Gender and intimate state encounters

This chapter explores the gendered complexities of the home encounter. It builds brings together the anthropological debates on the state and street-level bureaucracy to include feminist analysis of care and racialized motherhood. This chapter details how particular meanings that are imbued in the ‘private’ and domestic space heighten the gendered nature of governing relationships, placing more work on women and simultaneously excluding men. The chapter explores how family organisation and inscribed gender roles therein can exacerbate or ease the uncertainty and confusion within home encounters. The chapter not only examines how home encounters shape the relationships among Romanian Roma women and men, but also relationships between women and, typically, female support workers and, typically, male church volunteers. The chapter argues that those who perform ‘appropriate’ subjects of care (as mothers) can be positioned as objects of care (of the state) and consequently that men are excluded from these processes.

Wandering Abroad: Ethnographic Journeys in the City

I agreed to meet Punk Paul on Stokes Croft at around 8 a.m. Paul was exactly where he said he would be—behind the bin next to The Big Issue office. In his early forties, Punk Paul was everything a punk should be—a devout follower of punk bands across the UK, he sported a blue Mohican (when bathroom facilities and soap rations permitted), army issue boots and a battered leather jacket covered in ‘anti-fa’ (anti-fascist) symbols. Paul fashioned the rest of his clothes from whatever he was given by church volunteers and picked up along the way. His distain of authority was firm but friendly. ‘Evening officer,’ he could often be heard saying, with a wink, to local police who regularly busted him for drinking in ‘no drinking zones’. ‘Could you spare a few shekels for an old sea dog? I’m trying to get together a pirate ship to sail off the end of the earth!’ ‘I have to pay Abdul £10.03,’ Paul said, as I approached. Abdul, Stokes Croft’s kindly but long-suffering newsagent, let some homeless people, including Paul, have beer on tick. We walked the short distance from the post office to Abdul’s shop and I waited outside with my dogs while Paul paid his debt. He was holding a can of Tennant’s lager when he reappeared. ‘It’s sort of a constant debt that I have with Abdul!’ He grinned before leading the way down City Road, Brighton Road, and onto Wilder Street. ‘You have to see this place! If you want to see what homelessness is really like in this country . . . this city could be any city, if you ask me. You have to see this place!’ We continued down Wilder Street until we reached a semi-derelict building. Through peeling paint it was possible to read ‘Bristol Transmissions’ above the long-ago boarded-up shop window. ‘It’s known as “The Black House”,’ Paul said, pushing the door. A padlock had been smashed off. Inside, there were two downstairs rooms, both hugely decayed with missing floorboards.

The Influence of Calling and Perceived Organizational Support on Commitment across Ecclesial and For- profit Organizations

The article adds to an understanding of organizational commitment (OC) by examining how the con- struct varies between church volunteers (N = 89) and for-profit (N = 218) employees in Norway. The study used a non-experimental field-based methodology to analyze data collected cross-sectionally through self-administered questionnaires. A series of two-way analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed to test whether OC differed by type of organization, reporting higher levels of normative commitment (NC) and affective commitment (AC) in ecclesial organizations than in their for-profit counterpart. In addition, a series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed to test whether calling and perceived organizational support (POS) were predictors of OC in both types of organizations. The results confirm previous research showing that POS is an antecedent of NC and AC in for-profit organizations, and expand current commitment theory by showing that this is also the case for AC among church volunteers. The predictive power of calling on commitment was found to be weak in both types of organizations. The limitations of the study are indicated, and suggestions for practice and future research are provided.