The Men Behind Economically Successful Women: A Focus on Dutch Dual-earner Couples

Using data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study, this paper compares the partners of economically successful women with those of women who have fared less well on the labor market. First, socioeconomic and attitudinal within-couple homogamy is investigated. Second, hypotheses derived from social capital theory and companionate theory are tested to examine how socioeconomic and attitudinal characteristics of male partners are related to women’s economic success. Economically successful women tend to have high-income men, suggesting an accumulation of favorable material resources. Men’s supportive behavior rather than their attitudes contribute to their wives’ economic success

Copyright and cultural work: an exploration

This article first discusses the contemporary debate on cultural “creativity” and the economy. Second, it considers the current state of UK copyright law and how it relates to cultural work. Third, based on empirical research on British dancers and musicians, an analysis of precarious cultural work is presented. A major focus is how those who follow their art by way of “portfolio” work handle their rights in ways that diverge significantly from the current simplistic assumptions of law and cultural policy. Our conclusions underline the distance between present top-down conceptions of what drives production in the cultural field and the actual practice of dancers and musicians

The Patriarchal Bargain in a Context of Rapid Changes to Normative Gender Roles: Young Arab Women’s Role Conflict in Qatar

Social norms in patriarchal countries in the Middle East are changing at differing rates. In Qatar, expectations about education have shifted, and women’s participation in higher education is normative. However, women’s participation in the workforce remains relatively low, and women still are expected to perform all household and child-rearing activities. Interviews with 27 18–25 year-old Qatari women enrolled in college in Qatar are used to illustrate the conflict between norms about education, workforce, and family. Many young women resolve this normative conflict by giving preference to family over work and education. Other women hold conflicting norms and goals for their future without acknowledging the normative conflict. Overall, young women in this sample feared divorce, were uncertain about customary family safety nets, and thus desired financial independence so they would be able to support themselves if they were left alone later in life due to divorce, or the death of their husband. The Qatari government should revisit the appropriateness of continuing to emphasize the patriarchal family structure and socially conservative family norms, if they desire to advance women in their society

The impact of family structure and disruption on intergenerational emotional exchange in Eastern Europe

Demographic trends across Europe involve a decrease in fertility and mortality rates, and an increase in divorce and stepfamily formation. Life courses and living arrangements have become less standardized and the structure of families has changed. In this article, we examine to what extent contemporary family structure and composition resulting from demographic changes affect emotional exchange between children and their parents, both from adult child to parent and from parent to child. Because the general level of well-being has been shown to be lower in Eastern Europe, thereby potentially affecting emotional exchange within families, we focus our research on Eastern Europe. We use the “conservation of resources theory” to derive hypotheses on how family structure may affect intergenerational emotional exchange. Family ties are assumed to be important resources of affection that people want to obtain and retain throughout their lives. Data from the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) are used to test our hypotheses. In general, our data offer more support for the idea that families are resilient than for the often heard assumption that families are in decline as a consequence of the changed family structure and composition

The (In)Authenticity of Simulated Talk: Comparing Role-Played and Actual Interaction and the Implications for Communication Training

This article was published in the journal, Research on Language and Social Interaction [Taylor & Francis (Routledge)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2013.780341How authentic is simulated, or role-played, interaction, of the kind produced in communication training contexts? The article addresses this question by comparing actual and role-played police investigative interviews. Both types of interviews were recorded by the police: real ones to fulfill British legal requirements and training ones to maximize the authenticity of the training experience. Interview openings were examined using conversation analysis. Officers must adhere to Police and Criminal Evidence Act (2008) guidelines, turning them into spoken actions. The analyses revealed that while, in gross terms, officers in real and simulated interviews opened interviews by formulating the same actions (e.g., identifying copresent parties), differences were observable in their design and organization. In simulations, actions were more elaborate or exaggerated; that is, they were made interactionally visible and “assessable.” Furthermore, some actions were only present in simulations. Implications for the efficacy of role-play methods for training and assessing communication are discussed