This perceptive volume presents conceptual, theoretical, and empirical approaches to social policy analysis comparing China and Nordic countries in their treatment of the elderly. An international panel of experts offers valuable policy insights into issues of housing, community care, family care, pensions and social security, and mental health as China translates and adapts Western examples, particularly those set by Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The book contrasts shared issues in the contexts of economic history, accountability and service improvements, and sustainability while also examining specifically Chi nese problems such as care gaps between urban and rural elders. Coverage also considers the centrality of aging policy in China as the nation works toward its long-term goal of eradicating poverty. Included among the topics: Building a welfare system with Chinese characteristics: from a residual type to moderate universalism. "Aging in community": historical and comparative study of aging welfare and social policy. Sweden: aging welfare and social policy in the 21st century. Policy responses to aging: care services for the elderly in Norway. China's elderly care policy and its future trends. Aging Welfare and Social Policy will interest professionals and researchers addressing questions of Chinese and comparative social policy, health psychologists, and sociologists focused on family, youth, and aging.

This book brings together international research from scholars and activists on the forms of violence that older women experience into a unique, comprehensive two-volume set. This volume is concerned with understanding the consequences and impacts of violence against older women. The majority of policy and practice has been developed to reflect the dynamics and contexts of violence affecting young women, and most of the available support services had focused on the needs of those of child-bearing age. This volume sheds light on the specific needs and effectiveness of responses to violence against older women, and identifies both challenges and opportunities for developing services that meet older survivor's needs. It will be of interest to researchers in social and health care, gerontology, sociology and social policy, feminist research and criminology.

This edited book empirically discusses stratification in contemporary Japanese society. It is unique for its examination of social inequality in relation to declining fertility and an aging population. Japan is the most aged society in the world: according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan, people who are aged 65 and above comprised 29.1% of the country's total population in 2021. Meanwhile, the fertility rate has continuously declined since the mid-1970s. Japan experienced a dramatic change in its demographic structure in a short period of time. Such fast change could be a major factor that generated social stratification. In her industrialization, Japan was thought to share a pattern of social stratification similar to that of developed European and North American countries but with a low degree of socio-economic inequality and a high degree of homogeneity. There is no clear support for this description of Japan, although the country does share a pattern and degree of social stratification similar to that observed in Europe and North America. The social stratification theory has been developed in close relationship to the labor market; however, it is necessary to further examine the social stratification of very aged societies in which a substantial number of the population-namely, retired persons-no longer have any ties to the labor market. In this book, the contributors explore the pattern of social stratification at three life stages: young, middle-aged, and elderly. Included are discussions of various aspects of stratification such as education, work, wealth, marriage, family, gender, generation, and social attitudes.

This volume provides an international perspective on parental leave policies in different countries, goes beyond this to examine a range of issues in depth, and aims to stimulate thinking about possible futures and how policy might underpin them.

This open access book makes a contribution to our understanding of one of the social challenges facing many western nations i.e. the challenge of an ageing population. It specifically addresses the issue of competence among older employees. Others have studied ageing populations in terms of the economic burden or the pressure on healthcare services and generally view the rising numbers of seniors more as a challenge than an opportunity. In this book, authors discuss ways of gaining positive benefits from our ageing and more experienced work force.

The concept of "Waithood" was developed by political scientist Diane Singerman to describe the expanding period of time between adolescence and full adulthood as young people wait to secure steady employment and marry. The contributors to this volume employ the waithood concept as a frame for richly detailed ethnographic studies of "youth in waiting" from a variety of world areas, including the Middle East Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S, revealing that whether voluntary or involuntary, the phenomenon of youth waithood necessitates a recognition of new gender and family roles.

Marginalisation of Older Men: The Lost Boys focuses on the phenomenon of the marginalisation of older men and the impact of gendered ageing as a pathologic disorder leading to suicide ideation, rather than a celebratory state. In this engaging investigation,Deborah Mulligan explains why and how some older men have become marginalised in society, and the effects of this social isolation. The book offers effective and unique methods for researching marginalised groups and individuals to maximise innovativeness, reciprocity and utility for research participants. Mulligan skilfully articulates and communicates the hitherto unheard voices of older males. These voices represent a vital element in the mitigation of loneliness, social isolation and suicide. The lived experience of these individual men and their peers provides vital health information for older men in both contemporary and future society.

The book provides an interesting analysis of the time-use data to examine the extent to which active ageing is occurring in India. It also synthesizes data from the National Sample Survey Office All India Survey and another survey undertaken in Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, and Ranchi (capital cities of East Indian states) to examine the role of the aged in the Indian Society. Nearly all countries in the world are experiencing an important issue of ageing. India faces its own set of challenges with its aging population due to the absence of a social security system-the shifting family dynamics questions the contribution of the elderly to the family in every aspect. Econometric models have been used in the book to study gender differences and variations across socio-economic conditions, correlating them to the contribution of the aged to their families and the extent of active ageing. The book broadens the understanding on the aged and facilitates their integration in the society so that they can age more actively. Active Ageing and Labour Market Engagement offers an analytical perspective to professionals, researchers, and policy makers interested in gerontology.

This book examines the representation of infertility, assisted reproduction, miscarriage, adoption and surrogacy in a wide range of media, including blogs, vlogs, social media posts and factual programming. In so doing, it illustrates how pregnancy loss, involuntary childlessness and non-traditional mothering are being depicted across the media landscape. Whilst the topic of motherhood has emerged as a significant area of academic debate, narratives of unsuccessful or unconventional mothering have remained largely absent, even at a time when there is a growing conversation about infertility online. Timely, pertinent and original, the book demonstrates the importance of a broader and more informed cultural discussion about fertility and family building.

The book provides insights into the prevailing patriarchal system in rural Pakistan. It elaborates on the kinship system in rural Sindh and explores how young married women strategize and negotiate with patriarchy. Drawing on qualitative methodologies, the book reveals the strong relationship between poverty and the perpetuation of patriarchy. Women's strategies help elevate their position in their families, such as attention to household tasks, producing children, and doing handicraft work for their well-being. These conditions are usually seen as evidence of women's subordination, but these are also strategies for survival where accommodation to patriarchy wins them approval. The book concludes that women's life-long struggle is, in fact, a technique of negotiating with patriarchy. In so doing, they internalize the culture that rests on their subordination and reproduce it in older age in exercising power by oppressing other junior women.

This book explores the affective and relational lives of young people in diverse urban spaces. By following the trajectories of diverse young people as they creatively work through multiple and unfolding global crises, it asks how arts-based methodologies might answer the question: How do we stand in relation to others, those nearby and those at great distances? The research draws on knowledges, research traditions, and artistic practices that span the Global North and Global South, including Athens (Greece), Coventry (England), Lucknow (India), Tainan (Taiwan), and Toronto (Canada) and curates a way of thinking about global research that departs from the comparative model and moves towards a new analytic model of thinking multiple research sites alongside one another as an approach to sustaining dialogue between local contexts and wider global concerns.

American history is full of examples of discrimination in all forms, but never before has the wreckage from America's infatuation with eugenics and its state-sanctioned policy of hate toward the mentally ill been put in such personal terms. In this extraordinary debut book, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Erickson answers the questions that have long haunted an immigrant family: Why was a mother in her early twenties imprisoned and then sterilized? What caused her three children to be taken from her and placed in an orphanage that later preyed on children? What led her oldest son to commit an unspeakable act of violence? And, finally, whatever happened to her youngest son who disappeared from her life and was never seen by the family again? This is a tragic story, yet strangely an uplifting one. Because just as officials believed immorality and mental illness were as genetically linked as eye and hair color, various family members would prove them wrong. In a story that will make you seethe with anger and well with tears, When Mortals Play God shows how valuable life is, and how grit and determination can sometimes relegate evil and injustice to a back seat.

This open access book assembles landmark studies on divorce and separation in European countries, and how this affects the life of parents and children. It focuses on four major areas of post-separation lives, namely (1) economic conditions, (2) parent-child relationships, (3) parent and child well-being, and (4) health. Through studies from several European countries, the book showcases how legal regulations and social policies influence parental and child well-being after divorce and separation. It also illustrates how social policies are interwoven with the normative fabric of a country. For example, it is shown that father-child contact after separation is more intense in those countries which have adopted policies that encourage shared parenting. Correspondingly, countries that have adopted these regulations are at the forefront of more egalitarian gender role attitudes. Apart from a strong emphasis on the legal and social policy context, the studies in this volume adopt a longitudinal perspective and situate post-separation behaviour and well-being in the life course. The longitudinal perspective opens up new avenues for research to understand how behaviour and conditions prior or at divorce and separation affect later behaviour and well-being. As such this book is of special appeal to scholars of family research as well as to anyone interested in the role of divorce and separation in Europe in the 21st century.

This open access book draws on a broad study on violence against men, from both male and female partners in Norway, to contribute to the research on intimate partner violence. It identifies similarities in men's experiences and backgrounds, including in their perceptions of their own victimisation. Marianne Inez Lien and Jorgen Lorentzen argue that the traditional gender power model should be modified and supplemented, and propose that we consider violence in terms of psychological supremacy, rather than in terms of femininity and masculinity. Men's Experiences of Violence in Intimate Relationships will appeal to students and scholars across a range of areas including criminology, sociology and family violence, and gender studies.

A world-class introduction to the historical and continuing impact of classical theory on sociological debate The latest edition of Classical Sociological Theory offers students a definitive guide to the theoretical foundations of sociology and the continuing impact of the ideas explored by early theorists, including Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Simmel, Freud, Du Bois, Adorno, Marcuse, Parsons, and Merton. The prestigious editors have integrated several readings on the most influential theories arising out of the Enlightenment era and the work of de Tocqueville. Readers are introduced to seminal works in classical sociological theory by way of editorial introductions that lend historical and intellectual perspective to the included readings. The readings themselves have been selected based on their combinations of theoretical sophistication and accessibility. From analyses of self and society to examinations of critical theory and structural-functional analysis, Classical Sociological Theory remains the gold standard in classical theory readers. The Fourth Edition of this widely taught book includes: Selections that trace the history of classical sociological theory, from its undisciplined roots to its modern influence on contemporary sociological debate Readings describing the "pre-history" of sociology, including ideas from the Enlightenment and de Tocqueville Editorial introductions that place selected works firmly in their intellectual, philosophical, and historical contexts for the benefit of the student A distinguished and scholarly team of editors with a wide and deep range of expertise Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students of social and sociological theory, Classical Sociological Theory is also a thought-provoking resource ideal for use in courses taught in human geography, anthropology, criminology, and urban studies programs.

STEPHEN M. CHERRY draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. From the planning and construction of community centers, to volunteering at health fairs or protesting against abortion, this book illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family. Revealing more than intimate accounts of Filipino American lives, Cherry offers a glimpse of the often hidden but vital relationship between religion and community in the lives of new immigrants, and allows speculation on the broader impact of Filipino immigration on the nation. The Filipino American community is the second-largest immigrant community in the United States, and the Philippines is the second-largest source of Catholic immigration to this country. This ground-breaking study outlines how first-generation Filipino Americans have the potential to reshape American Catholicism and are already having an impact on American civic life through the engagement of their faith.

Foundations of Family Resource Management uses the lenses of consumer science, management, and economics, and beyond to help students make intelligent decisions about resources, time, and energies at the individual and family level. It has a strong interdisciplinary, global, and multicultural focus. This sixth edition brings in new material on millennials, delayed marriage, household composition, neuroscience, behavioral economics, sustainable consumption, technology, and handling crises. It has been updated in line with the latest census data and academic literature. The text contains lots of features to support student learning, including chapter summaries, "Did You Know?" questions, glossary of key terms, examples and cases, critical thinking activities, and review questions for discussion and reflection. Lecture slides and an instructor manual are available as digital supplements. This textbook meets the standards and criteria for the Certified Family Life Educator (CFLE) designation of the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) and will be suitable for resource management courses in family and consumer science, human ecology, and human environmental science programs.

This book produces an original argument about the emergence of 'trauma' in the nineteenth-century through new readings of Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Collins, Gaskell and Elliot. Madeleine Wood argues that the mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family: the cross-generational relationship is presented as formative and traumatising. By presenting family relationships as decisive for our psychological state as well as our social identity, the Victorian authors pushed beyond the contemporary scientific models available to them. Madeleine Wood analyses the literary and historical conditions of the mid-century period that led to this new literary emphasis, and which paved the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis in Vienna at the fin de siecle. Analysing a series of theoretical texts, Madeleine Wood shows that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, focusing her reading through Freud's early writings and Jean Laplanche's 'general theory of seduction'.

Winner of the Leisure Studies Association's Outstanding Book Prize This book examines the tensions and ambivalences which men encounter as they negotiate contemporary expectations of fatherhood and fulfill their own expectations of what it means to be a 'good' father. There is little doubt that today's fathers are responding to new expectations about fatherhood and fathering practices. The remote, detached, breadwinning father of the past, once lauded as a masculine ideal, has faded, and men are now expected to be 'involved', 'intimate', 'caring' and 'domesticated' fathers. Using a family practices lens and a case study of sport, Fletcher elucidates the changes and continuities in family and fathering practices in different historical periods and contexts. Negotiating Fatherhood will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in family and fathering practices, sport, leisure, and gender.

This book offers a unique look into prisons in Iran and the lives of the prisoners and their families. It provides an overview of the history of Iranian prisons, depicts the sub-culture in contemporary Iranian prisons, and highlights the forms that gender discrimination takes behind the prison walls. The book draws on the voices of 90 men and women who have been imprisoned in Iran, interviewed in 2012 and 2017 across various parts of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It presents a different approach to the one proposed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish because the author argues that Iran never experienced "the age of sobriety in punishment" and "a slackening of the hold on the body". Whilst penal severity in Iran has reduced, its scope has now extended beyond prisoners to their families, regardless of their age and gender. In Iran, penalties still target the body but now also affect the bodies of the entire prisoner's family. It is not just prisoners who suffer from the lack of food, clothes, spaces for sleeping, health services, legal services, safety, and threats of physical violence and abuse but also their families. The book highlights the costs of mothers' incarceration for their children. It argues that as long as punishment remains the dominant discourse of the penal system, the minds and bodies of anyone related to incarcerated offenders will remain under tremendous strain. This unique book explores the nature of these systems in a deeply under-covered nation to expand understandings of prisons in the non-Western world.

Tibet is known for its broad range of marriage practices, particularly polyandry, where two or more brothers share one wife. With economic development and massive Chinese social and political reforms, including new marriage laws prohibiting plural marriages, polyandry was expected to disappear from Tibetan social lives. This book takes as its starting point the surprising increase in polyandry in Panam valley from the 1980s. It explores married lives in polyandrous houses and develops a theory of a flexible kinship of potentiality through the lens of a farming village in Tibet Autonomous Region.

In their current demands, Blankenhorn points out, gay and lesbian leaders are not asking for marriage with an adjective in front of it, but marriage itself. Therefore, what marriage is and why it matters is what this debate is all about. What exactly is this institution to which gay and lesbian activists are seeking access? Why do we have it in the first place? Where did it come from? What is it for? How is it changing? These are some of the hard questions "The Future of Marriage" confronts.

Couples seek therapy for a variety of reasons, from short-lived adjustment difficulties to deeply entrenched conflict. Yet marital therapy has lacked a conceptual framework for matching treatment to a couple's particular problem. This outstanding new book, by a team of researcher-clinicians from the Center for Family Learning, is the first to address this deficiency.The authors systematically assess the duration and intensity of a couple's present conflict, as well as how the spouses function alone and in their extended families. They have found that troubled couples tend to fall into one of four categories, each best suited to a particular treatment program. The mild conflicts of stage one, for example, respond well to a six-week educational program; whereas the extreme anger and alienation of stage three is best handled without direct confrontation.The authors describe their evaluation and treatment procedures--including assessing multigenerational systems, dealing with triangles, and reducing emotional arousal--and illustrate their explanations with lengthy case illustrations and session-by-session transcripts. Because it offers a carefully articulated, clinically tested method of treating a broad range of marital problems, this valuable book makes a unique and much-needed contribution to the field.

The concept of time in childhood and youth is discussed in two contradictory ways; first romanticized, as a time of play, innocence, and exploration - of learning through trial and error, and second, as a time restricted by tight societal and generational structures, such as chains of care, institutional and family timetables. Children, Youth and Time reflects on the complex concept of time as perceived and experienced by children and young people in relevant societal and generational contexts. Including empirical and theoretical contributions from around the globe which shed light on time and temporality as it is negotiated by children and young people in distinction to adults, both within the family and in institutional contexts, the chapters in this collection delve into the impact of current global challenges upon children, young people, and families' time. How do critical global concerns such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic affect the temporal experience of children and youth? Providing fresh insight at a crucial moment of global disruption, the authors equip us with a stronger awareness of young people's perceptions of the world during periods of crisis. As a vital tool for safeguarding and implementing strategies to support children and young people in an everchanging world, this is a timely resource for researchers interested in the welfare of children and youth.

Families have become an increasingly important source of support for the elderly, and gerontologists are directing more and more attention to older adults and their families. This bibliography reviews the most significant works on families and aging published within the past ten years. Jean Coyle has selected and annotated nearly 800 books, articles, films, dissertations, and government documents. The detailed annotations summarize and evaluate the significance and usefulness of each item, and the comprehensive author and subject indexes make this volume a valuable reference tool. A thoughtful introduction surveys the most noteworthy research on families and aging done in the last decade. This is followed by eleven chapters, that address such topics as widowhood, intergenerational relationships, family caregiving, and the role of older adults in ethnic and minority families. Gerontologists, social workers, and all those interested in families and aging will find this guide an indispensable source of information.