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Reconnecting Household and Community An Alternative Strategy for Theory and Policy
Abstract
The aim of this article is to sketch the outlines of a social and spatial arrangement linking the household with its neighborhood. The fundamental theoretical and policy issue considered here is the sufficiency of the model of household isolation that has prevailed in the United States since the post-World War II era. Contrary to Talcott Parsons, who viewed that model as the end point of family evolution, critics at the time perceived it as having serious structural flaws. They argued for the reinvention of a meso layer of society linking the household more closely with its neighborhood. This article elaborates that theme by suggesting four spheres in which households might form pacts or alliances. These include gender, children/youth, mature persons, and economic disadvantage. To be fully implemented, the last issue in particular requires a partnership of some type with government.
... Elder cohousing may fit the "meso-layer of society that bonds the family household to the neighborhood, and ultimately to the nation" (Scanzone, 2001, p. 263). Cohousing as both built environment and social community-form integrates social values with everyday living and neighborliness, and may ultimately substitute for the "isolated family unit [of the] 1950's (Scanzone, 2001 andFolts & Muir, 2002). The no- longer fashionable ranch houses from the 1960's were left behind in favor of or we can go down a different path… [realizing that] the desire for an acre of land is not an unvarying condition of human nature (1995). ...
Study establishes a new community design typology addressing three realms of sustainability; ecology, economics and equity, and provides a planning model that meets the specific needs of elderly or mobility-impaired citizens. Environmental domains investigated range in scale, beginning with global and national macro-scale issues of climate change, energy consumption and air quality. An intermediate meso-layer encompasses state, regional and community scales, examining transportation systems, land-use and zoning, and bio-communities home to humans, wildlife and habitat. At micro-scales, housing, neighborhood connectivity, and caring networks are explored.
A new utopian design prototype is applied to a case study urban-village in the fragile desert ecosystem of Phoenix; juxtaposed with its rapid, sprawling development. Relationships between natural and built environments are weighed alongside ecological and economic concerns of current and future generations of living beings. The increasing needs of an elderly and mobility-impaired population infer a co-requisite of social sustainability and implicate issues of equity.
Measures of Livability and Sustainability (L & S) are gathered, graphed and quantified by frequencies, coded in word/term patterns, then filtered to essential elements through logical argumentation. Intersects of access and energy explicitly reoccur across a continuum of environmental domain scales, and two primary models emerge to represent eighteen leading measures of L & S (www.opl.uk and www.aarp.org, 2009).Validation is substantiated through multiple research methods: Case study; observations and interviews; focus groups; action research, ethnography and content analysis. Preliminary findings indicate elevated measures of accessibility and energy-efficiency are correlated with better livability and greater sustainability.
An LSI matrix is overlaid with case study's Phoenix General Plan (2004) along with criteria from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ([LEED] USGBC, 2009). Through cross-referencing village objectives with LS indicators and LEED criteria, benchmarks for solutions are identified; corroborated by interview, ethnography and focus group participants. Findings reinforce that community accessibility ensures livability, and built environments that maintain ecological health also promise better quality health for human users. Recommendations are developed based upon novel design-planning strategies, and proposal viability gauged according to how well both sustainability and livability solutions are met simultaneously. The result is the Sustainable Design Guide.
... In addition to the seminal review by Burton and Jarrett ( 2000 ) , which was discussed above, Voydanoff ( 2005 ) offered a broad and heuristic conceptual framework for integrating community demands, resources, and strategies into future research examining the work and family interface. Review articles by , Scanzoni ( 2001 ) , and Doherty ( 2000 ) challenged family scientists to bring a community focus to their understanding of families and to their professional practice with families. ...
Families and the community structures and processes that surround them are the focus of this chapter. A social organization theoretical framework is employed as a means of understanding prior work on how families and their communities intersect, and is also invoked to suggest new directions in this area of family science. As backdrop to presenting a theory of action and change, major works in family science, from the 1960s through the present, are analyzed regarding discussions of the families/communities interface. These major works include all sourcebooks and theory compilations centered on families. In addition, three principal journals in family science are analyzed for the period of 2000–2009, with a focus on family research centered on community contexts. This analysis provides a clear roadmap for directions future research might take. The chapter concludes by presenting the essential elements of a social organization theory of action and change, including its assumptions about families and their communities. Community antecedents (the social and physical infrastructures), social organizational processes (networks, social capital, and community capacity), intermediate results (sense of community), and important outcomes for individuals and their families are then elaborated.
Intensive interviews were conducted with 31 streetwalking prostitutes to examine their interpersonal support systems. Interviews focused on their relationships with parents or parental figures, partners, and children. Data were analyzed using phenomenological descriptive analysis. Results reveal the potentially dark side of human relationships and the destructive, lingering effects of such on individual development. Familial environments were characterized by parental alcoholism and drug abuse, domestic violence, parental absence and abandonment, and multiple forms of childhood abuse. Relationships between the women and their male partners were largely devoid of emotional content but rather based on sex and drugs. Few of the women retained custody of their children, although many were hopeful that they would be reunited with them in the future.
This article traces the development of changes internal to households since the late 1960s. The discussion is set in the context of two competing theories—constructionism and functionalism, old and new. The notion of varieties of families is distinguished from household diversity. Variety refers simply to what are known as family variants or alternative lifestyles. Diversity is indicated by a structural and spatial situation in which there is both parity of and linkages among households.
This article examines the situation in 47 "caring neighborhoods," which are defined as those in which the neighbors report working together in caring for the neighborhood children. These suburban neighborhoods are White and predominately middle class. Fictive kin are found in some of these neighborhoods, and in all of the neighborhoods a low value is placed on privacy. These neighborhoods challenge the stereotype of the isolated nuclear family of the suburbs but reinforce the model of the male-breadwinner family. In considering how families can connect over child-rearing tasks and move beyond the male-breadwinner family, it is seen that the problem lies not in the suburban housing structure but in the condition of neighborhood mothers, who have to stay at home with pre-school-age children. This research suggests that to have the appropriate neighborhoods available to families, intentional neighborhoods will have to be built with an emphasis on gender equity.
Although prior research demonstrates that residence in a socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhood increases young women's risk of bearing a child out of wedlock, few studies have explored the sequence of events accounting for this relationship. Analyzing data from the National Survey of Children using a multivariate nested logit model, the authors find that community socioeconomic status has little effect on the likelihood that unmarried adolescent women will become pregnant but that premaritally pregnant adolescents in poor communities are less likely than those in wealthier neighborhoods to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy. Thus, differences in premarital fertility rates across neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic status appear to result largely from differences in abortion rates. Compared to White women, Black women are more likely to become premaritally pregnant and less likely to marry before childbirth. Parent's education reduces premarital fertility rates both by reducing rates of premarital pregnancy and by increasing the likelihood of abortion.
Interviews with forty 10- and 11-year-old children (24 boys and 16 girls) investigated the effects of parents' division of child care responsibilities on children's self-esteem, their relationships with parents, and their gendered ideas and preferences. Children whose fathers participated relatively more in the emotional side of parenting (e.g., comforting) showed greater preferences for “feminine” activities and had higher self-esteem than children whose fathers were less involved. Children whose fathers performed a higher proportion of the “work” of parenting (e.g., transporting, planning activities, and arranging child care) endorsed a more gender-free model of family life. The absolute amount of time fathers spent with children had no independent significant effects. Egalitarian parenting clearly benefits children when fathers share “maternal” tasks, but even when fathers do not fully participate in those “maternal” aspects of parenting, dividing the time 50-50 may benefit mothers without hurting children.
Research literature on fatherhood has featured a critical perspective on men's attitudes toward family life, their style of parenting, and the amount they participate in myriad aspects of daily parenting. This qualitative study explores the resourcefulness of men and women in families dedicated to organizing their family life to involve fathers. A tag-team pattern of sharing parenting emerged as a key to their success. While agreeing on the fundamentals of child care, these mothers and fathers valued differences in what each parent contributes to the tag team. Both men and women in the research couples highlighted the pragmatic benefit of approaching parenting as a tag team requiring the full and unique contribution of each partner (mother and father). Pragmatic aspects of a tag team allow each partner to maintain certain specializations while remaining essentially interchangeable in function if not in form.
Based on findings from research with intergenerational literacy program participants, the author explores the consequences of participation in these programs for adult learners, namely: (1) increased self-confidence, (2) social-efficacy, and, to a lesser degree, (3) critical social involvement. Using a Freirean framework, she argues that these sort of impacts point toward the potential for positive social change from program participation. Policy makers, who drive federal and state funding for adult literacy programs, view education for adults from a deficit perspective, with the learners perceived as lacking in skills or abilities that would help them to contribute more fully to the economy. Many publicly funded adult education programs consequently find themselves driven more by workforce development and employability goals, than by social change or personal empowerment agendas. The intergenerational programs studied here aim not so much at merely conforming to policy-driven employability agenda, but primarily at empowering marginalized adults and their families. In this discussion, the author presents findings from surveys and interviews with adult learners from six intergenerational literacy programs in northern New England, with a focus on effects of participation for adults and key components of programming that supports these effects. The article concludes with implications for practitioners in the human service community and recommendations for further study.
This paper reviews the work-family policy of Bulgaria before and after the transition. Before the transition the family policy was one of earner–carer where women were given support to combine work-force participation with childcare and men were at least encouraged to help with carework. After the transition women's access to help with carework became so limited that the family policy, by default, became one of dual earner, but with extremely high levels of unemployment. A survey of 349 women by the Varna Employment Office indicates how devastating the loss of employment was during the transition. Today policies that support family caregiving still exist on paper but are not enforced. This is due, in part, to the lack of organized broad-based women's groups. Such organizations would be necessary for women to effectively claim the rights and entitlements to caregiving support. But there is continuing pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others to eliminate any state support for caregiving.
The concept of social organization provides an important framework for understanding families in the context of communities and focuses our attention on norms, networks, and associated processes that typify community life. We discuss the significance of community for understanding family outcomes, discuss challenges in defining community context, define social organization and feature several of its associated components and their linkages, and assess research designs that inform the study of social organization. We conclude by suggesting implications for theory (elaborating social organization community processes), research (incorporating designs and measures that reflect collective processes), and practice (maximizing effects generated by informal and formal networks in communities).
Interdependency and Care over the Lifecourse draws upon theories of time and space to consider how informal care is woven into the fabric of everyday lives and is shaped by social and economic inequalities and opportunities.
The book comprises three parts. The first explores contrasting social and economic contexts of informal care in different parts of the world. The second looks at different themes and dynamics of caring, using fictional vignettes of illness and health, child care, elderly care and communities of care. The book examines the significance to practices of care throughout the lifecourse of:
understandings and expectations of care
emotional exchanges involved in care
memories and anticipations of giving and receiving care
the social nature of the spaces and places in which care is carried out
the practical time-space scheduling necessary to caring activities.
Finally the authors critically examine how the frameworks of caringscapes and carescapes might be used in research, policy and practice. A working example is provided.
This book will be of interest to students and researchers of care work, health and social care, geography, sociology of the family and social policy as well as those in business and policy communities trying to gain an understanding of how work and informal care interweave
Debates on how to reduce poverty and inequality have focused on two controversial questions: Should social policies be targeted to low-income groups or be universal? Should benefits be equal for all or earnings-related? Traditional arguments in favor of targeting and flat-rate benefits, focusing on the distribution of the money actually transferred, neglect three policy-relevant considerations: (1) The size of redistributive budgets is not fixed but reflects the structure of welfare state institutions. (2) A trade-off exists between the degree of low-income targeting and the size of redistributive budgets. (3) Outcomes of market-based distribution are often more unequal than those of earnings-related social insurance programs. We argue that social insurance institutions are of central importance for redistributive outcomes. Using new data, our comparative analyses of the effects of different institutional types of welfare states on poverty and inequality indicate that institutional differences lead to unexpected outcomes and generate the paradox of redistribution: The more we target benefits at the poor and the more concerned we are with creating equality via equal public transfers To all, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality.
This paper reviews the origins and definitions of social capital in the writings of Bourdieu, Loury, and Coleman, among other authors. It distinguishes four sources of social capital and examines their dynamics. Applications of the concept in the sociological literature emphasize its role in social control, in family support, and in benefits mediated by extrafamilial networks. I provide examples of each of these positive functions. Negative consequences of the same processes also deserve attention for a balanced picture of the forces at play. I review four such consequences and illustrate them with relevant examples. Recent writings on social capital have extended the concept from an individual asset to a feature of communities and even nations. The final sections describe this conceptual stretch and examine its limitations, I argue that, as shorthand for the positive consequences of sociability, social capital has a definite place in sociological theory. However, excessive extensions of the concept may jeopardize its heuristic value.
In this book a group of influential and distinguished scholars analyse some of the key questions in contemporary international relations. The book is in three parts. In the first, the lessons and legacies of Cold War are examined, including debates about its rise and fall, and the implications of the superpower nuclear confrontation. Part II asks questions about powers and politics in the post-Cold War world: the USA's potential as a world leader, Russia's troubled future, Japan's potential power, the China syndrome, and Africa's problems. The final part looks further into the future, discussing international organisation, life politics, and the potentialities for human society under the conditions of globalisation. The book shows how different countries and different groups of countries are confronting urgent issues of statecraft in a period of radical global transformation.
This paper is an overview of research on collective housing, defined to include several models of housing with communal facilities. The overview is based on both empirical and theoretical research. A major part of the paper refers to Swedish examples, which have been extensively investigated over several decades, but the paper also includes material from other Scandinavian countries, the United States, Germany, and other parts of the world. Besides a discussion of definitions, the paper contains a summary of research on the history of collective housing, overviews of alternative housing projects, evaluations of individual collective housing projects, how socio-political change affects house forms, and gender, child, and design aspects of collective housing. The References comprise 75 titles, 27 of which are in Scandinavian languages and 29 in English.
American cohousing, transplanted in the early 1900s from a Danish model of private dwellings with shared common facilities, has spread across this country with 24 functioning communities by the mid-1990s. Cohousing has attracted the attention of an American audience as an alternative housing type that fosters neighboring and a sense of community. This paper is about the first five years of cohousing in America; it highlights the many issues faced by those who have tried and those who have succeeded in creating community. Data from 24 cohousing projects and a post-occupancy evaluation of three communities are discussed. The research topics explore the development process, resident turnover, site planning, functionality of the common house, and private units. The paper also gauges resident satisfaction and residents' sense of community. Looking at those pioneering years reveals that American cohousing can provide a strong sense of community. In many instances, however, the development and group processes have taken longer than expected.
Extensive research has detected unprecedented levels of public concern about environmental degradation and broad-based recognition that excessive consumption is a root cause of environmental damage. Yet in the U.S., there is little evidence for substantive attitudinal or behavioral change resulting from professed environmental awareness. Americans, it seems, don't walk their environmentalist talk! Scant research has plumbed the contextual determinants of pro-environmental behavioral change. Cohousing offers that opportunity. Cohousing communities generally have firm pro-environmental aspirations. Their physical and social setting provides support for the attitudes of individuals. To date, no systematic research has determined whether residents have been better able in cohousing to convert their environmental awareness into practice. This paper reports on the behavioral change of 346 households in 18 cohousing communities. It reveals a range of interconnected influences upon environmental praxis and argues for greater acknowledgment of the role of 'community' in the transference of environmental awareness into attitude and into practice.
Families are allocating their time in an increasingly market-oriented fashion, with a decreasing proportion of labor hours being devoted to unpaid work. This article analyzes two aspects of the changing allocation of time. First, using longitudinal data from 1971 to 1991, the nature of the changes in how the families have changed their allocation of time between market and non-market alternatives is examined. Next, how family types have changed their allocations over the same period are examined. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics is used for this analysis.
Results of this research indicate that the proportion of time spent on household labor among men has increased over individual men's life cycles and between cross-sectional cohorts. However, women continue to devote more hours to household labor than men. The number of hours women spend in the labor force are increasing, but the number of hours women spend in the labor force is still less than the number of hours men spend in the labor force. While the families in the longitudinal analysis have been able to maintain fairly stable work and income patterns, the cross-sectional data indicate that families need to devote an increasing number of hours to the labor market to maintain economic stability.
In the eighteenth century a Great Transformation began--a transformation rooted in even earlier times and still in progress today. This transformation is characterized by the decline of primordial institutions based on the family as the central element of social organization and the replacement of these institutions by purposively constructed organization. Sociology is itself a product of this transformation, and the stages in the Great Transformation are mirrored by changes in the central foci of sociological theory and research. The decline of primordial social organization has been accompanied by a loss of informal social capital on which social control depended before the transformation. The design of purposive organization is necessary to compensate for this loss; this design is an emerging central focus for sociology. I introduce an example, "bounties on children," to illustrate this point.
This article examines marital power dynamics in couples in which wives earn more than their husbands, work in higher status occupations, or both to determine if wives with resource advantages are able to exercise greater power in their relationships than wives in more conventional marriages. The results do not bear out this hypothesis. This article argues that the logic of resource and exchange theories breaks down when women bring more money and status to the marital relationship. This suggests that the balance of marital power is more closely related to gender than to income or status. This article examines what Komter (1989) calls the hidden power in marriage and highlights how these couples do gender in ways that reinforce the husband's power.
The term 'community' characterizes a good society, however, it is argued that the term is ill-defined and is often used in incompatible situations. The term is defined as 'a social entity that has the elements necessary to contain conflict within sustainable boundaries' and is not necessarily territorial. The concept of community is analyzed, including an overview of inequality, moral dialogues and bonding.
This paper defines commitment and proposes three types, continuance, cohesion, and control commitment, which bind personality systems to areas of social systems, linking cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative orientations to roles, relationships, and norms, respectively. Two processes underlie the development of each of the three types of commitment: sacrifice and investment support continuance; renunciation and communion support cohesion; and mortification and surrender support control. On the basis of these processes, a large number of commitment mechanisms, or commitment-producing organizational strategies, are set forth. Use of these strategies generally distinguishes successful (enduring) and unsuccessful (short-lived) nineteenth century American utopian communities
- Bott, E.
- Boulding, E.
- Corsaro, W. A.
- Gordon, M.
Social capital, civil society, and contemporary democracy
Unpublished dissertation
- M Torres