The Diversity of State Benefit Dependent Lone Mothers: the Use of Type Categories As an Analytical Tool

This article provides an empirical examination of how lone mothers who receive state benefits in Germany and Britain create meaning with regards to mothering and state dependency. It uses the concept of individualisation as it requires women to negotiate their own lives. But the concept of individualisation is limited as it insinuates a convergence in men's and women's work identities and aspirations and is in danger of reducing women's identity to their 'family-work' preferences that does not encompass the complexity of their lives. The article has both a methodological claim and a substantive claim: Methodologically, it explores how new type categories can be used as an analytical tool to help us understand how lone mothers create meaning and to make sense of the differences between the mothers' complex identities. Substantively, these type categories demonstrate that there are great variations and dynamics in mothers' identities despite their state dependency. Based on lone mothers' perceived choices and constraints they are categorised as pioneers, copers or strugglers. The pioneers view their situation as an opportunity to construct their lives actively in non-traditional ways. In contrast, the coper and the struggler types perceive a lack of choices and tend to have traditional gender role values. While copers view their situation as temporary and improvable, strugglers feel overwhelmed by constraints and perceive themselves to have no choices at all. This article discusses the construction and the characteristics of these categories while detailed case studies bring each type category to life and give them more substance. The data analysis also shows that besides values, lone mothers' structural background as well as the number and age of their children seems to be related to lone mothers' creation of meaning.Choices/constraints, Individualisation, Lone Motherhood, Type Categories, Sense of Coherence Concept, Structural Background

Beings in their own right? Exploring Children and young people's sibling and twin relationships in the Minority World

This paper examines the contributions that the sociological study of sibship and twinship in the Minority World can make to childhood studies. It argues that, in providing one forum within which to explore children and young people's social relationships, we can add to our understanding of children and young people's interdependence and develop a more nuanced understanding of agency. As emergent subjects, children, young people and adults are in a process of ‘becoming’. However, this does not mean that they can ‘become’ anything they choose to. The notion of negotiated interdependence (Punch 2002) is useful in helping us to grasp the contingent nature of children and young people's agency

A critical analysis of family and relationships policies in England and Wales (1997-2011)

In this review I will map out social trends and unravel the development of family and relationship support policies in England and Wales between 1997 and 2011. I aim to make sense of specific shifts by analysing the interplay between governments, government reports and Green Papers, policy making and state spending on support policies. To do this I critically engage with social policy, the development of policy making and implementation of government directives

Lone mothering in Britain and Germany Balancing choices and constraints

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN061981 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Border Regimes: Homophobia and LGBT Place Making in Six Ordinary Cities in Europe

European nation states increasingly hail LGBT identities as part of modern values; LGBT recognitions have become a symbol of secular achievements. Discourses around gay rights and sexual diversity are increasingly pitted against presumably homophobic and intolerant ‘others’. An increased intolerant and repressive attitude towards migrants and racialised minorities is justified by their supposed threat to exactly these values. LGBT tolerance is used as a marker for modern values and this positions LGBT people as ‘border patrollers’ who can count as part of the modern liberal nation. This paper analyses 92 interviews with LGBT participants who live in six small and medium sized ordinary cities in Europe. It discusses how their fear of homophobia is evaluated according to perceived sexual norms and attitudes at the neighbourhood level. Neighbourhoods are considered either LGBT friendly or unfriendly according to their socio-demographic characteristics that focus on social class and/or migration and that intersects with race, ethnicity and religion. Based on the findings, neighbourhoods are both a geographical and a cultural terrain that can be understood, organised and contested through a sexuality discourse in the production of border regimes that discipline and produce the confines of the normative, the ‘modern’ and the ‘backward’. Not only are LGBT people positioned as border patrollers but they express their fear of homophobia also through bordering. The neighbourhood can then be understood, organised and contested through a sexuality discourse in the production of border regimes