Sociology of Personal Life

4 Key excerpts on "Sociology of Personal Life"

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  Sociology of Personal Life

  • Vanessa May, Petra Nordqvist, Vanessa May, Petra Nordqvist(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  and it forms a range of connections’ (Smart, 2007: 29). For example, personal life includes not only family life at home but also going to school or to work, taking part in financial transactions in shops, and engaging with public policy – for example, by filling in official forms or by voting in elections. A further aim of the book is to provide con-ceptual tools for understanding the micro level of day-to-day personal life as well as the relationship between personal experience and wider social phenomena. However, by saying that we wish to question the primacy of family relationships as the stuff of personal life, we are not claiming that these are not central in personal life – quite the contrary. We still view these ‘traditional’ topics as major components of personal life, but we would argue that they can only be fully understood if explored in relation to other spheres significant to everyday personal life. Having said this, it is important for us to make it clear that we do not merely see this text as re-organising the implicit hierarchy of family studies. We are more ambitious than this. A Sociology of Personal Life is not merely a field but also a way of seeing and sociologically conceptualising the everyday. This entails asking challenging and innovative questions with the use of cutting edge conceptual tools. INTRODUCING A Sociology of Personal Life 3 What is sociological about personal life? A Sociology of Personal Life is concerned with investigating what is socio-logical about personal life; that is, what individual people’s personal lives say about society more generally. The aim of such a sociology is thus not only to understand the experiences of individual persons, but also how and why these experiences may in the aggregate follow some general patterns.

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  Connecting Self to Society

  Belonging in a Changing World

  • Vanessa May(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  66 SELF AND SOCIET Y IN SOCIAL THEORY A detour into the Sociology of Personal Life As discussed above, the sociology of everyday life has been critiqued for sepa-rating the everyday and social structures. As a way of bridging this gap, I borrow conceptual tools from the Sociology of Personal Life as developed by Carol Smart (2007). The term ‘personal’, which Smart (2007: 28) uses instead of the more atomistic ‘individual’, highlights the connectedness and social embeddedness of people’s lives. Furthermore, Smart proposes that because memory and cultural transmission play an important part in our lives, people can be understood as ‘embedded in both sedimented structures and the imagi-nary’ (Smart, 2007: 29). This allows us to capture the role that ‘traditions’ and ‘social structures’, on the one hand, and creativity, on the other, play in people’s lives. The Sociology of Personal Life shares this interest in the role that both the fixed and the dynamic play in our lives with the sociology of everyday life, but helps us overcome the distinction between ‘the unofficial’ and ‘the official’ spheres that the sociology of everyday life somewhat unhelp-fully erects. Personal life does not take place at only one level, but is ‘lived in many different places and spaces … and it forms a range of connections’ (Smart, 2007: 29). As discussed above, the boundary between private and public spheres is blurred. Personal life is not only shaped by but also shapes the public sphere. As individuals begin to behave differently in their everyday lives, this has an impact on the aggregate and on the public sphere (May, 2011b). For example, various social movements, such as the women’s liberation movement, the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement, have had a significant impact on legislation, which, in turn, has impacted personal life (Edwards, 2011).

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  Socialising Children

  • A. James(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  as children into the structures, institutions, empathies, intergenerational relations and other social relationships that permeate the fabric of the society in which they live. To understand socialisation involves, at one and the same time therefore, a focus on the society as well as on the individual child, on the role of structure as well as on exploring the potential of children’s agency and on cultural continuities as well as on change. Trying to understand socialisation from a child-centred perspective clearly takes us into deep and muddy theoretical waters. These the next chapter explores in some depth, preparing the groundwork for what comes later. However, to guide us through the murk of these debates as they reappear throughout this book there remains one particular guiding light – the idea that in order to understand socialisation as children experience it I need to explore the personal lives of children as they unfold across the childhood phase of the life course. And for this inspiration I turn to the recent work of the sociologist Carol Smart.

  Living a personal life

  The initial impetus for the development of what has come to be known as the Sociology of Personal Life (see May 2011) was Smart’s recognition that family sociology needed to be able to extend beyond its usual terrain to embrace the more contemporary ideas and practices of intimacy, friendship and other close relationships visible ‘out there’ in the social world. Somehow these social practices are family-like and yet, as Smart puts it, they can no longer be comfortably ‘squeezed into the existing terminologies of families or partnering or parenting’ (2007: 6). In her view, they represent rather different kinds of social relations that do not fit the traditional stamping ground of family sociologists. However, in developing her ideas, the concept of personal life came to embrace much more than this, since what it did was to invite a rather different way of thinking about the individual and their relationship to the social world. Already then it is possible to see the usefulness this idea might have for theories of socialisation.

  Another of Smart’s concerns, however, was to offer a counter-point to the contemporary theoretical trends towards excessive individualisation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). Within family sociology in particular, Smart wanted to take issue with the ideas from Beck-Gernsheim (2002) and Bauman (2003) that the family is in terminal decline because of wider social changes – divorce, more mobile labour markets, women’s employment and so on. These, such theorists argue, have fractured the kinds of social relationships that have, in the past, helped constitute family life. And although Giddens (1991) depicts the free-floating, decision-making, choice-taking, autonomous individual as emblematic of urban, Western life as it is now being lived in late modernity, this account offers a rather positive spin on the significance that the move towards individualisation has had for individuals in their everyday lives. Smart, by contrast, wants to insist that most people – in their everyday lives – are not now necessarily experiencing the world in this way. Instead, people’s sense of their connectedness with others not only persists but remains important to them. Indeed, for Smart, this is a core part of what it means to be human and is central to people’s personal lives.

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  Displaying Families

  A New Concept for the Sociology of Family Life

  • E. Dermott, J. Seymour, E. Dermott, J. Seymour(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  For example, a couple wishing to adopt have to ‘display’ their credentials as a possible family unit to an adoption agency. In this instance the need for reciprocity from an organisa- tion that is external to family members themselves defines a power- ful external individual or group as a participant in the construction of display, not merely as an observer. Beyond displaying families’: ‘displaying personal relationships’? It has already been noted that the term ‘family’ has, for some consid- erable time, been rejected as inadequate for conveying the multiplic- ities inherent in family life. Even when pluralised to ‘families’ the term is still insufficient to cover the range of relationships which those traditionally branded sociologists of family life wish to exam- ine. To include the wider relationships and negotiations that take place with friends, partners, acquaintances and colleagues along with those we call ‘family’ (whether that is defined as close biologi- cal kin or a looser definition), it has become commonplace to refer to ‘personal lives’, ‘personal relationships’ or the study of ‘intimacy’ as terms which encompass, but are not restricted to, the narrower ‘fam- ily’. While we might be tempted to dismiss these variations as mere semantics, debates over terminology, as Carol Smart suggests in her book titled Personal Life (2007), are significant because they reflect conceptual shifts and empirical changes. The current discussions in this area therefore indicate how the field is ‘going through a very interesting phrase as the sociological imagination stretches and 16 Esther Dermott and Julie Seymour reconfigures in order better to grasp and reflect the complexities of contemporary personal life’ (Smart 2007: 27). This interest in reflect- ing on what choices of terminology mean in relation to what we study and how we conceptualise our field of research is evident directly and indirectly in the contributions included in this collec- tion.

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