Speculating about work: dinnertime narratives among dual-earner American families

2012 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Narrative Study ◽  
Cultural Ideologies ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Dual Earner ◽  
The Family ◽  
Work Narratives

AbstractAt the family dinner table, the working lives of employed adults often enter the home through conversational narratives about work experiences. Rather than offering only finished, coherent accounts, however, many adults speculate about upcoming work activities and potential outcomes, decisions to be made, and possible repercussions of resolutions to past or ongoing problems. Drawing on a corpus of videotaped dinnertime interaction, this essay investigates such future-oriented work narratives among 16 middle-class dual-earner families in Los Angeles, California. The essay first reviews recent studies of narrative as social practice in everyday interaction that have problematized a focus on completed past-tense stories in canonical approaches to narrative. It then develops a language socialization perspective, which asserts that children and other novices acquire linguistic practices and cultural ideologies (like those about work) through observation of and participation in social interactions with others around them. The frequency and temporality of spontaneous talk about paid work among the observed families is analyzed with attention to children's participation in work discourse. A distinction is developed between past-tense narratives that recount completed or resolved experiences and those that remain unresolved and oriented toward the future. The essay concludes with a discussion of the relevance of such future projection for narrative study.

Haptic Sociality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Harness Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Sequential Analysis ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The Body ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
The Family ◽  
Tactile Communication ◽  
Participation Frameworks

This chapter extends the sequential analysis of human action to encompass intimate co-operative action, accomplished through the haptic, temporally unfolding intertwining of multiple bodies. The focus is on the construction through public social practice of tactile intercorporeality. Within a basic social institution, the family, members make use of culturally appropriate tactile communication (including the hug, the kiss, and other intertwinings of the body) during moments of affectively rich supportive interchanges. Materials for the study are drawn from video recordings of naturally occurring social interaction in thirty-two Los Angeles families who were part of the UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families. Examination of forms of experiential embodiment is important for articulating the participation frameworks through which affectively rich intimate social relationships are established, maintained, and negotiated.

Gender and Social Security: Some Lessons from Europe

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann-Charlotte Ståhlberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Sickness Benefit ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Dual Earner ◽  
The Family ◽  
Gender Neutral ◽  
The Individual

Different social security schemes affect men and women differently. This article compares the family or single earner model with the individual or dual earner model and examines their impact on gender inequality. However, even where social security schemes are designed to be gender neutral, when applied in a context that is systematically structured by gender, it points out that they will have a different impact on men and women. The article examines the ways in which supposedly gender-neutral rules, in sickness benefit, survivors' pensions and old age pensions have affected men and women in Sweden and concludes that, if countries wish to achieve equal economic outcomes for men and women, they will need to introduce measures to equalise men's and women's commitments to the home and the labour market, and to enable women to attain higher-paid jobs on the same basis as men.

scholarly journals The Tricky ’True Object’: Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination and Historicity

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 210
Author(s):  
Miklos Hadas
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
French Version ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Church

Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination was published in English in 2001, three years after the appearance of the French version. In order to deconstruct in vivo the working of sociological paradigm-alchemy, a close reading of the Bourdieusian argument is offered. After summing up the main thesis of the book, Bourdieu’s statements will be intended to be questioned, according to which the school, the family, the state and the church would reproduce, in the long run, masculine domination. The paper will also seek to identify the methodological trick of the Bourdieusian vision on history, namely that, metaphorically speaking, he compares the streaming river to the riverside cliffs. It will be argued that when Bourdieu discusses ‘the constancy of habitus’, the ‘permanence in and through change’, or the ‘strength of the structure’, he extends his paradigm about the displacement of the social structure to the displacement of the men/women relationship. Hence, it will be suggested that, in opposition to Bourdieu’s thesis, masculine domination is not of universal validity but its structural weight and character have fundamentally changed in the long run, i.e. the masculine habitual centre gradually shifted from a social practice governed by the drives of physical violence to symbolic violence.

scholarly journals Work and Career Experiences of Men from Families without College Experience

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Woodside ◽  
Melinda Gibbons ◽  
John Davidson ◽  
Christine Hannon ◽  
Jeffrey Sweeney
Keyword(s):  
Family Of Origin ◽  
College Experience ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Family Influence ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Post Secondary Education ◽  
Career Experiences ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
Adult Men ◽  
The Family

A dearth of research exists exploring the career and work development of adult men and the influence of family-of-origin on that development. In this qualitative study, the researchers used a phenomenological approach to examine the career and work experiences of men whose parents have no education beyond high school and the influences of family on these experiences. We describe five constituents: (a) what work is like; (b) preparation/education; (c) who or what influenced them; (d) how to act at work; and (e) challenges/opportunities/choices; and one essence: mottos from father, which articulate the meaning of the experience of work and career and the family influence on the experience. In conclusion, we provide implications for counselors working with adult men whose parents lack post-secondary education.

Suzanne Lacy between Kaprow and Chicago

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Amelia Jones
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Radical Innovations ◽  
Judy Chicago

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

“A Fly in the Buttermilk”

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Members ◽  
White Family ◽  
White Families ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Domestic Migration ◽  
White Couples ◽  
The Family

This chapter compares the discursive strategies that black-white couples and their families drew on to navigate the integration of black spouses into white extended families. White Carioca families engaged in more openly racist opposition, racist humor, and/or indirect insults to express discomfort with blacks marrying into the family. In an “irony of opposition,” past race-mixing in Carioca white families did not shield black spouses from these sentiments. This countered the myth of racial democracy in which color is not an impediment to interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, Carioca respondents were less likely to report resistance in white families than Angelino couples. U.S. couples' higher rates of domestic migration resulted in less integration of black spouses into white family life than among Brazilian couples, whose tight-knit family relationships led to black spouses' greater incorporation. Los Angeles couples understood white family members as using the discourse of “expressing concerns” about the relationship, then moving to more overt discouragement of marrying black partners. Couples understood this “expressing concern” discourse as an attempt at social desirability on the part of white family members, emblematic of U.S. “color-blind” racism.This chapter shows how intermarriage can leave white supremacy, anti-blackness, and racial boundaries intact within the family.

Songs of their lives: A narrative study of three older Korean immigrants in Los Angeles

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
Eun Cho
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean Immigrants ◽  
Emotional Communication ◽  
Narrative Study ◽  
Older Immigrants ◽  
The Past ◽  
Older Korean Immigrants ◽  
Temporal Moments

Conceptualized as a narrative inquiry, this study explored how music permeates the lives of older Korean immigrants in the United States. By closely examining three individuals’ lived experiences through the narratives they told, the study aimed to illuminate the complexity, depth, and uniqueness of meanings embedded in the musical lives of older immigrants. Narrative data revealed that while all interviewees had lived in the same time periods and went through many similar life events, each individual used different “colors and shapes” to “paint” their musical lives. Yet, some common themes also appeared from the narrative data: songs in the lives of the older immigrants portrayed their personhood, including who they are, where they come from, and what they like/dislike. Also, as a means of emotional communication, songs were intrinsically related to temporal moments at particular circumstances in the past, often paired with affective reactions. Finally, songs helped make sense of the socio-historical contexts in which the older immigrants have lived.

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