Family Studies

Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces, "Work, families and organisations in transition" illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees' experiences of "work-life balance" in contemporary shifting contexts.

Understanding Family Meanings provides an overview of the basic concepts and theories related to families using readings with questions and analysis to encourage reflection and learning. It focuses on family meanings as the key underpinnings for academic study and professional training.

Led by women’s life history accounts, this is an engaging and accessible account of how constructions of femininity fundamentally affect women's mental wellbeing through the life course.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive perspective on health and sickness among African Americans. It shows how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system.

Based on involved creative, qualitative work with families in India and the UK who live in different contexts, this book illuminates how environmental practices are negotiated within families, and how they relate to values, identities, and society.

Women are encouraged to believe that they can occupy top jobs in society by the example of other women thriving in their careers. This book shows that having a mother as a role model does not predict daughters progressing in their own careers. It offers a timely and original perspective on the debate about gender equality in leadership positions.

This book examines how pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a ‘parent crisis’ and are used to justify increasingly punitive state policies.

This book is the first to go inside women’s work and family lives in a year of working flexibly. The private labours of going part-time, job sharing, and home working are brought to life with vivid personal stories, concluding that there is an opportunity to make employment and family life work better together.

Every household has to perform housework. Using quantitative, nationally representative survey data this book theorizes about how power dynamics as reflected in housework performance help us understand broader family variations.

This outstanding work examines black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting and shows how it both undermines and reflects neoliberalism. Unique in its intersectional analysis, it fills a gap in the literature, drawing on black feminist theorizing to examine intensive mothering practices and policies.

This book explores what happened to the 'Romanian orphans' of the 1990s, including those who stayed in institutions as well as those who were fostered and adopted domestically and internationally. Looking in detail at their experiences, the book provides valuable new evidence on what is important for children in care today.

Spanning the UK, North America and Australia, this comparative study brings maternal workers’ politicized voices to the centre of contemporary debates on class, work and gender.

The book illustrates why social reproduction needs to be at the centre of a critical theory of work, care and mothering for post-pandemic times.