Gender and distribution of educational values among the staff in kindergartens

The article reports and reflects on a study of kindergarten staff member’s gendered attitudes. The empirical part consists of answers to a questionnaire from some 700 staff members of all 80 kindergartens in two Danish municipalities. The theoretical approach is informed by the framework of Pierre Bourdieu and the Mary Douglas’ Grid Group Cultural Theory. The common strong point of view is that men are an exceptional educational resource in kindergartens and for the sake of gender equality on the labour market, one is to promote a higher proportion of male workers in kindergartens and in several other sectors, where women commonly are in the majority. We examine these premises in respect of Denmark and Norway and then confront the notion of kindergartens to be gender-segregated in pedagogical and professional terms. In conclusion, it is proposed a renewal of the starting point of the educational gender research.     

Early childhood teachers: Roles and relationships

Staff roles and relationships were studied through interviewing 12 teachers in four New Zealand kindergartens over a period of 8 months before, during and after a new teacher joined the staff. In 2 of the 4 kindergartens serious problems with staff relationships emerged culminating in staff members resigning, while in the other 2 kindergartens harmonious relationships developed. The major themes emerging from the interviews were the importance of goal consensus and power sharing. Successful kindergartens involved all staff fora considerable time in developing philosophical agreement and clarifying roles but there were serious differences of viewpoint between staff in the unsuccessful kindergartens, often involving conflict about teacher roles and activities between experienced and inexperienced teachers. The successful kindergartens worked through consensus and negotiation while the unsuccessful kindergartens worked through the authority of the head teacher or by the majority view. It was concluded that more attention needs to be given to helping early childhood staff work together effectively and that staff roles and relationships are an important component of quality early childhood education.     

Conflicting contraceptive norms for men: equal responsibility versus women’s bodily autonomy

Most research investigating how men and women in heterosexual relationships negotiate contraceptive use focuses on the women’s point of view. Using a sample of 44 interviews with men attending a western US university, this study examines norms governing men’s participation in contraceptive use and pregnancy prevention and their responses to those norms. The paper demonstrates how competing norms around sexual health decision-making and women’s bodily autonomy contribute to unintended outcomes that undermine young people’s quest for egalitarian sexual relationships. While men largely agree that responsibility for sexual health decision-making should be shared with women, they also believe that women should have power over their own bodies and sexual health. However, the coexistence of these two competing norms – which call for both equal responsibility in decision-making and women’s bodily autonomy – results in a disconnect between men saying that sexual health decision-making should be equal, but not always participating equally. Thus, men largely give contraceptive decision-making power over to women, putting the burden of pregnancy prevention onto women and letting men off the hook. It is concluded that men’s negotiation of these competing norms reinforces unequal power and inequality in sexual relationships.     

Who decides? Women's status and negotiation of sex in Uganda

Women's ability to negotiate the timing and conditions of sex with their partners is central to their ability to control a variety of reproductive health outcomes. Focus group discussions and survey data from 1356 women and their regular male partners in two districts in Uganda were analysed to explore the nature of sexual negotiation and to test hypotheses about the influence of women's work and marriage institutions on norms and behaviour regarding sexual decision making. Sexual negotiation is characterized by four stages starting with normative precedent for decision making about sex and progressing to communication, disagreement, and conflict resolution. Men are generally reported to have more influence over sex in these settings, but women can and do refuse sex under a variety of circumstances. Education and urban residence consistently enhance women's ability to negotiate sex. The effect of marriage and women's work characteristics depends strongly on district context. We speculate that certain types of bridewealth agreement inhibit a woman's ability to influence timing and conditions of sex independently of other 'bargaining' resources she may control.     

Negotiating the role of expert carers on an adult hospital ward

Contemporary systems of welfare are increasingly underpinned by the assumption that families should care for their dependent adult relatives. Yet, the burgeoning empirical literature in this area has given little attention to the ways in which family caregivers fit into the service system. Drawing on interactionist theories of the division of labour, this paper employs ethnographic data, taken from a recent study, to explore the ways in which formal and informal carers negotiate 'care' on an adult medical ward. It is argued that established family carers (referred to as expert carers ) constitute a special case in understanding the negotiation of care in the hospital context because of the challenge they pose to fundamental features of the social organisation of the work: nurses' control over caring processes, their claim to expertise and their license to define standards of care.     

The relationship between qualified and unqualified workers in health care: the case of the remedial therapy professions

Summary The role of knowledge has traditionally been studied in terms of education and training, not in terms of job practice and the division of labour. This article examines the meaning of knowledge in the work context and its role in legitimating the division of labour between qualified and unqualified remedial therapy workers. The main analytic framework is derived from the work of Schutz.     

Male preschool teacher students negotiating masculinities: a qualitative study with men who are studying to become preschool teachers

The overall interest is to understand how men who study preschool teaching negotiate masculinities. Earlier research shows how male teachers negotiate masculinities when being in and entering a predominantly feminine work area, such as early childhood education [see, for example, Brody, D. L. (2015). The construction of masculine identity among men who work with young children, an international perspective. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 23(3), 351–361; Pirard, F., Schoenmaeckers, P., & Camus, P. (2015). Men in childcare services: From enrolment in training programmes to job retention. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 23(3), 362–369; Simpson, R. (2014). Doing gender differently. Men in caring occupations. In S. Kumra, R. Simpson, & R. J. Burke (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of gender in organizations (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press)]. It this article Connell's notion on hegemonic masculinity is reflected on in terms of negotiation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 men attending the preschool teacher-training programmes at three Swedish universities. The result shows two main themes for negotiation that were called ‘Becoming and being a “breaker”’ and ‘Coping with sticking out’.     

‘When you visit a man you should prepare yourself’: male community care worker approaches to working with men living with HIV in Cape Town,South Africa

Caring is typically constructed as a feminised practice, resulting in women shouldering the burden of care-related work. Health-seeking behaviours are also constructed as feminine and men have poorer health outcomes globally. Employing men as carers may not only improve the health of the men they assist but also be transformative with regards to gendered constructions of caring. Using semi-structured interviews and observational home visits, this study explored the techniques that community care workers employ when working with male clients. The empirical analysis draws on the perspectives of eight care workers and three of their male clients from the Cape Town area. Interviews reveal how care workers and clients perform and negotiate masculinities as they navigate hegemonic masculine norms that require men to act tough, suppress emotions and deny weakness and sickness. Both parties bump up against ideals of what it means to be a man as they strive to provide care and receive support. Community care workers avoid rupturing client performances of hegemonic masculinities which inhibit confession and support. To do this, they use techniques of indirectly broaching sensitive subjects, acting in a friendly way and being clear about the intention of their work.     

Waiting to Be Asked: Gender, Power, and Relationship Progression Among Cohabiting Couples

The majority of young married Americans lived with their spouses before the wedding, and many cohabited with partners they did not wed. Yet little is known about how cohabitating relationships progress or the role gender norms play in this process. This article explores how cohabiting partners negotiate relationship progression, focusing on several stages where couples enact gender. Data are from in-depth interviews with 30 working-class couples (n = 60). The women in this sample often challenged conventional gender norms by suggesting that couples move in together or raising the issue of marriage. Men played dominant roles in initiating whether couples became romantically involved and progressed to a more formal status. Although women and men contest how gender is performed, cohabiting men remain privileged in the arena of relationship progression. The findings suggest that adherence to conventional gender practices even among those residing in informal unions perpetuates women's secondary position in intimate relationships.     

The nursing-medical boundary: a negotiated order?

In a recent paper in Sociology of Health and Illness, Svensson (1996) makes the case for adopting the negotiated order perspective as the most appropriate theoretical framework for understanding patterns of doctor-nurse interaction. Analysing interview data with nursing staff from surgical and medical wards in five Swedish hospitals, Svensson identifies key changes in the health care context which he suggests have created ‘negotiation space’ for nurses, leading to the evolution of new working relationships with doctors. In examining the relationship between negotiation processes and the wider structural context, Svensson addresses a theme that has remained an enduring interest of critics and supporters of the negotiated order perspective alike. Drawing on data generated on a surgical and a medical ward in a UK District General Hospital, this paper attempts to make a further contribution to this debate and also to sociological understanding of doctor-nurse relationships, by analysing some features of hospital work which inhibited face-to-face inter-occupational negotiations but which nevertheless resulted in the modification of the formal division of labour between nursing and medicine. The implications of these findings for the negotiated order perspective are considered, and the question is raised as to what researchers working within this tradition understand by ‘negotiation’ and how it can be studied.     

A gender analysis of a national community health workers program: A case study of Afghanistan

Gender equity can be a neglected issue in health system reforms. This paper explores the multiple layered gender dynamics of the Afghan Community Health Worker (CHW) Program within broader health system reforms in Afghanistan using a qualitative research design. We interviewed policy makers, health managers, CHWs and community members in 16 sites in 2013 and 2014. We found that gendered societal norms interact and influence the Afghan CHW program in a dynamic way. Gendered social norms around the division of labour tend to privilege women in terms of access to resources at the community level, but it is men who hold leadership positions that ultimately decide how the resources are to be distributed. The Afghan Ministry of Public Health expresses a commitment to gender equity, but policies on gender are restricted to reproductive health, thus constraining a gender-equity approach as focused on maternal and child health. Our explicit gender analysis not only reveals gender inequities in the Afghan CHW Program and the broader health system, it also uncovers how a highly gendered division of health labour provides some opportunities for women’s empowerment that can disrupt patriarchal role constraints and broader gender inequities.     

Constructions of masculinity and femininity and sexual risk negotiation practices among women in urban Ghana

Using qualitative data gathered through in-depth interviews with women in Accra, Ghana, this paper explores narratives of masculinity and femininity and sexual risk negotiation practices among women. While women framed ‘proper’ masculinity in terms of stereotypical reproductive norms, they also acknowledged the fluidity and multiplicity of masculinities. Femininity was more uniformly characterised in terms of physical attractiveness and beauty, responsibility and reproduction. These features, especially those related to adherence to morally and socially appropriate sexual norms (e.g., menstrual and bodily hygiene, unplanned pregnancy etc.), influenced women's approach to sexual negotiation. Work aiming to support women to negotiate sex safely needs to pay attention to their notions of gender and practices of sexual negotiation.     

General practice. All stressed up and nowhere to go?

A survey of 1,545 staff in general practices in South East region found that GPs and practice managers were the most stressed. GPs believed that dealing with difficult patients was particularly stressful. The relationships between the senior partner and practice manager and the GP-nurse relationship were seen as crucial. The relationship between GPs and nurses is characterised by ambivalence and uncertainty. The division of labour between GPs and practice managers needs clarification if the government's proposals for improving general practice are to succeed.     

Negotiating skill for health care professionals

Health workers engage in negotiations at work and at home on a daily basis. The ability to negotiate is a vital part of interpersonal skill. The paradigm of negotiation strategy is undergoing a profound shift from power pressure to an egalitarian form of problem solving or value-added approach that is much more likely to result in win/win outcomes. The basic principle of this refreshing innovation is similar to what we learned about brainstorming and creative problem solving.     

May I have the next dance? Chinese gay men exploring selves and practices through the tradition of dance in public spaces

This study explores the way in which some Chinese gay men negotiate dance performances in parks and other public spaces in an attempt to invent and experiment with ‘possible selves’. In most circumstances, these same men conceal their sexual orientation for fear of stigma and discrimination, experiencing in the process something of a ‘divided self’. Little attention has been given to understanding the way such individuals negotiate and construct same-sex experiences, especially through the negotiation of specific and restricted social interactions and performances. Based on participant observation with a group of dancers practising in a Chinese public park, this paper analyses how these men explore same-sex relations and lifestyles through the circumscribed performance of collective public dance.     

Expert nurses and the division of labour in hospitals

This article analyses nursing expertise with a particular focus at the level of clinical and organizational practice. Through an examination of a specialist team of hospital nurses, and drawing on the concept of a community of practice, the article provides a critique of discussions of nursing expertise which can be overly normative, individualistic or divorced from practice. The theoretical background to our analysis is the division of labour in health care; the case study on which this analysis is based is a particular health policy: the introduction of critical care outreach services. The empirical portions of the article are based on a qualitative study of eight such services in England. In the first part of the analysis we elaborate on three ways in which 'expertise' can be deployed in practice: teaching and training; consultancy and advice; and practical clinical action. Each of these is shown to be related to the development of a community of practice. In the second part of the analysis we examine in more detail the impact of outreach nurses on the division of labour in health care and on traditional occupational hierarchies. A general implication of our findings is that expertise has fundamentally social characteristics which need to be acknowledged in academic and policy discourse.     

Learning about Practice from Practice: A Peer-based Methodology

A recommendation from the Social Work Task Force was that all employers of social workers should conduct a regular “health check” of the social work profession to learn from practice as part of a continuous cycle of improvement. This article documents how the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has gone about this. I describe the methodological and practical pathway we followed so that others can see what we did and why we did it. Like other busy social work offices, we had to set out a plan of methodological action in order that we achieved the learning from practice to inform our health check, and it is the planning work that is engaged with in this article. We have found that by involving and engaging our staff in the health check work, we have gained more than we had set out to find. An organisational commitment to act on what social workers have told us about practice is offering the senior management team new ideas about the best ways of delivering professional and reflective support mechanisms for staff. Learning from practice is now one of the core functions for the new Principal Social Worker.     

The New Zealand health reforms: dividing the labour of care

This paper examines the concept of care as it was practised and conceptualised within one hospital group in southern New Zealand during the health reforms. The paper argues that these reforms brought about a division in the labour of care between the broad group of managers, computer analysts, administration officers, and the clinical staff. Aspects of these two empirically derived categories of care are elaborated, as well as the problems associated with each style. While this division in the labour of care is argued to be an unintended local consequence of the New Zealand health reforms, it also represents a more global phenomenon-the abstraction of social life.     

Men's contribution to the food and nutritional situation in the Tanzanian household

More is presently known about women's than men's role in food production and nutrition in Africa. The present article is an attempt to remedy this shortcoming. A special focus is put on the influence men exert through their labour and decision‐making on the household food situation. Findings from a study in a subsistence agricultural community in Tanzania give a differentiated picture compared to current literature. Most men put a substantial amount of labour into food production, but not as much as their wives, while a minority did almost nothing. When men worked hard in the fields, their wives worked hard too. Both men's and women's labour input in the field was important for household food availability. However, no direct relationship was found between men's work and child nutrition. In decision‐making women had a subordinate position and men were apt to favour cash above food. However, women usually had their way with men to insure that family food needs were met. The potential for improving women's situation by increasing men's contribution is discussed.