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This article contributes to the sociology of relationships by exploring the moral imperatives that shaped perceptions and negotiations of family life during lockdowns in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified dominant discourses from an online qualitative story completion task and situate these in relation to emerging literature on the impact of pandemic-related restrictions on domestic relationships, gender relations, and labour division. We argue that discourses of family connection, clean and tidy homes, and the commodity of time operated as moral imperatives. These imperatives simultaneously offered opportunities for enrichment and agency, as well as operating as unobtainable benchmarks that constrained people's sense of wellbeing. In this analysis we explore how COVID-19 lockdown stories offer new ways of understanding the interplay between displaying and doing 'family life' where gender and labour relations are performed, reinforced and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how immigrants' proficiency in speaking English, and preference for retaining their native tongue as the language of the home, affect their occupational attainment in the Australian labour market. In particular, it investigates how well three approaches - an assimilationist approach, a Neo-Marxist approach, and an ethnic enclaves approach - account for differences among groups in how important language usage and skill are in occupational mobility. The data are drawn from the 1981 Census public use sample. The findings show that monolingual English usage is of no benefit in the labour market and that weak English skills harm the occupational opportunities of some groups much more than others, a finding that is fully consistent with the ethnic enclaves approach. Generalising from the differences among Australian immigrant groups, the paper provides some hypotheses about language effects among immigrants to industrialised societies more generally, and develops some hypotheses about conditions fostering development of ethnic enclaves in such societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of working class or subordinate consciousness and its relation to the dominant value system has been a central component of the research into actors' 'images of society'. This paper offers an empirical contribution to this topic via an examination of the conceptions of the economic system held by samples of Australian managers and shop stewards. Previous research has suggested that the consciousness of members of subordinate groups is inconsistent or contradictory in that lower class actors provide a mixture of support for and rejection of dominant values. The evidence reviewed here lends support to this finding but by focusing more closely upon the categories, vocabularies and frameworks which make up the actors' images of the economy, the paper attempts to offer a more satisfactory explanation of how such inconsistencies can appear, one which highlights the role of language as a mechanism in ideological incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrowing eligibility and increasing conditionality of social security payments in Anglophone liberal democracies like Australia has been accompanied by growing attention to the ways benefit recipients navigate the personal and practical challenges of life amid welfare reforms. This article reorients the study of getting by on welfare benefits to focus on the material and affective investment in making life liveable. I argue that the generative dimension of getting by is suggested but submerged within the reactive orientation of much welfare scholarship on coping and resilience. This article takes up the challenge of telling sociological stories of hope in hardship without romanticising everyday struggle. It does so by focusing on the pleasures, pursuits and projects – however modest and muted – that sustain a liveable life in hardship but do not necessarily conform to normative ideas of 'good resilience'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social mobility research mainly investigates directional change in socio-economic circumstance. This article contributes to the strand of social mobility research that examines subjective experiences of economic movement. It analyses social mobility as a set of relationally, temporally and spatially embedded social practices, subjectively experienced and interpreted. The interactive nexus between social and spatial mobility is a fruitful line of inquiry, and the experiences of international migrants are distinctly suited for developing this analysis. Drawing on a qualitative study of migrants' mobilities, both social and spatial, post-arrival in Australia, we argue that social mobility is experienced as sets of contingent social practices. These in/variably co-exist with aspirations for a sense of belonging and connectedness, a sense of security and other non-economic needs and desires and are also always adjusted over time. In addition, migrants' status as legal, cultural or social Others shapes the experience of social mobility in distinctive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people's drinking represents a nexus between time, temporalities and social practices. While drinking and intoxication have previously been considered a way to achieve a youthful sense of 'time out', young people's drinking is declining in Australia and other high-income countries, suggesting alcohol's centrality in young people's leisure time has diminished. Drawing on interviews with light and non-drinker teenagers from Melbourne, Australia, we develop Adorno's concept of 'free time' to show how young people's time use practices – including how they incorporate alcohol into their lives – are more than ever shaped by social and economic pressures. We framed participants' discussion of time and its relationship to drinking as a) using free time 'productively', b) being opportunistic around busy schedules, and c) the importance of using time for restoration. These framings suggest fragmented and pressure-filled patterns of free time may challenge drinking as a 'time out' practice for young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first findings of a survey carried out in Melbourne, Australia. It attempts to test hypotheses based on the embourgeoisement thesis, and its variations, in a social system with a strong equalitarian ideology and compulsory arbitration for all sections of the work force. It assesses the economic differences between white collar and blue collar workers and also the difference between these groups and a middle class group. It also compares the Australian situation with America and Britain. It finds a significant difference between blue collar and white collar income rates, total income medians and career income medians, as against the apparent near parity of the situation in Britain and America. These differences are not mitigated by wives' earnings or income from other sources. There is an almost complete dichotomy between these groups and the middle class group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of creative and cultural industries has provided a rich source for theoretical claims and commentary. Much of this reproduces and extends the idea that autonomy is the defining feature of both enterprises and workers. Drawing on evidence from research into Australian development studios in the global digital games industry, the article interrogates claims concerning autonomy and related issues of insecurity and intensity, skill and specialisation, work–play boundaries, identity and attachments. In seeking to reconnect changes in creative labour to the wider production environment and political economy, an argument is advanced that autonomy is deeply contextual and contested as a dimension of the processes of capturing value for firms and workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the homeownership aspirations and plans of two groups of young Australian adults defined by their class position as ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘middle class’. We draw on Bauman’s idea of liquid modernity and ‘liquid life’ to frame our analysis. Despite being under less pressure to adopt socially prescribed adult transitions that applied to previous generations – a steady job, marriage, family and a house in the suburbs – young adults from both middle-class and disadvantaged backgrounds aspire to homeownership. In spite of an apparent multitude of choices and an increased emphasis on individual agency, the articulations of their aspirations and plans to achieve it, in the context of the uncertainties of ‘liquid life’, are strongly influenced by their class position, defined primarily through family background and education. The article uses qualitative data drawn from two projects conducted in Melbourne, Australia, 2007–2010. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on a study of the use of genetic paternity testing in the Australian context. It uses data from interviews with women in regular or cohabitating relationships whose partners exited the relationship because of a pregnancy and subsequently denied paternity. At a broader level, it explores the fragility of paternity itself in the early 21st century within the context of unprecedented sexual freedoms and transformative changes to family formation and intimate relationships. It also locates cohabitating paternity in a broader discursive context that has seen an unparalleled demonization of mothers as potential perpetrators of ‘paternity fraud’, a neo-legal exposé of infidelity and extortion of child support that commercial DNA paternity testing purports to be able to uncover. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the question 'Why do fathers resist paying child support?' through interviews with 26 separated or divorced non-residential fathers in Australia. Drawing on Zelizer's typology we argue that the men in this study attempt to define child support as a gift -- a payment that emphasizes the power and beneficence of the payer and the obligation of the receiver -- but struggle to do so in legal and bureaucratic structures that position its receipt as an entitlement. The tension between child support as a gift and child support as entitlement is informed by gendered power over money, a key element of fathering in traditional and non-traditional family structures. The payment and non-payment of child support is used to reinforce the economic dimensions of fathering identities and define family relationships in remarkably traditional ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the systematic archiving of qualitative data emerging as a distinct possibility in Australia, both the practices of qualitative research and how subsequent outputs are 'used' are coming under increased scrutiny and reflection. Drawing on a series of focus groups with qualitative researchers, this article critically explores the meanings ascribed to qualitative research practice and the perceived challenges posed by contemporary innovations in data management, access, and analysis through electronic archiving. The accounts presented provide much needed insight into key debates (and divergences) within the qualitative community regarding the values and meanings of qualitative practice, but also how contemporary innovations may come to challenge these core values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the dilemmas associated with continuing to interpret women's experience through the lens of a progress narrative that emerged to represent the aspirations of women during the peak of the women's movement.The central theme of this narrative is that gender: will no longer act as a social constraint once women are recognized as workers as well as mothers. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Karl Mannheim and; empirical data from in depth interviews undertaken as part of a generational study of Australian women, the article argues that the progress narrative no longer inspires young women, who take gender equity for granted. Although motherhood continues to shape their working arrangements, the discourses they use to make sense of the tensions involved are embedded in a new Zeitgeist which prioritizes 'choice', not 'equity'. The implications of this shift for the 'work-life balance' social policy agenda are then considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The `cultural tum' in social gerontology addresses how ageing subjectivities emerge from social and cultural cultural contexts. This article report a phenomenological study of experiences of ageing in Thailand and Australia based on ethnography and interviews with older people in each setting. The data suggest that cultural contexts, issues of embodiment, dependency and institutionalization, and positive experiences of care are elements from which older people construct embodied subjectivities. The article is critical of approaches that suggest that reflexive modernization can explain the experience of ageing and suggests that the cultural mediation of a disparate range of social relations can be understood by asking `what can an ageing body do?' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]