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Are young people blindly self-interested? How does university shape students’ political participation? Can busy parents and grandparents find time to volunteer?
Challenging conventional thinking, leading academics explore how individuals’ relationships with civil society change over time as different lifecourse events and stages trigger and hinder civic engagement.
Drawing on personal narratives, longitudinal cohort studies and national surveys, this unprecedented study considers rarely examined aspects of civic engagement including school students’ sense of social responsibility and the charitable legacy bequests of elderly people and highlights significant implications for those promoting greater civic and political participation.
This introductory chapter outlines why this book is important. Drawing on Glen Elder’s work, it outlines five of the key principles of the lifecourse approach and how these apply to civil and political participation. It also includes a discussion of the challenges of defining civic engagement and the relationship between civil participation and political participation. Finally, the chapter outlines the organisation of the book.
In this chapter, Sally Power looks at school students’ engagement in civil society – an issue about which very little is known. Drawing on survey data with 1000 14-year-olds in Wales, this chapter challenges the largely negative media portrayals of young people as being selfishly- rather than civically-minded. Levels of associational membership among these young people are high, and levels of charitable activity and volunteering are extraordinarily high – engaged in by the overwhelming majority of young people and far more frequently than by older people. However, the data also indicate that young people are very ambivalent about the value of these activities which must raise issues about future levels of civil and political participation.
This chapter, Sally Power, has three main purposes. Firstly, it summarises the principal findings from each of the contributing chapters in order to identify any cross-cutting findings. Secondly, it reflects on the merits of understanding engagement with civil society from a lifecourse perspectives. Thirdly, the chapter concludes with a brief examination of the implications of the principal findings for policymakers and other key stakeholders trying to promote greater levels of civil and political participation.
The relationship between the family and civil society has always been complex, with the family often regarded as separate from, or even oppositional to, civil society.
Taking a fresh empirical approach, Muddiman, Power and Taylor reveal how such separation underestimates the important role the family plays in civil society. Considering the impact of family events, dinner table debates, intergenerational transmission of virtues and the role of the mother, this enlightening book draws on survey data from 1000 young people, a sample of their parents and grandparents, and extended family interviews, to uncover how civil engagement, activism and political participation are inherited and fostered within the home.
This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between civil society and the family. Despite the family’s central role in social, cultural (and biological) reproduction, it is largely absent from the majority of contemporary literature on civil society. This is surprising given the continued importance of family life in the routines and responsibilities of individuals around the world. Ideas (or ideals) about family life colour one’s decisions about where to work, where to live and how to spend one’s time and money. This book explores the extent to which family relationships and connections can help in understanding civic and political engagement. Exploring the relationship between civil society and the family is important not only to fill a gap in the literature, but also because the family will become an increasingly important agent of social change.
This chapter discusses the paradoxical positioning of the family and civil society. This paradox arises from the ways in which civil society is variously defined through a series of binary oppositions — in relation to each of which the family sits uneasily. The chapter begins by outlining how the ‘family’ has traditionally been conceptualised in relation to civil society. These representations are not only contradictory, but also based on value-laden representations of both the family and civil society that are ideologically rather than empirically underpinned. In general, within much of the academic literature, there has been a tendency to uphold the virtues of the ‘public sphere’ against the self-interestedness of the ‘private sphere.’ The chapter concludes by arguing for the importance of empirical rather than just theoretical research on the interface between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’.
This chapter examines the challenges of, and opportunities afforded by, undertaking research with families. The home is normally regarded as an intensely private place, and it is rare for a non-family member to be given insights into family practices, allegiances, and ruptures. The chapter then outlines the study’s mixed-methods approach, which combines a multigenerational questionnaire with numerous conversations with parents and grandparents, as well as a family tree mapping exercise. The study combines these methods to explore the extent to which the ‘relational, embedded and connected’ nature of everyday life contributes to the inheritance or abandonment of particular forms of civic engagement. The chapter also introduces the study participants. Although predominantly white, the families vary significantly in terms of their household make-up and socioeconomic circumstances. The chapter concludes with some caveats that should help one to contextualise and interpret the empirical research presented in the following chapters.
This chapter evaluates all of those factors that might complicate the straightforward sharing of values and practices between different family members. The family is widely regarded as a socialising agent, and parents, in particular, are seen to play a pivotal role in providing their children with a framework for interpreting and navigating the social world. However, there are manifold other events, relationships, and experiences that combine to shape an individual’s perspective of, and engagement with, civil society. Drawing on survey, interview, and family tree data, the chapter considers the range of influences that participants identified, highlighting some of the things that might frustrate the intergenerational sharing of values and practices. It also looks at variation and difference within families, investigating how the bringing together of two previously unconnected families through marriage or partnership is negotiated in relation to social and political perspectives.
This chapter explains that it is in the area of religious practice that the uncertainties of intergenerational transmission are most clearly demonstrated. All available evidence indicates that religious affiliation is inherited from parents. However, that is only part of the story. The chapter focuses on the precariousness of religious transmission and seeks to explore: first, what family and lifecourse events appear to disrupt an inheritance of faith; and, second, what the implications are for young people’s civic engagement. In addition to examining the levels and processes of the intergenerational transmission of faith (or its absence), it discusses how religious affiliation is reflected in particular kinds of associational membership, levels of volunteering, and other kinds of social activism.
