Supriya Singh

Gender and the Use of the Internet at Home

In the United States and Australia, men and women use the internet in nearly equal measure, whereas in Japan, India and China, men continue to dominate internet use. This article focuses on gender differences in the use of the internet at home as seen from womens perspectives and draws particularly on open-ended interviews in 1999 with 30 middle-income Anglo-Celtic women with internet access in urban and rural areas of Australia. The study found that women generally use the internet as a tool for activities, rather than as play or a technology to be mastered. This partially explains why women farmers use the internet more extensively than their farmer husbands. When women become comfortable with technology - as with the telephone or the PC on a farm - women see it as a tool rather than a technology. Womens continued discomfort with technology thus remains at the centre of the social construct of gender and technology.

Password sharing: implications for security design based on social practice

Current systems for banking authentication require that customers not reveal their access codes, even to members of the family. A study of banking and security in Australia shows that the practice of sharing passwords does not conform to this requirement. For married and de facto couples, password sharing is seen as a practical way of managing money and a demonstration of trust. Sharing Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) is a common practice among remote indigenous communities in Australia. In areas with poor banking access, this is the only way to access cash. People with certain disabilities have to share passwords with carers, and PIN numbers with retail clerks. In this paper we present the findings of a qualitative user study of banking and money management. We suggest design criteria for banking security systems, based on observed social and cultural practices of password and PIN number sharing.

Money in heterosexual relationships

Money in middle-income Anglo-Celtic marriage is joint and nebulous, whereas money in cohabiting heterosexual relationships is separate and calculable. The move from cohabitation to marriage is accompanied by greater jointness in the management of money. As the nature of the couples commitment becomes more explicit in marriage, money becomes more nebulous and less calculable. However, in both marriage and cohabitation, the questions of equality, power and control are blocked so that the reality of womens lower income does not challenge the popular discourse of marriage and cohabitation being equal partnerships. The secular rituals of the marital joint account and purposive pooling in cohabitation channel information to reduce the gap between ideology and experience on the one hand, and the contradictions between coexisting ideologies on the other. These conclusions are based on two separate qualitative studies of 16 married couples and 15 cohabiting couples in Mel bourne, between 1991 and 1994.

Towards a sociology of money and family in the Indian diaspora

The linking of money, family and migration has become increasingly important with the rise in Indian remittances to US

Indian Students in Melbourne: Challenges to Multiculturalism

21.7 billion in 2004, the largest amount of remittances in the world. The economic importance of remittances has meant that they have primarily been studied as money flows resulting from direct migration. Some attention has been paid to their economic impact at the local, regional and national levels in India. In this article, I argue that sociologists and anthropologists have much to contribute to the study of remittances, as a social phenomenon linked to family and migration. The emergence of a transnational Indian family also means the development of a special kind of transnational family money, where money is equated with or measured against filial care. In the global context of migration, remittances are one of the ways families negotiate shifting arrangements of care, responsibility and security for the young, for women and for the elderly. These perspectives will help develop the sociology of money in India, connecting it to migration, family, marriage and gender relationships.

Impersonalisation of electronic money: implications for bank marketing

The migration experiences of Indian students challenge traditional frameworks of multiculturalism in Australia. First, unlike earlier groups of migrants, Indian students pay to study hoping to become migrants. Indian families contributed AU

Contested Representations of Remittances and the Transnational Family

2.9 billion in educational fees, living expenses and tourism in December 2010 and generated 28,975 full-time equivalent jobs. Second, the students’ narratives are largely centred on mobility and acquiring greater options rather than settlement. Third, Indian students come from a country that is an important trading partner for Australia. And last, like other migrants, the students live in transnational families that go beyond the traditional national framework of multiculturalism. This study draws on 35 open-ended individual and group interviews with Indians who arrived on student or spouse visas in 2005 or later and 12 persons who occupy leading positions in Indian community organisations, media and local government.

Money management and control in the Indian joint family across generations

This paper examines the mismatch between the impersonality of electronic money on the one hand and Australian customers’ desire to have a personal banking relationship on the other. This gap is illustrated by a critical appraisal of literature relating to the sociology of money, the adoption of information and communication technologies and self‐service technologies. The paper argues that bank‐marketing professionals adopt an activity‐centred social marketing strategy. This strategy places customers and their activities at the centre to help ensure a fit between payment activities, services, and values relating to money within different cultural contexts. The strategy has managerial implications for, when payments services are tracked according to customers and activities, the data required are different from data generated by following customer segments and products. An activity‐centred social‐marketing strategy has the potential to increase trust in banks and halt the shift of financial relationships to intermediaries such as brokers and financial planners.

Transnational family money : remittances, gifts and inheritance

This paper deals with the changing idea of money and the transnational Indian family across generations and life stages. It draws on a qualitative study of 38 first and second generation Indian migrants to Australia. For first generation migrants, sending money home is one of the important ways of expressing belonging and care for the transnational family. Over time, the remittances become contested in terms of their value and their equivalence to physical care, raising questions of belonging. With multiple migrants, the family centres on Australia, which now becomes the source country when children migrate elsewhere. Money and gifts are sent home to Australia or to other countries. The nuclear family is the main reference point for most of our second generation migrants, but there remain some gift exchanges with extended family and charitable donations. These donations reflect a sense of ancestry rather than the locus of family. Hence accounts of sending money to India need to be supplemented by studies of the diffusion of the transnational family across different nodes of the diaspora. The study of remittances has to reflect this diffusion and change in the transnational family if it is to adequately explain how money is the medium of family relationships.

Electronic Commerce and the Sociology of Money

Studies of money management and control will have more cross-cultural relevance if the family context of money across generations is taken into account. The study of money management and control in middle-income nuclear and joint family households in urban India illustrates the importance of examining money flows within the wider family context because there is a two-way flow of money beyond the married couple – between parents and adult children, siblings and other members of the extended family. In the three or four generational joint family, control and management at the household level is not necessarily duplicated for the constituent couples. We draw on open-ended interviews of 40 persons from 27 urban middle-income households in North India, between November 2007 and January 2008, to show that the male control of money is the dominant pattern. This pattern is linked to the ideology of male dominance that is found among the middle, lower middle and struggling households, particularly in non-metropolitan households. The upper-middle-class households predominantly in metropolitan households show a pattern of joint or independent control. The focus is on the couples money decisions within the context of the wider family.