Sara Cantillon

Are married women more deprived than their husbands

Conventional methods of analysis of poverty assume resources are shared so that each individual in a household/family has the same standard of living. This paper measures differences between spouses in a large sample in indicators of deprivation of the type used in recent studies of poverty at household level. The quite limited overall imbalance in measured deprivation in favour of husbands suggests that applying such indicators to individuals will not reveal a substantial reservoir of hidden poverty among wives in non-poor households, nor much greater deprivation among women than men in poor households. This points to the need to develop more sensitive indicators of deprivation designed to measure individual living standards and poverty status, which can fit the framework of traditional poverty research using large samples. It also highlights the need for clarification of the underlying poverty concept.

Breaking silence: educating citizens for love, care and solidarity

An indifference to the affective domain and an allegiance to the education of the rational autonomous subject and public citizen are at the heart of formal education. The impact of Cartesian rationalism is intensifying with the glorification of performativity measured by league tables and rankings. The citizen carer and the care recipient citizen are only recognised in the educational arena when professionals are being trained to manage those in need of care. Education for informal care labour, solidarity work and love labour is generally not part of the formal educational trajectory. Because the scholarly understanding of work has been equated with economic self preservation and self‐actualisation through interaction with nature, education is seen as preparation for this type of work. Education is indifferent to other‐centred work arising from our interdependencies and dependencies as affective, relational beings. In particular it has ignored the centrality of nurturing for the preservation and self‐actualisation of the human species. In this article the authors argue that sociologists need to engage with the extensive feminist scholarship on care if they are to challenge the deeply care‐less view of the citizen that is implicitly accepted in new and older forms of liberal thinking. The rational economic actor model of the citizen is contrasted with the care‐full view of the citizen and the implications of both for education are explored.

Poverty Within Households: Measuring Gender Differences Using Nonmonetary Indicators

Conventional methods of analysis of poverty assume resources are shared so that each individual in a household or family has the same standard of living. Nonmonetary indicators of living standards and deprivation are increasingly being used in measuring household poverty. This paper argues that such indicators can be used for a rather different purpose - the exploration of differences in living standards within households. It illustrates this by using indicators of deprivation of the type used in recent studies of poverty at household level to measure differences between spouses in a large Irish sample. It then discusses the limitations of these indicators for the purpose at hand and points to the need to develop more sensitive indicators of deprivation designed to measure individual living standards and poverty status, which can fit within the framework of traditional poverty research using large samples. While the discussion is specific to Ireland, the methodology developed is relevant outside the Irish context, in developing as well as developed countries.

Which Equalities Matter? The Place of Affective Equality in Egalitarian Thinking

There is a deep ambivalence in Western society about caring and loving generally (hooks, 2000). This ambivalence has found expression in the academy. In both liberal and radical egalitarian traditions, love and care have for the most part been treated as private matters, personal affairs, not subjects of sufficient political importance to be mainstreamed in theory or empirical investigations, while the subject of solidarity is given limited research attention. Sociological, economic, legal and political thought has focused on the public sphere, the outer spaces of life, indifferent to the fact that none of these can function without the care institutions of society (Fineman, 2004; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 1993). Within classical economics and sociology in particular there has been a core assumption that the prototypical human being is a self-sufficient rational economic man (sic) (Folbre, 1994; Folbre and Bittman, 2004). There has been little serious account taken of the reality of dependency for all human beings, both in childhood and at times of illness and infirmity (Badgett and Folbre, 1999). That fact generates two very important forms of inequality: inequality in the degree to which people’s needs for love and care are satisfied, and inequality in the work that goes into satisfying them. These are the core of what we call ‘affective inequality’.1

Time to Care, Care Commanders and Care Footsoldiers

This chapter uses data from our set of 30 in-depth Care Conversations with carers and care recipients (see Introduction and Appendix) to examine the way unpaid care work interfaces with employment in terms of time demands. It also explores the ways in which time for love labouring is squeezed out increasingly through the use of so-called flexible time schedules, the intensification of work and time spent commuting to and from work.

Love Labouring: Power and Mutuality

Most research on care is taken from the perspective of the carer (Hughes et al., 2005). Within this work, the carer is represented as the giver, the care recipient the receiver; the care recipient has needs, the carer is less needy; the carer is strong and able bodied, the care recipient is weak and vulnerable. This understanding of care portrays it as a deeply asymmetrical relationship and leads us to expect marked power inequalities within it, with the caregiver exercising power over care recipients.

Its not all red and blue - suicide, homicide and us presidential elections

The global financial crisis has generated a renewed interest in the issue of inequality, its impact on the economy and on the social consequences for society more generally. There has been a spate of recent publications on the topic, for example, Stiglitz’s The price of inequality (2012) and Galbraith’s Inequality and instability (2011). More specifically, there have been a number of interdisciplinary books in epidemiology and social science which focus on identifying statistical relationships between economic inequality, usually using some summary measure of income distribution as its proxy, and a host of social indicators such as crime, health, education, drug abuse and social mobility. The spirit level (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) is a prime example of this literature, and James Gilligan’s book, Why some politicians are more dangerous than others, fits into that genre in so far as it plots a relationship between the political affiliation of the US president, as a proxy for unemployment and inequality, and the rate of lethal violence in the USA over the past 100 years. Why some politicians are more dangerous than others describes itself as a murder mystery with two separate ‘facts’ to be solved, namely, why do homicide and suicide rates tend to increase and decrease together, and, why do these rates of murder and suicide fluctuate so enormously? As a first step, Gilligan combines homicide and suicide rates into a single ‘violent death rate’ and employs this as the principal variable for his analysis. Tracking this ‘violent death rate’ from 1900 to 2007, Gilligan detects what he calls a pattern of ‘peaks and valleys’. Specifically, he identifies three ‘large, sudden and prolonged increases and decreases’ which he then classifies as epidemics of lethal violence which are interspersed with periods of more normal rates of lethal violence. Investigating this mystery, Gilligan finds a relationship between what he calls total lethal violence rates, that is, the homicide and suicide rates combined (and in particular these six data events), and the political party then in power. Gilligan claims that suicide and homicide rates increase when a Republican President is in office and decrease under Democratic Administrations. So the mystery now to be solved is the correlation between the president of the USA and rates of lethal violence – that is, ‘to discover the casual mechanisms by which a change in the party of the president can lead more people to kill themselves or others?’ Gilligan identifies a chain of evidence and his clear, unambiguous, answer goes as follows: economic and social distress in the form of unemployment, poverty, social status, etc. stimulate feelings of shame and humiliation, Journal of Political Power Vol. 5, No. 3, December 2012, 511–516

Strategic Issues for the Equality Movement

What organizational forms, what methods of action should egalitarians adopt? In this chapter, we identify some key issues for the equality movement: the problem of coordination, the role of political parties, the tension between radicals and moderates and the interplay of means and ends. We argue for a ‘strategic pluralism’ that recognizes the diversity of the equality movement and makes a virtue out of the range of strategies pursued by different groups and organizations. By setting out in a dispassionate way the pros and cons of various strategies, we hope to convince activists to appreciate and support those who take different approaches to promoting equality.1

Equality, the Legal System and Employment Law

The legal system is an important context for equality because it regulates all other social institutions and is located at the intersection of state and civil society. While law helps to legitimate state authority, it also purports to serve civil society by providing a framework that secures public accountability and facilitates transactions between private parties. This chapter examines the potential role of the legal system in promoting equality of condition, in light of the complex and often contradictory functions it fulfils in society. We begin by reviewing some of the ways that the legal doctrines and institutions of liberal democracies currently serve to resist egalitarian change, going on to set out some ways that they could be reformed. We then examine anti-discrimination law as one of the major areas in which the legal system has been used to promote equality of opportunity, and analyse its shortcomings. This analysis forms the basis for exploring some of the ways that legislation could be used to promote equality of condition in the workplace, drawing on and developing some existing legal instruments.

The Centrality of Equality: Equality and Other Values

The idea of equality has always belonged to the ideals of the left. Nor could anyone deny its relevance in today’s world, given the widespread and savage inequalities illustrated in Chapter 1. What is more controversial is to claim that equality has a special status among progressive ideals and that it should be the defining concept in our thinking about social institutions and how they should be changed. In this chapter we support this claim by briefly discussing the relationship between equality and some other human values. We start with ideas that are sometimes contrasted with equality but in our view are simply part of what egalitarians believe. We then move on to what we call ‘human goods’, namely those things and relationships that generally enhance the value of people’s lives. We argue that far from conflicting with these values, equality demands that their benefits should be justly shared. We go on to discuss the connection between equality and some key political values, namely freedom, solidarity and the protection of the environment. We finish by identifying some genuine conflicts between equality and other values, where we are happy to endorse the egalitarian alternative.