Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

This edited volume discusses and analyses the impact of neoliberal policies and ideologies on public and private care practices in Nordic, Central, and East European welfare states. Through new conceptualizations of care practices, chapters take the reader directly into the homes, workplaces, and everyday life of urban and rural residents throughout Europe. The book argues that common neoliberal responses to care crises are not about revaluing care but rather a normalization of precarious work as expressed in moving care from public institutions to families within private homes. Featuring contributions from eight countries, chapters contribute to research on gender, care, migration, and welfare policies by discussing how recent developments in global capitalism and neoliberal policies influence welfare policies and care arrangements in post-egalitarian and post-socialist societies in Europe. 

This book develops a new sociology of the intergenerational and longitudinal dynamics of men’s family participation in relation to their trajectories through poverty. By addressing the ostensible absence of men from low-income families in existing literature and policy, the authors interrogate the interconnectedness of poverty, family, and place while paying explicit attention to the trajectories of men through and across low-income families and localities. Through qualitative secondary analysis of four linked datasets from research within low-income families over a twenty-year period, Hughes and Tarrant argue that there is much to be gained from examining both men’s accounts of family and poverty across the lifecourse and the accounts of men experiencing family poverty. In so doing, they develop a new theoretical family lifecourse framework that accounts for the dynamic and place-based character of poverty and its implication for families. Thus, the book foregrounds the development of a more comprehensive sociology of family poverty.

This book examines the lives of children and young adults living in residential care systems in Zimbabwe and their unique conceptualization of family. While the importance of family for the development and wellbeing of children can't be overemphasized, the questions of what and who counts as family to orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) are under-researched. Gwenzi brings a social constructionist approach to study OVCs in institutional care as well as living with their families in Zimbabwe, finding that they do not have a single definition of family and that they use diverse characteristics to describe what family means to them. With the data suggesting a need for belonging, continuity of relationships, protection, and trust, this study makes recommendations for policy and practice with youth in alternative care in sub-Saharan Africa.