Family, Gender and Kinship in Australia

The Social and Cultural Logic of Practice and Subjectivity

Allon J. Uhlmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317136507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This ethnographically-based exploration draws on sociological, historical and demographic data to provide a comprehensive analysis of family, gender and kinship in Australia, which informs modern kinship and gender at large. Allon Uhlmann charts the cultural basis that underlies kinship practices and argues that the Australian family is characterized by deep cultural and social continuities rather than the common view that the family is undergoing substantial change. He further shows how the modern family both shapes, and is shaped by, broad social and economic processes. This analysis provides greater insight into this critical field of practice as well as showcasing a novel analytical approach to practice that is rooted in the sociology of practice and in the anthropology of cognition. The book also suggests changes to the way in which social scientists currently treat family and kinship.

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Project and the Field

This book is intended as an ethnographic report into kinship, family and gender practices; as a critical exposition of the current social scientific understanding of such practices; and as a theoretical and methodological treatise on practice.

The project originated in ethnographic fieldwork among workers and their families in the Australian town of Newcastle, New South Wales, from late 1994 until early 1996. The fieldwork unfolded in various phases, each lasting a few months. In the first stage I conducted interviews with union organizers and local politicians, and also started approaching potential informants. In the next phase I conducted formal interviews with community organizers, with professionals and activists in areas of family, youth and gender, and with family and relationship counsellors. At the same time I was keeping close contact with several families – learning about and sharing in their daily lives – while conducting a series of formal and informal interviews with other informants. In the following stage I continued my work with ethnographic informants, while starting to formulate preliminary observations. In the final phase of my fieldwork I focused with my informants on exploring and elaborating my preliminary observations, rather than on trying to generate new observations. In this phase I also conducted focus groups.

In total I maintained rather close and continuous contact with around fifteen informants. I also administered four focus groups (two with men, two with women) whose participants numbered between five and six each, and conducted interviews (both formal and informal) with many more. Some of my informants came through contacts I established in the union movement, others through personal contacts, a few through community organizations (such as the local branch of the Australian Labor Party, a Toastmasters club, religious community organizations, and adult technical and continuing education institutions). A few neighbours in the ‘rough’ inner-city suburb of Islington where I lived also became informants. Some of the youth I interviewed were contacted through a few community organizations that deal with young people, such as a youth theatre group. The participants in the focus groups were recruited through the distribution of fliers at shopping centres, followed by phone interviews.

This description might convey the impression of a well-organized ethnographic fieldwork, carried out in a premeditated and systematic manner. In reality, however, much of the fieldwork unfolded haphazardly rather than by intentional pre-planning. For example, I had originally intended to focus my study on workers in a particular industrial site, using that site as a bounded community of sorts. I chose one steel-making plant of BHP – the largest Australian-based multinational at the time – and proceeded to get the approval of the manager of the site. This approval was subsequently revoked by BHP’s head office in Melbourne. The reason for denying me access was most likely a reluctance of top BHP management to have outsiders in the plant just as they were about to launch a massive downsizing drive. The extent of the planned closures and the intentional escalation of industrial conflict were not known to either workers or local management at the time I began my fieldwork. Once the negative response arrived from BHP’s corporate headquarters, workers, especially staff members, were warned by management in no uncertain terms not to cooperate with me in the study. I decided not to try to recruit any more informants from among employees at that workplace, and did not put any pressure on those who bowed to company pressure and decided not to continue. While I continued working with a few of the workers, I gave up on my original attempt to delineate a clearly bounded population. I subsequently relied on the snowball method to recruit further informants. Another dead end in my research was my attempt to use social network analysis, which I had originally hoped to integrate into the study. As it turned out, I had underestimated the amount of data which such an analysis would both generate and require. I concluded that, given the great restrictions on my resources, I could not pursue this avenue of research.

As a result of the collapse of my strategy to bracket off a bounded community, my increasing realization of the limits on my resources, and the abundance of well-resourced statistical data on Australian families, I decided not to attempt survey work or other quantitative data collections, and rather to focus on in-depth, qualitative studies. As I proceeded to concentrate on qualitative work, I continued to experiment with different research methods. Towards the end of my fieldwork I conducted four focus groups. These proved surprisingly useful in the data they provided. I conducted two focus groups with men, and two with women.

While all informants contributed to the research voluntarily, those who participated in the focus groups were paid A$40 for their participation. Professional childcare was also provided to participants, free of charge, during the sessions. Initially I tried to recruit participants on a voluntary basis, but met with very little success. One common practice among some researchers with low budgets is to get a pre-existing group of people, such as a club committee, to participate as a group in a focus group. I decided not to follow this route, as it is an essential aspect of the focus group methodology that participants should be strangers to one another. Furthermore, Newcastle is saturated with commercial research companies who run focus groups, and who pay their participants. This had created an expectation, which was not unreasonable, among potential participants that they should be remunerated for turning up at an allotted place at an allotted time for the interview.

This shift in methodology towards an exclusive focus on qualitative research was only possible because of the abundance of solid quantitative data on family practices published by such sources as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS). It coincided with a general shift in my interests from providing a description of the patterns of practice, to trying to understand the logic of practice. This shift was influenced by the fact that the practice of my informants was rather disappointingly common. An original hypothesis I had entertained before heading off to the field – namely that terminal monogamy was being replaced with serial monogamy – fell flat. My informants did not take lightly to divorce and separation, nor did they experience it as an integral part of the normal life experience. Divorce and separation were still very much marital breakdowns rather than integral stages of a novel life trajectory.

Further, confronted with the realities of my field I found it necessary to raise fundamental questions that ideally should have been answered by works in other disciplines. For example, while much statistical data exists on family-related regularities of practice, the current historical and sociological literature does not provide a useful analysis of what is changing and what is not in the practice of kinship and family. Moreover, the analysis of the logic of these patterns of practice is not very useful by anthropological standards. For instance, it is not clear from the literature if changes in aggregate patterns of practice reflect what, following David Schneider (e.g. Schneider 1980, 1–8), one might call normative changes, or perhaps changes at the cultural level.

In confronting the cultural level of practice I also came up against one of the most frustrating and fruitful limitations of ethnographic data – the silences and lacunae in the data that result from the fact that what is taken for granted escapes explication. These silences are all the more interesting as they were echoed in much social research, and resonate with much of the experience of both producers and consumers of anthropological research alike.

My shift in focus towards the logic of kinship practice led me to an in-depth engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This engagement began while in the field, but grew in intensity in the period following my return. In the process I had to re-evaluate the very questions, concepts and theories that had guided my research. Bourdieu’s theory of practice came to form the analytical backbone for the discussion below. However, in the course of bringing it to bear on my ethnographic data, I found it necessary to modify several aspects of his theory, and to integrate elements of cognitive sciences and phenomenology into the broad scheme of things. Specifically, work on metaphor and categorization in social sciences opened the way for me to explore the way the lived world is organized in practice even when this contradicted formal logic; and the phenomenology of embodiment allowed me to reintroduce the body – as physical reality – into the analysis. Thus this study became an opportunity for me to develop an eclectic methodology to analyse practice.

In sum, then, this work is ethnographically driven, but is not an ethnography in the narrowest sense of the word. Rather, it is a broader exploration of various theoretical issues relating to the kinship practices which were observed in the field. The ethnographic component of the research joins in with other historical, sociological and demographic data to provide an object for analysis. The analysis that follows serves two functions. One is to provide new information about and greater insight into a critical field of practice. The other is to showcase an analytical approach to practice.

Before delving into the analysis in the chapters that follow, I should better situate my fieldwork, and my informants.

The Context of the Fieldwork

Newcastle at the time of my fieldwork was in the throes of a major political-economic structural shift. From the early years of the twentieth century Newcastle’s economy had been based on heavy industry. However, major structural reforms that flowed from the increased globalization of the economy resulted in the progressive exodus of heavy industries from Newcastle, beginning in the early 1980s and culminating in the mid-1990s. For example, in the early 1980s BHP was the town’s main employer. In 1982–83 BHP shed well over 10,000 employees, reducing its workforce to around 3,000. Beginning in 1995, BHP began progressively restructuring, eventually winding down virtually all operations in the city. More generally, by the time of my fieldwork heavy industry’s share of employment in Newcastle had dropped substantially. The largest employer in Newcastle in 1995 was the University of Newcastle (Boreham and Hall 1993; Metcalfe and Bern 1994; Metcalfe and Bern n.d.; Docherty 1983; Mills 1997; Sexton 1997; Hextall et al. 1997; Greg Heys (Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Newcastle and Lord Mayor 1995–9), personal communication; Serge Zorino (Trades and Labour Council), personal communication; Mick Savin (AWU-FIME Amalgamated Union), personal communication; Bob Ritten (Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union), personal communication; Denis Nichols (Automotive, Metals and Engineering Union), personal communication).

This was part of a national trend that saw manufacturing’s share of the formal economy drop, while tertiary service industries increased their proportion. Over that period capital grew stronger in relation to both organized labour and the state apparatus. This was reflected economically in the drop in the ratio of wages to profit, in the wages’ share of production costs, and in the wages’ share of the national income. The structural shift was accompanied by the rolling back of social spending by state and federal governments, the pacification of labour, and a progressive deterioration of the labour experience. Unionization rates dropped, unemployment increased, as did casual and part-time work. Full-time work entailed progressively longer hours of work and greater effort, in conjunction with a decline in job security. Good jobs became rarer, and degraded jobs proliferated. Apprenticeships which had previously been important in securing young people’s economic independence became very rare indeed. All these transformations affected the labour market unevenly. Consequently, the economic and social inequalities within the working class increased, so that the best-off of the working class – invariably core employees in well-unionized industries – shrank in ratio, but were doing comparatively better than before. At the same time the people at the bottom of the heap increased in numbers, and were worse off. Newcastle itself failed to develop any alternative economic bases to the rapidly fleeing heavy industries, and was exhibiting, in a magnified form, all the ailments of the national structural transformation (Gittins 1997; McGregor 1997; Connell and Irving 1992; Boreham and Hall 1993; Greg Heys ((Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Newcastle and Lord Mayor 1995–9)), personal communication).

My Informants and their Class Position

My ethnographic informants came mostly from the shrinking traditional industrial working class. The vast majority could be classed as members of what Bourdieu (1984) has dubbed the dominated class which can be glossed as working class. When analysing the dominant class – that is the various social, cultural and economic elites – Bourdieu distinguished between dominated and dominant fractions. This distinction can also be applied to the working class.

Among my informants there was a higher representation of members of the dominant fraction of the working class, than of the dominated fraction of the working class. They included tradesmen, semi-professionals, foremen, mid-level clerical workers, trade unionists and their families. They were mostly from Northern and Western European extraction, or at least identified with the ‘non-ethnic’/‘true-blue’ mainstream society. While my informants’ age range varied, my main focus was on men and women in their twenties, thirties and forties.

In adapting Bourdieu’s relational scheme to my working-class informants, I distinguish between two class fractions – the dominated and the dominant – according to the segment of the labour market to which they are attached.¹

The Australian labour market, like all modern capitalist labour markets, is segmented (Boreham and Hall 1993; cf. Sawyer 1989, chapter 3; Edwards 1979; Norris 1993). The distinction I am drawing between the dominant and dominated fractions of the working class relates to the distinction often drawn between the primary and the secondary labour markets in various studies, for example the distinction between the ‘secondary’ labour market, and ‘subordinate primary’ labour market in Richard Edwards’s formulation (Edwards 1979). The secondary labour market offers casual employment and dead-end jobs, is characterized by great worker mobility, low skill level, low investment by employers in employee training, poor working conditions, job insecurity and ultimately, low wages. The labour-market participation patterns of those who sell their labour power on this market can be typified by great horizontal job mobility (normally between employers) and a lack of promotion, and is typically accompanied by high levels of unemployment. By contrast, the primary labour market, which is largely organized around large corporate employers’ internal labour markets, provides workers with better working conditions and greater job security. Positions that are filled with labour power bought on the primary labour market normally require greater skill levels than those that are filled on the secondary labour market. Employers invest more in training and maintaining such employees. The primary labour market, which normally takes the form of a manorial internal labour market (see Norris 1993, 98–113), contains the jobs of the old industrial working class, and the lower-level clerical, service and supervisory positions. Workers who sell their labour power on this labour market normally enjoy higher levels of unionization, exercise greater control over their labour process and, ultimately, earn much higher wages. Compared with those from the secondary market, they are more likely to stay with their current employer, more likely to win promotions and more likely to advance up the skill and remuneration levels. Further, in transition between industries, workers tend to remain within their segment of the labour market. This was particularly visible during my fieldwork, which occurred at the peak of deindustrialization in Newcastle. All those whom I encountered who had made the transition from blue-collar work to white-collar jobs of the primary labour market had been employed in the primary segment in their original industry.

I class those who live in households whose income derives primarily from the secondary labour market as the dominated fraction of the working class, and those whose households rely primarily on the primary labour market as the dominant fraction of the working class.

Members of the dominant fractions of the working class directly dominate members of the dominated fractions of their own class in various contexts. The following instances reflect the specificities of my fieldwork site. At the workplace, the secondary labour market jobs in large firms would usually come under the supervision of the firm’s core workforce, which was composed of those who were attached to the primary labour market. In other words, the members of the dominated fraction of the working class came under the supervision of the dominant-fraction members of the working class. Similarly, in formal grassroots organizations such as lay church groups, unions, ALP branches, single-issue organizations or parental mobilization around schools – those in leadership positions were much more likely to be members of the dominant fractions of the working class, rather than their counterparts in the dominated fractions. Another form of domination occurred in the home-rental markets. Many members of the dominant fraction invested in real estate, usually in the cheap, impoverished, inner-city suburbs. These investments required a relatively modest initial capital investment, which was one reason they were popular. Also, being members of the working class, my informants were ‘good with their hands’, and often used their embodied cultural capital (that is, their manual skills) to improve the real estate and increase its value. The loans taken to finance the acquisitions were paid off from the rent collected from tenants. The tenants on such properties were very likely to be members of the dominated fractions of the working class, who could not afford even the initial investment to gain a mortgage to buy a family home. Through this relationship between landlord and tenant too, then, members of the dominant fraction came to dominate members of the dominated fractions of the working class. Even in State agencies that manage and control the working class (e.g. police, Department of Social Security), those employees who directly interacted with the public normally belonged to the dominant fraction, while clients or those subjected to the work of these agencies were usually members of the dominated fraction. Finally, occasionally a member of the dominant fraction of the working class might try to set up an independent small business. When such businesses became successful enough to require the recruitment of employees, the latter were most often members of the dominated fractions of the working class. All these instances of daily domination of the one fraction by the other represent a major structural fault line which cuts across the working class (cf. McGregor 1997, 55–56, 89–93, 199).

Further, the daily conflicts within the working class – either through direct domination as I described above, or merely through exclusory practices like the closed shop at unionized workplaces – continuously put the dominant fraction and its style in opposition with that of the dominated fraction and its style. (I will return to the intertwining of class structure and gender style in chapter 8.) Nevertheless, both fractions shared their basic position in the social structure – namely opposition to the social, economic and cultural elites – and were furthermore not separated in a clear-cut fashion. Mobility between the two fractions occurred frequently. During my fieldwork, at a time when heavy industries were fleeing from Newcastle, mostly offshore, the most common mobility was downwards through redundancy and unemployment, from the dominant fraction to the dominated fraction. More importantly, most of my dominant-fraction informants had little which had distinguished ...