This article presents interpretative analysis of 25 qualitative interviews with parents of preschool children in Germany, which focused on starting daycare and centred on topics of closeness and distance in the parent–child relationships. The article draws on sociological studies on intensive parenting, and cultural psychological theories of parenting. The analysis reveals that parents discuss starting daycare within the cultural framework of intensive parenting: they stress the benefits for their child’s social and cognitive development. As cultural psychological theories suggest, parents in Germany emphasise autonomy and independence, while also arguing that young children need interdependence. In addition, parents articulate a longing for interdependence themselves: they yearn for closeness with their children, but are also aware that their children are on a path towards autonomy. The article theoretically elaborates on these ambivalences and suggests that adding the dimension of parents’ longing enriches both the concept of intensive parenting and cultural psychological accounts.
Being single and of marriageable age in a society where marriage is the norm invites perceptions of social undervaluation and vulnerability to social pressure to conform. The current study examines the reasons for more Indonesian adults remaining single, the perceived societal stigma related to this, and how they react to such undervaluing societal perceptions. Never-married Indonesian adults (N=350; M age=29.79 ± 4.50) participated in this study, where their responses were analysed by thematic coding. The majority of participants stated that they were involuntarily single. The findings indicated four contexts within which they remained single: situational shortcomings, compliance with socially constructed marriage ideals, various perceptions of marriage, and unreadiness to marry. Participants mainly reacted to pressures with polite disregard, which reflected their cultural practice of avoiding conflict. This study provides an introduction to understanding the complexities and challenges for single people in Indonesia, which is still understudied.
While there has been an increasing focus on familial imprisonment within academic literature, policy and practice, where this is in respect of children and young people this has tended to focus on their parents. This narrow view of family has seen the omission of sibling imprisonment experiences from these narratives. This article explores these experiences through in-depth interviews with seven young people, aged 17–22 at the time of their interviews, but also reflecting back on when they were children and younger teenagers. By exploring aspects of loss, the barriers to being able to maintain sibling relationships in a prison, and the potentially lasting impacts on these relationships, it argues the need to recognise family more widely than we currently do. This is both in terms of not focusing solely on parental imprisonment, but also the recognition of family through their ‘practices’ and ‘display’: what they do rather than what they are.
For decades, sociologists have characterised fear as the predominant emotion of late-capitalist societies. How can this be explained? Which determinants underlie the continuing relevance of fear? To answer this question, I draw on insights from modernisation theories and affect theories, which I see as complementing and extending each other. I argue that the former provide a ‘structural approach to fear’, focusing on fear-generating socioeconomic and cultural transformations, while the latter provide an ‘approach to fear’s affectivity’, focusing on the bodily and relational character of fear as well as its modulation by the current politics of fear. By combining these approaches, both the structural and affective dimensions of significant causes and effects of fear can be illuminated. This allows for the contouring of the late-capitalist ‘affect regime of fear’ using its structural and affective preconditions, which offers an expanded explanation for the persistence of fear in late-capitalist societies. Therefore, I will first introduce both approaches and outline their mutual extensions. Second, I will reconstruct and combine their insights regarding two significant fear-related phenomena, namely global risks and neoliberal lifestyles. Third, I will illustrate that these are preferentially processed through the affective politics of fear that reinforces politics of securitisation and politics of inequality. Finally, I will summarise the main features of the affect regime of fear and outline how the sociology of fear might benefit from bringing modernisation and affect theories’ approaches into dialogue.
Women in political leadership have been the topic of much discussion since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a number of women in executive office being praised for their empathic approach. The pandemic has raised questions about the role of women in political leadership at a time of crisis and the drivers behind the feelings they evoke. Drawing on online reflective focus groups with participants mainly from the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 national lockdowns, this article explores the feelings and affective responses evoked from seeing women in political leadership roles at a time of crisis. The focus groups highlighted the conflict that participants felt at seeing women political leaders navigating crisis situations, with expected displays of empathy at the forefront of discussions. The findings also suggest that, in order to be trusted, women political leaders must still overcome gendered expectations about their authority and warmth. The participants felt conflicted when evaluating the leadership styles of women in politics and grappled with notions of trust and authenticity. The article provides new psychosocial insights into the way we think and feel about women political leaders and highlights the complex gendered terrain that women in political leadership have to navigate.
This study examined how Finnish parents working non-standard hours (N=18) positioned institutional flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a link in their chain of childcare. Interview data, analysed following the principles of discursive psychology, yielded three discourses on flexibly scheduled ECEC: the discourse of the child’s best interest, the discourse of the labour market, and the discourse of equality of opportunity for the child. Flexibly scheduled ECEC was positioned in these discourses either as the last resort option for childcare, a safe haven for the child, a societal service enabling parents to work during non-standard hours or as a place for children’s learning. It is important to recognise the origins of these discourses and reflect on them to improve ECEC services, so that they meet the demands of safety as a link in the chain of childcare and increase the level of parental satisfaction with them.
This article tackles the problem of how to transcend affinities for hierarchy and in their place generate desires for equality. Drawing from paradoxical treatment of equality in his The Ignorant Schoolmaster as something that is verified by unequal subjects, I show that Rancière treats equality as something only possible in the context of a false authority, the teacher, encircling students in a political boundary out of which they must break. Turning to writing on the relationship between democracy, equality and psychoanalysis in his book Equals, I argue that uncovering internal desires for dominance and hierarchy is a prerequisite for cultivating different desires. As Phillips shows, we must become equal with ourselves in order to cultivate appetites for democracy, and to do the work that democracy requires. Taken together, these two texts demonstrate the necessity of two interrelated steps for transcending dominant structures: cultivating desires and exercising capacities for democratic equality.
When conducting ethnographic research, a family researcher becomes involved in the personal lives of the participants. This raises a number of concerns for the researcher when establishing relationships with family members. Drawing on qualitative data from research on children’s intra-familial privacy in Turkey, this article aims to increase awareness of several cultural aspects that may have an impact on how researchers build rapport with family members in Turkey. It reflects on a set of key considerations when doing ethnographic research with multiple families. These include the cultural struggles for children when addressing the researcher (in kinship terms such as ‘elder sister’), negotiation of the researcher’s role through participant observational activities, the changing display of family over time, the researcher’s over-involvement in family issues, and adapting to family cultures when working with families from different sociocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Increasing shares of the sustainable consumption literature postulate the need for a focus on limits to consumption as a basis for achieving absolute reductions in resource use. After all, improvements in the sustainability of consumption expected from technological innovation and efficiency gains have been eaten up by rebound effects, to date. The decoupling that proponents of green growth were hoping for is nowhere in sight. However, discussions about limits to consumption immediately meet opposition from political representatives, powerful associations and industry lobby groups alike. Specifically, opponents claim that we simply cannot afford a scaling back of consumption and the economic growth it is supposed to drive due to the growth-dependent nature of our welfare systems. Such claims have become very dominant narratives that influence what societies deem ‘realistic’ and ‘possible’ regarding the politics of sustainable consumption, cementing the current status quo. It also shows that research on strong sustainable consumption governance, that is, governance pursuing a reduction in consumption levels and fundamental shift in consumption patterns (especially in the Global North), needs to target such claims head on, if existing paradigmatic barriers to a sustainability transition are to be overcome. But what counter-narrative(s) can scholars offer? To identify potential elements of such counter-narrative(s) for consumption scholars to draw on, the present article investigates what answers critical sustainability research, in particular the degrowth literature, has in stock regarding the affordability of reductions in consumption-driven growth from the perspective of democratic welfare states.
The emotions and experiences of the public have become of increasingly prominent concern in criminal policy debates in Western countries. In Sweden, the concepts of trygghet (security) and otrygghet (insecurity) are often used during discussions on public safety and fear of crime. In this article, I address how the Swedish concept of (in)security is politically constructed in the criminal policy discourse, by scrutinising the political debate taking place prior to Swedish general elections in the 21st century. By analysing the symbolic potential of the concept of security, I demonstrate how people are encouraged to turn towards the welfare state and its associated values to feel secure and how collective emotions such as trust and solidarity play a key role in enhancing the emotional tone of the discourse. By relating the political discourse on crime and (in)security to the welfare state context, the aim of this article is to further our understanding of how a culture of insecurity and a normative order of emotions manifest in Sweden. In the concluding discussion, I address some of the consequences of the discourse: in particular, the potentially unifying and solidarity-producing, as well as exclusionary, effects.
