{"id":53441,"date":"2013-01-23T11:30:25","date_gmt":"2013-01-23T16:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=53441"},"modified":"2013-01-20T14:58:11","modified_gmt":"2013-01-20T19:58:11","slug":"the-working-family-discourse-and-the-invisibility-of-individuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/01\/23\/the-working-family-discourse-and-the-invisibility-of-individuals\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Working Family” Discourse and the Invisibility of Individuals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that \u201cworking families\u201d don\u2019t exist, it\u2019s just the way most people use this term it\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0mean anything. \u00a0Search Google images for \u201cworking families,\u201d and you\u2019ll find images like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s pretty much the way the term is used: every family is a\u00a0working family<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To hear the White House talk, you have to wonder whether there are people who aren\u2019t in families. I\u2019ve\u00a0complained about this before<\/a>, Obama\u2019s tendency to say things like, \u201cThis reform is good for families; it\u2019s good for businesses; it\u2019s good for the entire economy.\u201d As if \u201cfamilies\u201d covers all people.<\/p>\n

Specifically, if you Google search the\u00a0White House website’s<\/a>\u00a0press office directory, which is where the speeches live,\u00a0like this,<\/a>\u00a0you get 457 results, such as\u00a0this transcript<\/a>\u00a0of remarks by Michelle Obama at a \u201cCorporate Voices for Working Families\u201d event. The equivalent search for \u201cworking people<\/a>\u201d yields a paltry 108 hits (many of them Obama speeches at campaign events, which include false-positives, like him making the\u00a0ridiculous claim<\/a>\u00a0that Americans are the \u201chardest\u00a0working people<\/em>\u00a0on Earth<\/a>.\u201d) If you search the entire Googleverse for \u201cworking families\u201d you get about 318 million hits, versus just just 7 million for \u201cworking people\u201d (less than the 10 million that turns up for \u201cKardashians,\u201d whatever that means.)<\/p>\n

You would never know that\u00a033 million Americans live alone<\/a>\u00a0— comprising 27% of all households. And 50 million people, or one out of every 6 people, lives in what the Census Bureau defines as a \u201cnon-family household,\u201d or a household in which the householder has no relatives (some of those people may be cohabitors, however). The rise of this phenomenon was ably described by Eric Klinenberg in\u00a0Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n

This is partly a complaint about cheap rhetoric, but it\u2019s also about the assumption that families are primary social units when it comes to things like policy and economics, and about the false universality of \u201cmiddle class\u201d (which is made up of \u201cworking families\u201d) in reference to anyone (in a family with anyone) with a job.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one visualization, from a\u00a0Google ngrams search<\/a>\u00a0of millions of books. The blue line is use of the phrase \u201cworking people\u201d as a fraction of references to \u201cpeople,\u201d while the red line is use of the phrase \u201cworking families\u201d as a fraction of references to \u201cfamilies.\u201d It shows, I think, that \u201cworking\u201d is coming to define families, not people.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t all bad. Families matter, and part of the attention to \u201cworking families\u201d (or\u00a0Families That Work<\/em><\/a>) is driven by important problems of work-family conflict, unequal care work burdens, and so on. But ultimately these are problems because they affect people (some of whom are in families). When we treat families as the primary unit of analysis, we mask the divisions within families — the conflicts of interest and exploitation, the violence and abuse, and the ephemeral nature of many family relationships and commitments — and we contribute to the marginalization of people who aren\u2019t in, or don\u2019t have, families.\u00a0 And those members of the\u00a0No Family<\/a>\u00a0community need our attention, too.<\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Family Inequality. It\u2019s not that \u201cworking families\u201d don\u2019t exist, it\u2019s just the way most people use this term it\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0mean anything. \u00a0Search Google images for \u201cworking families,\u201d and you\u2019ll find images like this: And that\u2019s pretty much the way the term is used: every family is a\u00a0working family. To hear the White House talk, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,253,272,85,293,76],"class_list":["post-53441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-history","tag-marriagefamily","tag-politics","tag-social-construction","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53441"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53451,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53441\/revisions\/53451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}