreneurial city” comes over as a head-fake. Would Marwell expect the same dilemmas to operate in a city that is less thoroughly dominated by the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors as New York City? Would the “neoliberal city” work better? It’s hard to tell because Bargaining for Brooklyn’s theoretical targets and interlocutors are not urban political economists; they are sociologists of urban poverty. Nevertheless, while Marwell wisely limits the explicit scope of her work in this book, she whets the appetite for comment on other critical literatures on urban governance. Bargaining for Brooklyn should be assigned in graduate and undergraduate courses on urban political science and sociology, ethnography, poverty and public policy. Policymakers too should take notice of this book. As advocates of “civil society” dominate the public conversation about how to provide public goods, they will benefit from Marwell’s cautionary analyses of CBOs’ often-tangled attempts to raise the standard of living and build durable participation in their communities.