This article addresses a lacuna in the literature on the ‘emotional turn’ in journalism by examining how emotions shape journalists’ career trajectories. In-depth interviews conducted at two points in time reveal that love leads journalists to accept precarious work. Over the years, cynicism developed. Cynicism shaped careers in two ways: some moved into public relations and expressed emotions of relief. Others left media organisations to work as freelance journalists, expressing emotions of wanderlust and love. We address the ambivalence of love as an emotion. It leads journalists to accept precarious work that prevents investigative journalism. However, love of journalism has led others to pursue careers outside of media organisations that offer more freedom of expression, which is crucial for democracy.
Intersectionality is a concept that has received little attention in scholarship on consumption, despite its significant relevance. Marie Plessz and Stefan Wahlen organised a roundtable held at the European Sociological Association (ESA) Consumption research network (RN5) interim meeting, 2 September 2022, in Oslo. This is a summarised and edited transcript of this roundtable discussion. As such, it advances the conceptual lens of intersectionality applied to (food) consumption studies and critically assesses possible future avenues of research that build on existing approaches. It first discusses the role of social and political positions that might be considered intersectionally, to then outline central characteristics as well as empirical strategies when investigating food. This transcript also showcases a possible novel format that is welcomed in the journal Consumption and Society.
This article examines young people’s attitudes towards parental involvement in paid work and their association with two channels of intergenerational transmission – parents’ employment arrangements and gender ideologies – the relative importance of these channels and if young people’s gender moderates the association. The data came from a German two-wave panel study of 609 adolescents (aged 15–21) surveyed in 2018 and their mothers in 2013–15. Analyses show that young people’s preferred weekly working hours for mothers were positively related to their parents’ employment arrangements and gender ideologies four years earlier. In contrast, the more progressive their mother’s gender ideology was, the fewer working hours young people preferred for fathers. The two transmission channels were nearly equally important and their impact did not differ between female and male adolescents. Our findings suggest that the intergenerational transmission of gender roles might be one of multiple factors contributing to stalling trends in gender equality.
This article presents our Family Stories model identifying self-reported change behaviours and environments by families developed from our two-phase research in an inner-city area in the south of England. The research focused on parents whose families had experienced complex issues affecting the behaviour, wellbeing, learning and/or safety of children, and who had received social care support from services that had broadly adopted a trauma-informed approach. We identified parents’ self-reported change behaviours and environments, in the context of the high rate of families relapsing and returning for multiple episodes of support. We also identify key challenges to securing long-term positive change, including the barriers to nurturing a strong and successful parenting identity, in which parents are more able to sustain positive change. Our model identifies four enablers, evident in the self-reported change behaviours narrated by our participants: community, allyship, strategy and mastery.
In this article, we discuss epistemic injustice in the International Child Development Programme (ICDP), a universalised parenting support programme in Norway that is mandatory for all newly arrived refugees. We show that despite the programme’s good intentions, it constitutes a form of epistemic injustice because it enforces a state-endorsed epistemology that proffers the ‘right’ way of parenting. Using data collected during ICDP training for a group of newly arrived refugee parents from Syria, we explore how the ideals embedded in the programme influence the interactions and epistemic exchanges between participants and mentors. This study contributes to discussions on parenting support for marginalised groups by revealing the functioning of epistemic injustice as new inhabitants in a welfare state are targeted by a social support programme aimed at enhancing their parenting skills.
In this article, I investigate the social organising of a process leading up to a Somali single parent I call Maryam receiving a letter from the Norwegian child protection services (CPS). Using institutional ethnography, I show how Maryam’s experience is shaped by generalised, objectified understandings that transcend the relations she has at specific points in time; by what Dorothy Smith labels ruling relations. Based on Maryam’s story about the process leading up to the letter from the CPS, but also on documents connected to her case and other interviews with her, I show how she is constructed as a mother lacking knowledge and needing help, and how she is constructed as a suspicious mother when she declines this help – and the role of generalising, objectifying understandings in this process.
Presently and historically, working-class mothers have been positioned as problematic. Their children’s low attainment is blamed on perceived deficiencies in their parenting. Tied to this, the concept of the ‘word gap’ has been used to demonstrate a language deficit, which it is claimed leads to working-class children starting school behind their middle-class peers. These concepts are central tenets to the BBC’s Tiny Happy People website which was analysed to ascertain current ‘good’ mothering discourses. This critical discourse analysis considers the authorship of the website and the BBC’s status as commissioning editor, alongside its key concept: addressing the word gap. Tiny Happy People’s target audience are parents from lower socioeconomic groups. Together with the content of the website, this framing will be used to consider Tiny Happy People’s approach to the perceived problem and how that may affect working-class mothers.
Gender equality work in organisations has been criticised for weak results and an unclear political agenda. Studies on such work that put emotions at the centre are rare. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between feelings of discomfort and practical gender equality work in companies, in projects which are facilitated by external gender experts in collaboration with company employees. Interviews and project documents from four companies involved in a regional gender equality project in Sweden form the empirical basis. Findings show that there was an aspiration to feel discomfort about inequality, among both gender experts and company employees, which was also embedded in recurring practice aiming for feeling and interpreting inequality. The discomfort among interviewees can be understood as signalling both authentic engagement and progress, but may also clash with specific organisational emotion norms and lead to problems associated with individualising responsibility. The article shows the import of discomfort and related emotions in gender equality work, and can be used for critical reflections on and realignment of ideas that inform these efforts.
We share findings from a qualitative study on emotions in Scottish working-class households during lockdown. The results challenge existing research focused on emotional capital, which often suggests that working-class people struggle to provide emotional resources to those close to them. Using the concept of emotional reflexivity we show how these household members cared for each other’s feelings, challenging deficit views of working-class emotionality. This research offers a novel understanding of working-class participants collaboratively making space for each other to feel, many favouring acts of care rather than talking. The COVID-19 lockdown, however, tended to reinforce gendered practices of emotion work, although some participants drew on emotional support beyond the household to try to mitigate this burden. The emotionally reflexive practices seen in these households suggest that sustaining more equality in emotional wellbeing relies on navigating material circumstances, is not always about verbal sharing, is often an interactional achievement, but also means resisting unrealistic expectations of intimate relationships within households as the fountainhead of all emotional succour.
In China, Confucian authoritative familism has long established the tradition of paternal grandparents caring for grandchildren. With urbanisation in progress, many older people choose to settle in cities with their children, mainly to look after their grandchildren, and are known as ‘migrant grandparents’. Through a study of this group in Shanghai, the article reveals four other roles of migrant grandparents in addition to the role of caregivers: namely, workers, leisure seekers, in-laws (qingjia) and spouses. The prioritisation of grandparents’ roles demonstrates their increasing subjectivity in self-determination, transformative social values and personal life expectations. This article argues that Chinese older adults have begun to individualise and that these practices have contributed both to the destruction of the collective single-core family model in traditional and neo-familism and the emergence of independent, dual-core familism between two generations.
