bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Warm South
Authors: Holland Robert
Published: May 2019

Ever since the age of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, the Mediterranean has had a significant pull for Britons — including many painters and poets — who sought from it the inspiration, beauty, and fulfilment that evaded them at home. Referred to as ‘Magick Land’ by one traveller, dreams about the Mediterranean, and responses to it, went on to shape the culture of a nation. This book charts how a new sensibility arose from British engagement with the Mediterranean, ancient and modern. Ranging from Byron's poetry to Damien Hirst's installations, the book shows that while idealized visions and aspirations often met with disillusionment and frustration, the Mediterranean also offered a notably insular society the chance to enrich itself through an imagined world of colour, carnival, and sensual self-discovery.
An Enchanted Garden
Authors: Holland Robert
Published: May 2019

This chapter details British engagement with the Mediterranean from 1860 to 1890, highlighting British dilemmas in the field of culture during the High Victorian age. The Britons of the period remade their world in material terms, but also, eventually, in political ones. Many also confronted the frightening disintegration of their religious faith in the wake of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Thus, it is hardly surprising that in other matters, and above all in the cultural sphere, they sought ways of sticking to what was familiar about the past, or revising it in ways that did not entail the radical experiments or the disruption that they so deplored across the Channel. The Mediterranean, so embedded in the existing imaginative landscape, continued to be central to themes pervading British aesthetic and stylistic preferences, though increasingly absorbed among a widening array of other influences as a globalized world system took shape in however messy and eclectic a way.
Family experiences of care and protection services: the good, the bad and the hopeful
Authors: Featherstone Brid , Gupta Anna , Morris Kate , White Sue
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the experiences of families enmeshed in child welfare systems. Stories of pain, hurt, betrayal, and violence are told to professionals everyday. However, a key theme of this book is a concern that the language and theoretical and practice tools available to them are impoverished and increasingly inadequate. This is partly due to the inadequacy of a model that translates need to risk routinely, colonises a variety of sorrows and troubles within a child protection frame, and has abandoned or lost a sense of the contexts — economic and social — in which so many are living lives of quiet desperation. The chapter draws on a number of studies conducted by the authors, in particular a detailed study of families and their experiences of welfare services; and an enquiry on the role of the social worker in adoption, ethics, and human rights, which looked at the perspectives of birth families, adoptive parents, and adopted young people.
A social model: experiences in practice
Authors: Featherstone Brid , Gupta Anna , Morris Kate , White Sue
Published: May 2019

This chapter suggests some approaches to practice and offers examples of alternative models for child protection. Within a social model for protecting children, a multi-dimensional and contextualised understanding of social problems is required, as are services and professional practice which address the lack of material, social, and symbolic capital that cause harm to children and their families. For individual social workers working with individual families, as a start this means assessments, reports, and plans recognise and highlight the structural underpinnings of families' hardships, making them visible to professionals and to the families who are the subject of the assessment/report. There can be a recognition that solutions to problems are not only about individual change, but also reflect the impact of social and economic environments on individuals and families. However, all these developments are difficult in risk-focused case work approaches. The recent turn towards strengths-based case work may open up possibilities.
Crafting different stories: changing minds and hearts
Authors: Featherstone Brid , Gupta Anna , Morris Kate , White Sue
Published: May 2019

This chapter assesses how one might change the conversation on child protection. It explores the specific issues of seeking to effect social change within a ‘post-truth’ climate and discusses how one might draw from work in social psychology, cognitive linguistics, and the sociology of emotions to learn the craft of telling stories. It has long been clear that hurling ‘facts’ in the form of statistics at people is likely to change very few minds. Rather than facts and pie charts, it is stories that have the power to animate people and bring them together to change the world. Organisations such as the New Economics Foundation, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have been using methodologies derived from framing theory to explore how different stories could be crafted on poverty, child abuse, and neglect.
The sexual politics of gendered violence and women’s citizenship
Authors: Franzway Suzanne , Moulding Nicole , Wendt Sarah , Zufferey Carole , Chung Donna
Published: May 2019

This chapter argues that sexual politics is present in all aspects of our lives, including gendered violence, the state, and citizenship. It adds that sexual politics opens up new possibilities for understanding the persistent effects of domestic violence by shifting attention to the politics of gender relations. This shift away from the binary category of gender as men/women to the active and relational dynamics of sexual politics undercuts assumptions that gendered violence is natural or inevitable, or that violence is only caused by individuals. Sexual politics has material and discursive effects and offers an understanding of how the gendered dynamics of domestic violence and its long-term consequences have remained largely hidden from view. This chapter argues that the persistence of violence against women is implicated in the sexual politics of citizenship and the state. Hence, the challenge of violence against women is recognised as an issue for the state, citizenship, and society.
Gendered violence and the self
Authors: Franzway Suzanne , Moulding Nicole , Wendt Sarah , Zufferey Carole , Chung Donna
Published: May 2019

This chapter is devoted to questions about why intimate partner violence is understood in terms of its psychological impact on individual women. It suggests alternative ways that the serious psychological and emotional impact of intimate partner violence might be understood and addressed so that policy and practice may be more beneficial. The notion of coercive control has become an important explanatory concept, exposing how intimate partner violence is almost always experienced as repeated, patterned violence, intimidation, isolation, and fear. This chapter shows how gendered discourses, practices, and power relations that are embedded in domestic violence erode women's sense of themselves as persons, and hence their capabilities to exercise their citizenship.
Re-engaging lives
Authors: Franzway Suzanne , Moulding Nicole , Wendt Sarah , Zufferey Carole , Chung Donna
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines how the sexual politics of domestic violence gives rise to stigma and shame, eroding women's confidence and trust in others. The analysis presented here therefore makes a new contribution to knowledge about how intimate partner violence interrupts and changes women's social relationships and affiliations in ways that have lasting effects on the capacity to exercise citizenship. In common with findings in relation to employment, housing, and mental health, this chapter shows that women do not regain the levels of social engagement they had prior to intimate partner violence, and that the nature of social participation is also changed by intimate partner violence in ways that are not wholly negative. It explores how intimate partner violence affects women's participatory citizenship and the interconnections with its impact on the three other key life domains. This chapter also examines how women rebuild the social relationships and connections in their lives.
Campaigns for women’s freedom from violence
Authors: Franzway Suzanne , Moulding Nicole , Wendt Sarah , Zufferey Carole , Chung Donna
Published: May 2019

This chapter shows that feminists themselves have struggled with the obstacles created by the fitful and damaging politics of ignorance that help to sustain gender inequality. Whether unequal gender relations are merely natural, or whether men's identity depends on maintaining their dominant position as patriarch of the family by necessary force, or whether somehow women's psychology or childhood socialisation leads them to attract abusive men into their lives, or whether women need to learn how to manage their violent partner for the sake of the marriage, the children or their relationship with god are all questions that feminists have needed to work through. And, the chapter argues, this work must continue. The discursive effects of a politics of ignorance about violence against women have an impact on women as much as on men, and on our social and political understanding of violence as much as on social institutions and the state.
Transforming sexual politics
Authors: Franzway Suzanne , Moulding Nicole , Wendt Sarah , Zufferey Carole , Chung Donna
Published: May 2019

This chapter returns to the topics broached in the previous chapters and considers the progress made so far. It shows how there have been achievements in many countries in terms of housing, law reform, policy development, and the provision of support services for women leaving intimate partner violence. But, while these developments are important and could go some way towards improving the safety of women and their children, this chapter argues that not all state responses are sufficiently informed about the nature of the gender inequalities that enable violence, nor of the specific impact of intimate partner violence. It points to areas where state responses to intimate partner violence must improve in order to build women's capabilities to exercise full citizenship. After all, male-dominated sexual politics continues to locate intimate partner violence as an issue of the private sphere while, at the same time, claiming that gender equality has been won anyway and is therefore irrelevant.
Introduction
Authors: Dowling Sally , Pontin David , Boyer Kate
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter provides a brief background into the seminars which have helped to shape the publication of this book. Here, the emphasis is on breastfeeding, as it is a policy priority for the four devolved UK governments with a responsibility for health and is acknowledged to be important in improving public health and reducing health inequalities. However, there is a clear relationship in the United Kingdom between socioeconomic status and breastfeeding, with significantly lower rates among women living in the most deprived areas. There are also differences between younger mothers and older mothers, women with different levels of formal education, and women from different ethnic backgrounds. The variation in available breastfeeding support is also part of the story, as is the loss of intergenerational kin-based knowledge networks. In addition, a whole range of micro-practices, social engagements, and events unfold when mothers try to integrate breastfeeding into the rest of their lives. It is these parts of the story that the seminar series focused on — the nuances of breastfeeding babies as a social practice.
Weaving breastfeeding practices into policy
Authors: Newell Lucila
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores breastfeeding as a practice through a sociological and geographical perspective. More particularly, it closely follows E. Shove's work on social practices to think about the everyday practice of breastfeeding. The aim is to change the type of questions asked about breastfeeding, and to change how the issue is framed, to inspire people to develop alternative policy proposals. It suggests a framework focusing on practices to bring in the wealth of research and perspectives on breastfeeding that focus on the wider emotional, social, and cultural issues that affect breastfeeding in a way that can inform policy practices. The chapter describes what a practice-based approach means and looks like, and how it differs from behaviouralist approaches. It also outlines how breastfeeding relates to its competing practice: feeding babies with infant formula. Threaded through this analysis are ways in which these practices reproduce each other, and their patterns of recruitment and defection. The chapter then analyses the elements and histories that make up breastfeeding practice today, and ends with thoughts on how these may move policy forward.
‘Missing milk’: an exploration of migrant mothers’ experiences of infant feeding in the UK
Authors: Condon Louise
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the experiences of parents born abroad who are raising a child in the United Kingdom. It is recognised that work, paid and unpaid, can pose challenges to exclusive and even partial breastfeeding, and such challenges are exacerbated when mothers are migrants and live in precarious social and financial circumstances. A complex mixture of factors influences infant feeding behaviours, including ethnicity, health beliefs, and financial demands; and the economic necessity to return to work soon after delivery has been previously identified as a factor reducing migrant women's ability to breastfeed. Who migrants are and what is known about their breastfeeding and weaning behaviours are addressed, and the chapter then reflects upon two empirical studies conducted with migrant parents in the South West of England. In this way, the voices of migrants from a variety of migrant backgrounds are heard and their experiences explored in depth. Throughout the chapter the concept of ‘missing milk’ is also discussed, and the consequences for babies, parents, and society raised. ‘Missing milk’ is the breast milk that babies would customarily have received, which has decreased following migration.
Changing cultures of night-time breastfeeding and sleep in the US
Authors: Tomori Cecilia
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at the cultural assumptions that childbearing requires specialised medical knowledge in the United States, where expectant parents usually receive advice on all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care from multiple medical experts. This guidance divides the care of mothers and infants under the supervision of separate medical experts, and further fragments various aspects of infant care, including feeding and sleep. The chapter uses historical and ethnographic research to explore the origins of these assumptions and their consequences for American parents who embark on breastfeeding. It suggests that severing the links between these evolutionarily and physiologically connected domains has had a significant detrimental impact on night-time infant care. Parents have been left without adequate community cultural knowledge about the interaction of breastfeeding and sleep, and assume that these processes are separate. As a result, they are frequently surprised by infants' night-time behaviour and have difficulties navigating night-time breastfeeding and sleep. These challenges constitute an important element of an already formidable set of barriers to breastfeeding in the United States, where structural support is extremely limited and breastfeeding remains a controversial practice.
Law of lactation breaks in the UK: employers’ perspectives
Authors: Fraser Melanie
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks into the legal understandings that managers have of lactation breaks. It gives a summary of the key legislation applicable in the United Kingdom and discusses how this is applied within the workplace. The chapter also gives some suggestions for how to improve the legislative backdrop in which women make decisions about their return to work, breastfeeding, and how this process can be better managed by employers. In the project described here, managers, human resources staff, and strategic leaders in a UK public sector organisation were asked about lactation breaks. This investigation shows a real-world context for decision-making around infant feeding. Managers displayed limited knowledge of the legislation and called for goodwill from all parties to resolve issues, better guidance, and perhaps legislation on the topic. There were some hesitancies about allowing a baby to visit the workplace, because of lack of suitable facilities, and health and safety issues. This chapter indicates that better procedures are needed for the process of returning to work as a new parent, and that lactation breaks should be part of that conversation.
Making breastfeeding social: the role of brelfies in breastfeeding’s burgeoning publics
Authors: Giles Fiona
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at the online circulation of breastfeeding selfies — or brelfies — and asks what their benefits might be in terms of making breastfeeding easier. It looks at brelfies as social media activism, drawing attention to embodied mothering, and upending assumptions about the solitary nature of maternity. It argues that brelfies provide a means through which breastfeeding can emerge from its existing practical, conceptual, and imaginary confines, by communicating images of breastfeeding to an almost limitless audience. Not only have brelfies attracted extensive media coverage, raising awareness about breastfeeding in the community, the images also provide a unique form of communication between breastfeeding mothers and their friends, families, and children, as mothers see themselves in the act of taking their own photos. By considering the implications of increased images of women breastfeeding in public — as well as the increased circulation of images of women breastfeeding generally — this chapter argues that brelfies invite us to reconceptualise breastfeeding in public as breastfeeding in social contexts more broadly: in short, to reimagine breastfeeding in relation to its many publics.
Forgiving: the end of public education
Authors: Gunter Helen M.
Published: May 2019

This chapter suggests that complex forms of discrimination are developing within and external to schools: within-school segregation is happening through the use of data to determine particular curriculum pathways and ability grouping of children; between-schools segregation through the use of data to determine high-status academic schools in comparison with ‘sink’ schools; and beyond schools, where children are separating themselves from school through absence and parents are making proactive decisions to home school. The chapter examines the construction of this fragmented and chaotic ‘system’ by considering the possibilities for reconciliation through examining Hannah Arendt's work on forgiving. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity to the reforms to public services commons education puts the focus on a form of depoliticisation by privatism where the opportunity and capacity for forgiveness is in peril.
Thinking politically again: the conditions for public education
Authors: Gunter Helen M.
Published: May 2019

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The chapter recaps that the book used Hannah Arendt's thinking to explore the catastrophe that is unfolding in plain sight in public services education and the wider political culture in which it is located. The investigation into education policy reveals the ‘new modes of negating the human’ through the disposability of children and the professionals committed to educating them. The chapter begins by summarising what is unfolding and testing it against the conditions for totalitarianism that Arendt identifies. It notes the trends in the crystallisation of those conditions, and the dangers evident in the death of political thinking, talking, and action. A study of public services education is a site where this can be recognised, but it is also where politics is in evidence in regard to both resistance and the resilience of a commons approach.
The demography of grandparenthood in 16 European countries and two North American countries
Authors: Margolis Rachel , Arpino Bruno
Published: May 2019

Intergenerational relationships between grandparents and grandchildren can offer tremendous benefits to family members of each generation. The demography of grandparenthood – the timing, length and population characteristics – shape the extent to which young children have grandparents available, how many grandparents are alive, and the duration of overlap with grandparents. In this chapter, we examine how the demography of grandparenthood varies across 16 countries in Europe and two countries in North America, and why it is changing. Next, we examine variation in two key determinants of intergenerational relationships – the labour force participation and health of grandparents. Last, we comment on some important changes in the demography of grandparenthood that may come in the future.
Grandparental childcare: a reconceptualisation of family policy regimes
Authors: Price Debora , Ribe Eloi , Gessa Giorgio Di , Glaser Karen
Published: May 2019

In this chapter we argue that to understand the ways that policy, structure and culture all shape how grandmothers help to care for children, we need to re-think our approach to these issues. We need in particular to think about policies in terms of how they impact on mothers and grandmothers simultaneously, providing different and complex incentives and opportunities in each generation. This leads us to conceptualise childcare as something that is organised in the wider family, and to think of family care versus formal care when considering the wider impacts on individuals and society, rather than focussing on maternal versus non-maternal childcare. It also necessitates thinking about how cultures of gender, family and paid work might be influencing family-level discussions and negotiations. We show that conceptualising childcare as a family collaboration framed by policy and culture helps to explain substantial variations in grandmaternal childcare across Europe..
Grandparenting in developing South East Asia: comparative perspectives from Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam
Authors: Knodel John , Teerawichitchainan Bussarawan
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the critical roles played by demographic trends and development levels in explaining cross-country variations in grandparental care in Southeast Asia. Based on analyses of recent national-level surveys of older persons in Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, we examine the extent and circumstances of grandparenting and their consequences from the perspective of grandparents. Results indicate that substantial proportions of older persons live in households with coresident grandchildren and commonly provide grandparental childcare. Although skip-generation households remain uncommon in all three countries, in accordance with development levels they are by far most common in Thailand and least in Myanmar. Differences in economic development and fertility trends account for much of the observed differences in grandparental care by affecting grandchildren availability and migration of adult children. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of changing grandparenting patterns for the renegotiation and reinterpretation of the intergenerational contract in the coming decades..
Second-parenthood realities, third-age ideals: (grand)parenthood in the context of poverty and HIV/AIDS
Authors: Hoffman Jaco
Published: May 2019

Within contexts of poverty and HIV/AIDS in (South) Africa, this chapter positions itself at the interface of the historical-moral engagement of grandparents caring for grandchildren and contemporary social realities and aspirations. The phenomenon of the oldest generation caring for younger generations builds on a long-established continuum of social structures and norms related to intergenerational support. However, in the context of HIV/AIDS they are increasingly being forced to take sole responsibility for their grandchildren, including legal guardianship. In this chapter I argue that the point of departure for these grandmothers is an obligatory contribution perspective which often overrides their own needs and aspirations with implications for their own care futures. During the past decade, however, an increasingly more rights-based / corrective discourse developed through which expectations and demands of younger generations are questioned and the obligatory contribution discourse is contested or at least relativized through negotiation..
The composition of grandparent childcare: gendered patterns in cross-national perspective
Authors: Craig Lyn , Hamilton Myra , Brown Judith E.
Published: May 2019

Grandparents are important providers of childcare while their adult children participate in work and other activities. The literature suggests that grandmothers are more likely than grandfathers to provide care for their grandchildren, and that the prevalence and intensity of grandparent childcare provision varies by country. But research is lacking on the composition of grandparent childcare time, and whether this varies across countries. What patterns do we see in the gendered distribution of childcare tasks among grandparents? To what extent does this vary across countries with different employment patterns, family policy regimes and norms of familial obligation? Using Time Use Surveys of Australia, Korea, Italy and France this chapter will explore how grandparents are spending their time with grandchildren. It reveals cross-national similarities and differences in the gendered distribution and relative composition of care and discusses the implications for grandmothers and grandfathers in the four different welfare regimes.
Grandfamilies in the United States: an intersectional analysis
Authors: Dolbin-MacNab Megan L. , Few-Demo April L.
Published: May 2019

This chapter utilised the theoretical framework of intersectionality to provide a critical analysis of grandparents raising grandchildren, or grandfamilies, in the United States. The analysis focused on how grandparents’ multiple social identities may overlap and conflict with one another, and how these social identities are embedded within historical and cultural contexts that privilege some social identities over others. By considering representational, structural, and political intersectionality, the current analysis revealed that oppressive discourses related to age, gender, race, and class are central to understanding the challenges facing grandfamilies. Even the family structure itself can be a basis for marginalisation. Finally, the analysis also revealed how social systems of oppression are reproduced structurally through federal and state policies that, while designed to be supportive, may further oppress and disempower grandfamilies with specific social identities..
Can Chinese grandparents say no? A comparison of grandmothers in two Asian cities
Authors: Goh Esther C.L. , Wang Sheng-li
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines two dominant research constructs namely, ‘cultural obligation’ and ‘intergenerational reciprocity’ in caring for grandchildren in Chinese societies – Fuzhou and Singapore. Drawing on Social Relational Theory (SRT), it examines the agency of grandmothers through unpacking the rationales for their involvement or non-involvement in childcare, and the goals and meanings they ascribe to their decisions. Grandparents are viewed as agents: capable of setting goals, devising plans, strategies and taking actions to achieve their goals in the relational contexts with their adult children and grandchildren. The key research questions addressed in this chapter are : (1) to what extent do grandmothers in Fuzhou and Singapore are influenced in their decisions to provide childcare by similar yet diverse Confucian roots; (2) understanding the socio-cultural discourses of grandparenthood in Fuzhou and Singapore; and (3) whether such discourses will constrain or facilitate their sense of agency in decision making.
The clustering of access to schools
Authors: Gorard Stephen
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at the various possible reasons and solutions for why and how educational disadvantage occurs. It examines how factors described in the previous chapter, such as segregation, influence whether children go to school with others like them. The clustering of students with similar characteristics in particular schools is partly determined by factors outside education — indeed, often outside immediate government control. The economic cycle, the nature of regional populations, residential segregation within regions, local population density, quality of public transport (especially in rural areas), and patterns of recent immigration are all determinants of either the level or trend in socio-economic status (SES) segregation between schools. Other determinants, however, are quite clearly within education and within government control.
School improvement
Authors: Gorard Stephen
Published: May 2019

This chapter concerns school improvement. It argues that, until recently, school improvement policies have either been created on little robust evidence at all, or have simply been based on the correlates of the kinds of school effectiveness studies described in the previous chapter. This is a very misleading approach because high- and low-attaining schools might differ in a range of ways that are unrelated to whether their results are better or worse. This includes their type (such as academy or community school), their location, and even their décor (potted plants for example). School improvement policies have also been influenced by highly vocal single studies, and developers acting as agents selling their wares via conferences and similar. Teacher action research is widely used but is not really research let alone action research as originally devised. As such, none of these are appropriate for advising national or local policy on improving schools.
Learning beyond institutions
Authors: Gorard Stephen
Published: May 2019

This chapter summarises in three strands the common theme of learning or raising academic attainment outside of normal school (or other educational institution) hours. The strands concern out-of-school hours interventions, trying to enhance parental involvement in their child's school work, and learning or self-teaching entirely separate from institutions. This chapter shows how relatively formal activities seemingly unrelated to attainment can benefit attainment at school. However, they do not seem to be able to reduce the poverty gradient in attainment. Moreover, using parents more as a resource for their children's education may not have a beneficial impact at all, and will increase rather than reduce the poverty gradient, unless parents are brought into activities conducted in schools — which is then no longer ‘education otherwise’ but just more school.
Widening participation to higher education
Authors: Gorard Stephen
Published: May 2019

This chapter focuses on widening participation to undergraduate higher education. It considers when in the ‘pipeline’ to higher education these socio-economic patterns first appear, when are they strongest, what causes them, and what can be done about them. The chapter then considers how this stratification can be overcome by using contextualised admissions (CA), as is ongoing policy in the United Kingdom at the time of writing. Contextualised admissions entails the use by universities of contextual data about prospective students' socio-economic and educational circumstances to inform admission decision-making, usually by reducing the grade requirements for entry where it is clear that an applicant comes from a disadvantaged family, neighbourhood, or school environment. CA policies are therefore a kind of positive discrimination within the current set-up.
Widening participation to other opportunities
Authors: Gorard Stephen
Published: May 2019

This chapter brings place and time more strongly to the fore in explanatory models of learning and distinguishes between biographical and historical changes. It also tries to distinguish between the determinants of, and barriers to, participation. The chapter provides two explanations: one based on choice and one based on structural and other determinants, arguing that either or both is possible. People's patterns of participation may be determined by prior (and future) events in their lives, or these events may create a personal culture that colours the objective opportunity structure in such a way that people's choices are frequently predictable. In fact, rather than seeing these two mechanisms of agency as alternatives, the chapter points out that they could be different descriptions of the same events, with both contributing to our understanding. The first appears more naturally when analysing in-depth data as narratives, while the second appears more naturally when the same data is used to create predictive models.
Where now for equity and effectiveness policy?
Authors: Gorard Stephen
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers solutions for a more effective education policy. Education mostly appears to reflect society, which suggests that the root cause of inequality is at least partly not educational. Education policy cannot be expected to solve issues such as child poverty alone, in the short term, or even at all. This means that education policy has to be humbler, but it still has important roles to play — in ensuring that inequalities are not worsened by the education system, and by promoting structures and interventions that can ‘compensate for society’, to some extent. In this light, this chapter provides examples of specific policy proposals, considers where policy-makers have erred, and shows how policy can work with research.
Context: a survey of the literature
Authors: Knoepfel Peter
Published: May 2019

This chapter deals with 19 recent contributions from the literature, which aim to provide a systematic categorization of public policy resources (Meltsner, Clapham, Lapeyronnie, Lacam, Kiun, Davern, Lemieux, Newig, Söderlund, Blin, Sabatier & Weible, Hood & Margetts, Dowding, Vesan & Graziano, Sauer, Imbeau, Compston, Klüver and Dente). It concludes that all of the ten resources dealt with in the current book feature in this literature, that the value of resources is relative, and that the contributions by Dente, Compston, Hude & Margetts are closest to mine while those of Söderland, Davers and Meltsner differ most significantly from it. The chapter insists on the exchangeability, transferability and objectivability of public action resources and rejects the inclusion in the definition of personal, individual characteristics of the actors, to whom such resources belong. Furthermore, it stresses the observation that not only public actors but also civil society actors have public action resources.
Conceptual development of the resource-based approach
Authors: Knoepfel Peter
Published: May 2019

This chapter contains an in-depth definition of the aforementioned resource-based approach to public policy resources, which is usually used for analysing the institutional conditions for sustainable resource use in connection with the postulate of sustainable development. It exploits the concept of institutional resource regimes (IRR) rooted in constitutional and civil law, which is illustrated by the analysis of the governance of the resource ‘public documentary information’ (big data) conducted by Olgiati Pelet.
Information
Authors: Knoepfel Peter
Published: May 2019

This chapter is dedicated to the resource Information, which has become an indispensable key resource for both public and private actors involved in public policy processes in recent years. Information has become a real common pool resource. Nevertheless, each of the actors will try to obtain advantages from exclusive access to Information and secrecy. This is particularly true of target groups, which are the most important owners of such resources in technical policy fields. The examples presented in this chapter stem from security and risk policies, (institutional) transparency policies, economic, environmental, archive and pharmaceutical product policies. The chapter illustrates strategies of exclusion and proliferation for each of the three actor groups and other specific uses of the resource Information, particularly in policy implementation processes.
Organization
Authors: Knoepfel Peter
Published: May 2019

This chapter deals with Organization which is the existence (or absence) of adequate internal and external structures and procedures that enable an actor to pursue their interests and values during the different policy production stages (program formulation, implementation). It consists of real world interaction processes between specific actors (resource Personnel), which are regulated by rules that vary in terms of precision (general and policy-specific rules). In relation to public actors this resource corresponds to what we call a political-administrative arrangement (PAA), which shapes implementation processes in accordance with administrative procedural acts. Such arrangements can be made visible by retracing the dossier circulation process (including among decision-makers and other actors invited or obliged to provide advance notices), which are specific for the production of various categories of policy outputs. The chapter provides examples from water protection policy, institutional administrative reform policy, environmental policy, and agricultural and health policy. Its main focus concerns all kinds of administrative reforms aimed at improving the coordination between different public policies.
Time
Authors: Knoepfel Peter
Published: May 2019

Within each policy formulation and implementation process, the options available to the actors are limited both by the rules governing decision-making (institutions) and the related time budgets, which clearly demonstrate the resource-related character of time. Time is frequently scarce, especially for those who consider that the need for a public intervention is urgent (usually the beneficiary groups). Other actors can wait (frequently the target groups) or they may even try to gain time by interrupting both policy formulation and, particularly, policy implementation activities. Thus, (subjective) Time is definitively an omnipresent public action resource. The chapter uses examples from all kinds of emergency policies or policies that are deliberately delayed and hampered through the adoption of time-consuming strategies by one of the three actor groups (environmental policies, natural disaster policies, climate adaption policies, spatial-planning policies). The chapter stresses the role of procedural deadlines, moratoria, time-consuming appeal procedures and, again, the relational character of the resource.
Work Conditions
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the role of the structure and content of work in the case of the housewife. Answers given by the forty women in the sample to questions about work tasks suggest that certain characteristics of housework may be more or less uniformly experienced as dissatisfying while others are potentially rewarding. A look at the social class dimension also indicates that there is a considerable area of shared response to housework which may reflect on the nature of the work itself, and the conditions under which it is done. Hence it would seem both helpful and important to examine a number of aspects of work that industrial sociology has highlighted as critical in the explanation of job satisfaction. These are the experiences of monotony, fragmentation, and excessive pace in work and social interaction patterns. Two other dimensions of work looked at in this chapter include working hours and the technical environment.
Children
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter studies the subject of children in the case of the housewife. The interviews document well the dissatisfying social context in which the role of mother is carried out today. Social isolation and constant responsibility bring about discontent. Competition with the demands of housewifery means that to the mother as houseworker, the child is sometimes seen as an obstacle to job satisfaction; for the child, the need to juxtapose its demands with those of housework cannot but be experienced as frustrating. Although men do something to remedy this difficulty by involving themselves in child-care, the trend could be seen as a retrogressive one from the women's point of view. Ultimately, satisfaction with housework may be increased, but only at the expense of satisfaction with child-care.
Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers how the meaning of childbirth is interlocked with a society's attitudes towards women, arguing that it is important to appreciate the history of motherhood as it appears to us in industrialised society today, because our sort of motherhood is unique in history. What happens to women when they become mothers reflects what has already happened to them as they became women. Like childbirth, femininity and masculinity follow different cultural patterns. The industrialised world today insists on certain sex differences while having moved towards an idea of sex equality. This chapter shows how equality and difference are compatible, since equality in this ideology does not mean ‘sameness’.
Remember Pregnancy is a State of Health
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter argues that pregnancy is a medical condition — a condition to be monitored by doctors. Between seven and eighteen visits to the general practitioner (GP), local authority, or hospital clinic were made during pregnancy by the sample women for antenatal care: the average was thirteen. Going to the doctor suggests illness, and two other features of illness are associated with pregnancy in modern industrialised society: a pregnant woman, like other ‘patients’, is allowed to give up her normal work, and is encouraged to hand over responsibility for the management of her condition to others (the medical profession). Moreover, pregnancy produces unpleasant symptoms, each of which, in other circumstances, can be a sign of illness. Even in pregnancy some of these require medication, a habit not normally associated with health.
Menus
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines a major theme in the early weeks of motherhood — feeding. Indeed, for months the mother's concern for the baby tends to be focused on what, how much, and how often it eats. A baby that is feeding and growing ‘well’ is a prize for the mother's efforts — a tangible token of her love and work. Conversely, a baby who gains weight more slowly than it ‘should’, and who perhaps cries a lot and seems unsatisfied, is a sign of maternal failure. Of course such an attitude is fanned by the professional advisers of baby who take it as axiomatic that the baby's growth and happiness must depend on a mother's care. A new mother listens to these advisers, but she also listens to those who have reared babies without the benefits of professional training: mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters, and friends. And she listens to her baby, who may have ideas of its own. The chapter shows that what goes into the mouths of babies is a mix of all these ingredients, a compromise between the different messages.
Domestic Politics
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines fatherhood. It shows that, while biology makes fathers dispensable, society carves out particular roles for them. These roles are shaped by history and circumstance, yet in a sense the problem for every society is the same. If men are to feel involved with (or at least responsible for) their children, they must be impressed by a sense of indispensability: they must feel necessary. Our industrialised culture achieves this end via a logic of economic dependence: women and children must be supported by men. The logic is reinforced by an appeal to a set of ideas about the nature of both men and family life. A proper man fathers children, who are then visible confirmation of his sexual and social normality. A proper family is made up of a male and female parent and their children. Looked at another way, the problem for men is how to share the experience.
‘A Friend a Day Keeps the Doctor Away’: Social Support and Health
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

Among the social origins of the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome study, as described in Chapter 1, was the idea that social support is good for health. This chapter attempts to draw together ideas, insights, and problems from disparate areas of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, history, epidemiology, and medicine to address the question: why, in the first place, should anyone suppose that social support can be helpful to childbearing women and their families? The discussions cover the health outcomes influenced by social support; the link between social support and reproduction; how social support works; and the research challenge posed by the certain hostility of modern medicine towards the role of social factors in influencing patterns of health and illness.
Sickness in Salonica and Other Stories
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter attempts to provide context for the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome (SSPO) study covered in the subsequent chapters by considering the causal relationships between the social aspects of people's lives and their health. It reviews various groups of intervention studies to justify the argument that giving people social support is likely to be good for their health. The SSPO study was planned against this background. It is obvious that social interventions in health, although adding up to impressive evidence that social support is health-promoting, have varied ethically, methodologically, conceptually and in terms of the policy concerns they address. A major problem in understanding social interventions lies with the challenge these may pose to commonsense understandings of how health is best promoted.
Who’s Afraid of the Randomized Controlled Trial?
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter details the design of the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome (SSPO) study. It describes the ‘hybrid’ nature of the study, which made it difficult for the author to secure funding for it. The Department of Health eventually agreed to fund the SSPO study for three years from September 1985. By then, the author had left the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, with its resource of medical and epidemiological expertise, and the final protocol named a collaborator there, Dr Adrian Grant, who had extensive experience in the randomized controlled trial field, and was willing to help at all stages of the study.
‘One of Mummy’s Ladies’
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the role of the research midwives in the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome (SSPO) study — what they did, said and felt; how they were perceived by the study women; the impact of the study on their lives. The midwives' role in the study was made up of conflicting elements. First, the injunction to provide social support seemed to them at times at odds with adhering to the methodology of a randomized controlled trial. Second, the midwives found that providing social support in practice had to contend with a burden of social disadvantage and difficulty in the lives of the study women, which was likely to overwhelm any chance of the social support intervention having any beneficial impact. Thirdly, in attempting to provide support in such circumstances, the midwives sometimes found themselves up against gaps and deficiencies in the health and welfare services which they were powerless to change. Fourthly, there was the problem of their own task in all of this, a problem which could be reduced to the question: who supports the supporters?