Daughters-in-Law in Negotiating the Intergenerational Contract in Rural China: A Qualitative Case Study

Daughters-in-law play a key role in intergenerational relationships, especially in Rural China. Albeit, their voices are less heard and examined. This study explores how daughters-in-law in Rural China view and negotiate intergenerational contracts with their older adult parents-in-law. A qualitative case study design was used, and multiple data collection methods (including semi-structured interviews, observation and document review) with thematic analysis were employed. Findings highlight that daughters-in-law play a key role in shaping the intergenerational contracts between their spouse and their spouse’s parents. In particular, the daughters-in-law provided instrumental support to their parents-in-law who were without self-care abilities or at risk when their adult child (the daughter-in-law’s spouse) went to the city/county for work. There were also unique findings highlighting diverse negotiations of the intergenerational contract between daughters-in-law and their older adult parents-in-law. In the context of growing austerity and the current pandemic, whereby informal social supports and networks become key to older adults’ wellbeing, identifying strengths and barriers of intergenerational support from daughters-in-law, is significant to support both the individual members and family wellbeing.

Gender Imbalance, Marriage Squeeze and Multiple Biological Clocks: Exploring the Challenges to Intergenerational Contract in North India

This paper maps the impact of gender imbalance on intergenerational relations in north India. It uses the idea of multiple biological clocks to understand the impact that gender imbalance and male marriage squeeze have on two categories of persons: “overage” unmarried sons and their aging parents, and the inter-generational contract between them within the family-household. De-linking the idea of the biological clock from the female body, this paper demonstrates that social understandings of bodily progression are equally significant for men, who, in the Indian context, need to marry by a certain age, and their elderly parents who need to be cared for. In north India, where family-household unit is the most important welfare and security institution for the elderly, disruptions to household formation due to bride shortage caused by sex ratio imbalance, is subjecting families to severe stress. Families with unmarried sons struggle with anxieties centred on the inability to arrange marriages for aging sons, questions of allocation of household labor, the continuation of family line, and lack of care for the elderly. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in north India, this paper explores the tensions and negotiations between elderly parents and unmarried sons concerning the fulfillment (or lack of it) of the intergenerational contract against the backdrop of gender imbalance. It concludes by discussing the various strategies available to families in crisis that involve shame-faced adoption of domestic and care tasks by unmarried sons or bringing cross-region brides who then provide productive, reproductive, and care labour.

Universal State Pension Schemes and the Duties of Retirees

Because they are funded on a pay-as-you-go basis, universal state pension schemes are long-term intergenerational contracts. In them, one working generation (G2) contracts with retirees (G1) to fund their retirement. Unlike in a standard contract, G1 does not offer anything to G2. Rather, G3 (G2’s children and grandchildren) will be expected to fund G2’s retirement in turn. In this way, G1 and G2 have bound G3 into a contract without their tacit or express consent (because they do not exist to give it at the time of the contract). In this chapter the author interrogates the foundational question of whether an intergenerational contract of this nature is just. The author anticipates that a model of hypothetical consent will help make sense of the binding nature of such a contract. However, the author also argues that if hypothetical consent is relied upon to justify such contracts, it will place unexpected obligations on G2, including the obligation to reproduce or support high levels of immigration, and rights for G3, including the right to heavily tax G2 if they do not discharge the aforementioned duties.

Sacrifice and Indebtedness: The Intergenerational Contract in Chinese Rural Migrant Families

For four decades after China initiated economic reform, rural-urban migration has become a central experience for rural families. How do families negotiate economic production and social reproduction across geographic spaces and against institutional constraints? This article identifies the concept of intergenerational contract as an analytical tool to answer this question. Based on qualitative data gathered in Hunan and Shenzhen, I reveal that (a) children’s education is pursued as a family project, deeply rooted in families’ classed social mobility aspirations; (b) by spatializing the living and responsibilities of generations, rural migrant families selectively appropriate the hierarchical economic geography produced by state policies, to balance work and family arrangements; and (c) children engage in emotional labor guided by normative expectations and rules to reciprocate older generations’ care and support. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of migrant families and opens theoretical spaces to address the linkages between family, culture, and class in contemporary China.

養老領域中的代際衝突與代際公平——基於儒家倫理的視閾

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.從世界範園看，代際公平早已經是一個與養老金改革、醫療資源配置等問題深度捆綁的核心議題。代際公平危機首先凸顯在養老金赤字上，並進一步危及到社會養老保險制度的公平性，危及到養老保障制度的基礎－－代際契約。就倫理層面而言，如何在老齡化的壓力重構代際契約成為決定代際公平辯論走向的關鍵。本文擬簡述目前在代際公平辯論中佔主導地位的解釋範式，並批判性地審查其倫理意蘊與局限性。在此基礎上，本文擬提供一種基於儒家倫理思想的替代性的解釋範式。本文試圖論證儒家倫理及其蘊含的代際契約不僅為解決代際公平問題提供了新的思路，而且也為當前中國養老制度改革提供一些重要的政策建議。From a global perspective, generational equity has long been a core issue in pension reform and medical resource allocation. Indeed, discussion of generational equity involves a financial crisis related to pension deficits and the fairness of the pension system, which is a crisis that threatens the ethical foundation of the social insurance institution, i.e., the intergenerational contract. From an ethical perspective, how to reconstruct the intergenerational contract under the pressure of aging is crucial to the debate on generational equity. This study critically examines the dominant framework of the debate on generational equity and proposes an alternative interpretation framework based on Confucian ethics. Finally, this study argues that Confucian ethics and the interpretation of the intergenerational contract not only shed new light on the issue of generational equity but also provide important policy implications for the current pension system reform in China.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 33 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Complexities of elder livelihoods: Changing age-inscriptions and stable norms in three villages in rural West Africa

The intergenerational contract seems to be a dominant social norm of senior care all over the world, in which older adults are cared for reciprocally by those for whom they have cared. Yet in three villages in northern Benin and northern Togo, this intergenerational norm seems to be breached, with older adults living alone and in poverty. However, standardized surveys from a comparative research project established that kin groups do not abandon their older adults, if one considers the kin group to be containing classificatory children instead of the nuclear family with biological children and remittances to substitute for daily care. This article argues that the apparent contradictions between the intergenerational contract and the actual practices of providing care in old age are not so stark. The creative living arrangements of older adults in response to social changes of migration do not challenge the intergenerational contract, but instead are the ways of fulfilling it. The analytical concept of age-inscription (see Alber & Coe in this issue) helps to explain the gap between discursive norms and individual creative solutions of senior care. The social norm of the intergenerational contract persists through new age-inscriptions.

There Is Nobody to Rely on: Cracks in the Intergenerational Contract Among the Elders in Arab Society in Israel

This study aims to examine the ways that old Palestinian Arabs in Israel experience and talk about ageing. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted among 25 Arab men and women, Muslims and Christians, aged 65 to 85 years. Using the concepts of “intergenerational contract” and “gender contract,” the study reveals a new discourse reflecting a complex relationship between the elders and their families, characterized by ambivalence and internal conflict. The findings indicate that the intergenerational contract has not disappeared and that family loyalty still exists, but the cracks are gradually widening. The gender contract, which remains stable in the perception of the elders, is changing as well, while the young women are struggling to comply with their part in the contract. The elders are therefore, aware of the possibility that the intergenerational contract will not be implemented in the traditional way and that there is no one to rely on.