The Sociology Of Housework Reissue

In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed sociologist Ann Oakley undertook one of the first serious sociological studies to examine women’s work in the home. She interviewed 40 urban housewives and analysed their perceptions of housework, their feelings of monotony and fragmentation, the length of their working week, the importance of standards and routines, and their attitudes to different household tasks. Most women, irrespective of social class, were dissatisfied with housework – an important finding which contrasted with prevailing views. Importantly, too, she showed how the neglect of research on domestic work was linked to the inbuilt sexism of sociology. This classic book challenged the hitherto neglect of housework as a topic worthy of study and paved the way for the sociological study of many more aspects of women’s lives.

Ann Oakley is a pioneer in the field of sociological research. In this classic re-issue, she interviewed 60 women to find out what it’s really like to have a baby. Covering pregnancy, birth and child care, she relies on the stories mothers tell to discuss whether and why women want to become pregnant, how they imagine motherhood to be, the experience of birth, post-natal depression, feeding and caring routines and the challenges for the domestic division of labour and to fathers. She shows that most women are unprepared for the birth or the work of caring for a baby, but also for the joys that a baby can bring. As topical today as the day it was written, this important book was the first to examine first-time motherhood in the words of those experiencing it, and it continues to influence generations of researchers today.

This book is about home and international law. More specifically, it is about the profound, and frequently devastating, transformations of home that are happening almost everywhere in the world today and what international law has to do with them. Through three stories of home – the desert home, the lake home and the city home – this book traces how the everyday operations of international law shape the material, affective and imaginative experience of home. It argues that international law’s ‘homemaking work’ is characterised by acts of domination, practices of resistance and the production of unhomely spaces. However, the book also considers whether and how the liberatory potential of international law could be unlocked through the metaphor of home. This book draws from fieldwork conducted by the author in Palestine, Cambodia and the United Kingdom. It takes a global socio-legal approach to home and international law, informed by feminist political theory, feminist geography, home studies and contemporary critical approaches to international law. It is the first academic work to examine the relationship between home and international law. This book’s global socio-legal approach to home and international law will be of interest to those teaching and studying in international law, socio-legal studies, legal pluralism and legal geography.

The open access book provides a critical account of parenthood in Polish society. It uses a qualitative perspective to show how mothers and fathers engage with parenthood and also function in the labour market. Parenting in contemporary Poland is not only affected by individual preferences and choices, but significantly by the institutional context, in particular the family policy system, as well as socio-cultural norms of how men and women should fulfill parental roles. The author distinguishes between different kinds of work done in connection to parenthood and shows how the existing institutional system reinforces gender and other forms of social inequalities even in a post-communist state like Poland. The author demonstrates that Polish society has different expectations and institutional norms related to work and gender norms compared to those in long-standing democracies in Europe and elsewhere. The book also shows that the experiences of parenthood in Poland are different between men and women, between single and coupled parents, and based on economic and other resources. This book is of interest to social science students and researchers of family studies, parenting, sociology of work, and social structure in post-communist societies.

Drawing on her long experience as an academic researcher and writer, Ann Oakley develops a sociology of the research process itself, telling the story of how a research project is undertaken and what happens during it, to both researchers and those who are researched. This remarkable book focuses on a topic of great importance in the provision of health services – caring and social support. Setting neglect of this topic in the wider context of an ongoing crisis in gendering knowledge, Social support and motherhood is now reissued for a contemporary audience. It has much resonance for social science researchers and others interested in the experiences of mothers, and in the relations between social research, academic knowledge and public policy.

Approaching global health through a social justice lens, this text explores both established and emerging issues for contemporary health and wellbeing. Divided into two parts, the book introduces key concepts in relation to global public health, such as ethics, economics, health disparities, and globalisation. The second part comprises chapters exploring specific challenges, such as designing and implementing public health interventions, the role of social enterprise, climate change, sustainability and health, oral health, violence, palliative care, mental health, loneliness, nutrition, and embracing diverse genders. These chapters build on, and apply, the theoretical frameworks laid out in part one, linking the substantive content to broader contexts. Taking an inclusive, global approach, this is a key text for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of global health, public health, and medical sociology.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429352775 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place. A public place, whatever its nature—a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner—is where people pass by, meet each other and at times become a victim of crime. With this book, we submit that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline. The book aims to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places with examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. This is achieved by tackling five cross-cutting themes: the nature of the city’s environment as a backdrop for crime and fear; the dynamics of individuals’ daily routines and their transit safety; the safety perceptions experienced by those who are most in fear in public places; the metrics of crime and fear; and, finally, examples of current practices in promoting safety. All these original chapters contribute to our quest for safer, more inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In More Than Medicine, LaTonya J. Trotter chronicles the everyday work of a group of nurse practitioners (NPs) working on the front lines of the American health care crisis as they cared for four hundred African American older adults living with poor health and limited means. Trotter describes how these NPs practiced an inclusive form of care work that addressed medical, social, and organizational problems that often accompany poverty. In solving this expanded terrain of problems from inside the clinic, these NPs were not only solving a broader set of concerns for their patients; they became a professional solution for managing "difficult people" for both their employer and the state. Through More Than Medicine, we discover that the problems found in the NP's exam room are as much a product of our nation's disinvestment in social problems as of physician scarcity or rising costs.