Abstract
This chapter considers the next generation of urbanites as one entry point for entrepreneurial urban strategies. It investigates the way in which cities aiming to redefine themselves imagine future populations and how in these efforts they design social policies that explicitly and particularly target women as mothers. It develops the concept of urban regeneration: efforts to regenerate the city by either investing in the children (the next generation) of the current population or replacing the current population of children by a new generation of better-suited children. Based on an ethnographic case study of parenting guidance policy practices, this chapter shows how a ritual-like practice of communication and reflection produces subject positions in parenting guidance that very much resemble what is expected of employees in the post-Fordist and arguably more feminine labour market.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This means that unlike many researchers I was not primarily interested in the lived experiences of the ones participating in the practices, nor was I looking for their perspectives on the interactions or the policy strategies per se. Rather, I studied a range of moments, or rather situations, in which practitioners executing social policy and individual mothers consuming/targeted by these policies met: instances in which they encountered each other. The primary objects of my research are, thus, interactions in parenting guidance practices, not the agents participating in them. In addition to my ethnographic observations that I recorded in field notes, I interviewed 10 practitioners and 7 managers of the organizations that provided parenting guidance and 12 mothers that participated in the programmes. These interviews were largely to expand my knowledge of the practices and to reflect upon them with agents in the field. But the extensive ethnographic research of interactions forms the core of the data on which this paper is based.
- 2.
Access to the practices that I set out to study posed no great problems because I wanted to participate in more or less open and in any case informal settings. I entered the field as an invitee of the practitioners. Almost all agencies and practitioners were very welcoming to my participation. They were convinced of the quality and necessity of their work and were in some cases quite eager to show me. Usually, the practitioners I came into contact with gave me their weekly or monthly schedule of where and what they would be teaching and coaching and I would be, so to say, “signing in”, meeting them in the scheduled time and place. In those locations, the mothers were confronted with my presence and I introduced myself as a university researcher working on my PhD and interested in parenting guidance. I encountered distrust a couple of times, for example, in the form of further questions about my motives. However, the mothers were generally quite used to invitees of practitioners (interns were, e.g. a frequent presence as were policymakers and managers) and, as a matter of fact, researchers, because in the Netherlands not only policy interventions into private lives are common, but so are researchers looking into these private lives and policy interventions. Many mothers had encountered and talked to researchers before. Some of the time, mothers were delighted that somebody “from the university” would want to talk to them. In any case, I was always open to participating mothers and practitioners about my research plans and goals. I explained that the research was done for my PhD, what a PhD was and how no other parties (such as the municipality or state) had direct interests or were involved. The mothers and practitioners in this article thus gave informed consent to me recording the events that I witnessed in writing (I made no audio records) and using these recordings for scientific and popular publications on the subject, provided I anonymized everyone. All names used here are thus pseudonyms and if necessary, some details about the mothers are left out in order to further protect their privacy.
- 3.
Goffman uses the term “ritual” to point to the way in which the self becomes sacral in everyday symbolic encounters (for instance in 1967). My use of the term ritual differs from Goffman’s approach in precisely this aspect. Instead of looking for the symbolic or sacral, I am interested in the repetitive form of ritual-like transactions.
References
Abramovich, M. ([1988] 1996). Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from ColonialTimes to the Present. Cambridge: South End Press.
Adkins, L. (2002). Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. London: The John Hopkins University Press.
Beck, U., Giddens, A., & Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aestheticsin in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bell, C. (1997). Ritual. Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Berg, van den, M. (2013). City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(2), 523–536.
Berg, van den, M. (2016a). Egalitarian Paternalism. Interactional Forms of Negotiating Equality and Intervention in Dutch Policy Practices. Citizenship Studies, 20(3/4), 457–474.
Berg, van den, M. (2016b). ‘Activating’ those that ‘Lag Behind’ – Space-Time Politics in Dutch Parenting Training for Migrants. Patterns of Prejudice, 50(1), 21–37.
Berg, van den, M., & Arts, J. (forthcoming). Evaluating the Aesthetics of Work-Readiness. Aesthetic Judgements for Conditional Welfare and Post-Fordist Labour Markets.
Berg, van den, M., & Chevalier, D. (forthcoming). Of “City Lounges”, “Bans on Gathering” and Macho policies. Gender, Class and Race in Productions of Space for Rotterdam’s Post-Industrial Future.
Berg, van den, M., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2012). Paternalizing Mothers. Feminist Repertoires in Contemporary Dutch Civilizing Offensives. Critical Social Policy, 32(4), 554–574.
Berg, van den, M., & Schinkel, W. (2009). “Women from the Catacombs of the City”: Gender Notions in Dutch Culturist Discourse. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 22(4), 393–410.
Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.
Bonjour, S., & De Hart, B. (2013). A Proper Wife, a Proper Marriage. Constructions of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in Dutch Family Migration Policy. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(1), 61–76.
Boucher, M. (2011). Gouverner les familles: Les classes populaires à l’épreuve de la parentalité [Governing families. Working classes experiencing parenthood]. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Bourdieu, P. ([1984] 1996). Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. New York/London: Routledge.
Crozier, G. (1998). Parents and Schools: Partnership of Surveillance? Journal of Education Policy, 13(1), 125–136.
Crozier, G., & Davies, J. (2007). Hard To Reach Parents or Hard To Reach Schools? A Discussion of Home-School Relations, With Particular Reference to Bangladeshi and Pakistani Parents. Britisheducational Research Journal, 33(3), 295–313.
Cruikshank, B. (1999). The Will to Empower. Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Donzelot, J. ([1977] 1980). The Policing of Families: Welfare Versus the State. London: Hutchinson & Co.
Duyvendak, J. W. (2004). Een eensgezinde, vooruitstrevende natie. Over de mythe van dé individualisering en de toekomst van de sociologie. Amsterdam: Vossius pers.
Duyvendak, J. W. (2011). The Politics of Home. Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan.
Elchardus, M. (2009). Self-Control as Social Control. The Emergence of Symbolic Society Poetics, 37(2), 146–161.
Epstein, J. L. (2001). School, Family and Community Partnerships. Preparing Educators and Improving Schools. Boulder: Westview Press.
Ghorashi, H. (2003). Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Daring or Dogmatic? Debates on Multiculturalism and Emancipation in the Netherlands. In: T. Van Meijl & H. Driessen (Eds.). Multiple identifications and the self. Utrecht: Stichting Focaal.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity – Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual. Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books.
Grandey, A., Deifendorff, J., & Rupp, D. (Eds.) (2012). Emotional Labor in the Twenty-First Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work. London: Routledge.
Hage, J., & Powers, C. H. (1992). Post-Industrial Lives. Roles and Relationships in the 21st Century. London: Sage.
Harvey, D. (1989). From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism. Geografiska Annaler, 71B(1), 3–17.
Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Hochschild, A. R. ([1983] 2012). The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hoffman, L. (2014). The Urban, Politics and Subject Formation. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(5), 1576–1588.
Kabeer, N. (1995). Targeting Women or Transforming Institutions? Policy Lessons from NGO Anti Poverty Efforts. Development in Practice, 5(2), 108–116.
Kalberg, S. (2002). Introduction to the Protestant Ethic. In: M. Weber ([1920] 2002) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (pp. xi–lxxvii). Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing.
Keere, de, K. (2014). From a Self-Made to an Already-Made Man A Historical Content Analysis of Professional Advice Literature. Acta Sociologica, 57(4), 311–324.
Lopez, G. R., Scribner, J. D., & Mahitivanichcha, K. (2001). Redefining Parent Involvement: Lessons From High-Performing Migrant-Impacted Schools. American Educational Research Journal, 38(2), 253–288.
Mahmood, S. (2001). Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Şalat. American Ethnologist, 28(4), 827–853.
McDowell, L. (2000). “Learning to Serve?” Employment Aspirations and Attitudes of Working-Class Men in an Era of Labour Market Restructuring. Gender, Place and Culture, 7(4), 389–416.
McDowell, L. (2003). Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working ClassYouth. Blackwell: Oxford.
McDowell, L. (2009). Working Bodies. Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Muehlebach, A. (2011). On Affective Labour in Post-Fordist Italy. Cultural Anthropology, 26(1), 59–82.
Muehlebach, A. (2012). The Moral Neoliberal. Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nayak, A. (2006). Displaced Masculinities. Chavs, Youth, and Class in the Post-Industrial City. Sociology, 40(5), 813–831.
Nixon, D. (2009). “I Can’t Put a Smiley Face On”: Working-Class Masculinity, Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy’. Gender, Work and Organization, 16(3), 300–322.
NIZW, Nederlands Instituut voor Zorg en Welzijn. (2006). Opvoeden Zo! Cursusmap. Utrecht: NIZW.
Peake, L. (2016). On Feminism and Feminist Allies in knowledge Production in Urban Geography. Urban Geography, 37(6), 830–838.
Peake, L., & Rieker, M. (eds.) (2015). Rethinking Feminist Interventions Into the Urban. London: Routledge.
Prins, B. (2000). Voorbij de onschuld. Het debat over integratie in Nederland. Amsterdam: Van Gennep.
Rahman, A. (1999). Micro-Credit Initiatives for Equitable and Sustainable Development: Who Pays? World Development, 27(1), 67–82.
Reekum, R., Van, & Berg, van den, M. (2015). Performing Dialogical Dutchness: Negotiating a National Imaginary in Parenting Guidance. Nations and Nationalism, 21(4), 741–760.
Sassen, S. (1991). The Global City. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schinkel, W. (2007). Denken in een tijd van sociale hypochondrie. Aanzet tot een theorie voorbij de maatschappij. Kampen: Klement.
Sharma, A. (2008). Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Starfield, S. (2002). “I’m a Second-Language English Speaker”: Negotiating Writer Identity And Authority in Sociology One. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 1(2), 121–140.
Verkaaik, O. (2009). Ritueel burgerschap. Een essay over nationalisme en secularisme in Nederland. Amsterdam: Aksant.
Verkaaik, O. (2010). The Cachet Dilemma: Ritual and Agency in New Dutch Nationalism. AmericanEthnologist, 37(1), 69–82.
Vincent, C. (2001). Social Class and Parental Agency. Journal of Education Policy, 16(4), 347–364.
Waal, van der, J., & Burgers, J. (2009). Unravelling the Global City Debate on Social Inequality: A Firm Level Analysis of Wage Inequality in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Urban Studies, 46(13), 2715–2729.
Weber, M. ([1920] 2002). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing.
Wekker, G. (2004). Still Crazy after All Those Years … Feminism for the New Millennium. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 11(4), 487–500.
Wekker, G. (2016). White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press.
Willis, P. E. (1977). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.
Willis, P. E., & Trondman, M. (2000). Manifesto for Ethnography. Ethnography, 1(1), 5–16.
Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and Nation. London: Sage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
van den Berg, M. (2017). Social Policy: Targeting Women in Urban Policies – Producing Subject Positions. In: Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52533-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52533-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52532-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52533-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)