IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v3y1997i2p29-61.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Lone Mothers and Paid Work - Rational Economic Man or Gendered Moral Rationalities?

Author

Listed:
  • Simon Duncan
  • Rosalind Edwards

Abstract

In this article we examine the inadequacies of the rational economic man approach for understanding individual economic decision-making, and we suggest an alternative concept which we call ''gendered moral rationalities.'' We carry out this critique in the context of research on lone motherhood and paid work. This is an important social and political issue where analyses commonly use the rational economic man approach (although often only implicitly). However, these analyses have not, we argue, been able to understand the social processes by which lone mothers take up, or do not take up, paid work. In this paper we take the debate further by using recent empirical work on the employment position and values of lone mothers in Britain, integrating information from interviews with census data. The results suggest that it is nonmarket, collective relations and understandings about motherhood and employment which are the primary factors in explaining lone mothers' uptake of paid work. We term these ''gendered moral rationalities.'' While individual levels of human capital and policy constraints remain important, in a causal sense these are best seen as contingent, secondary factors. The source of economic rationality therefore, at least in this case, primarily lies outside the market and in the domain of collective, and highly gendered, understandings about proper social behavior. This critique parallels recent work by feminist economists who call for a complete restructuring in how economists think and conduct their research.

Suggested Citation

  • Simon Duncan & Rosalind Edwards, 1997. "Lone Mothers and Paid Work - Rational Economic Man or Gendered Moral Rationalities?," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(2), pages 29-61.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:3:y:1997:i:2:p:29-61
    DOI: 10.1080/135457097338690
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135457097338690
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/135457097338690?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Julia Bachtrögler & Julia Bock-Schappelwein & Paul Eckerstorfer & Peter Huber & Christine Mayrhuber & Mark Sommer & Gerhard Streicher, 2019. "Wachstumsfaktor Gleichstellung. Der ökonomische Nutzen von Gender Budgeting in Wien," WIFO Studies, WIFO, number 65741.
    2. Svenja G rtner, 2013. "German Stagnation vs. Swedish Progression: Gender Wage Gaps in Comparison, 1960-2006," LIS Working papers 586, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    3. repec:ilo:ilowps:360912 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Esther Geisler & Michaela R. Kreyenfeld, 2012. "How policy matters: Germany’s parental leave benefit reform and fathers’ behavior 1999-2009," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2012-021, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    5. Struffolino, Emanuela & Mortelmans, Dimitri, 2018. "Lone Mothers in Belgium: Labor Force Attachment and Risk Factors," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, pages 257-282.
    6. Margaret Lewis & Kimmarie McGoldrick, 2001. "Moving Beyond the Masculine Neoclassical Classroom," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(2), pages 91-103.
    7. Anzelika Zaiceva & Klaus Zimmermann, 2014. "Children, Kitchen, Church: does ethnicity matter?," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 12(1), pages 83-103, March.
    8. Leen Marynissen & Eleonora Mussino & Jonas Wood & Ann-Zofie Duvander, 2019. "Fathers’ Parental Leave Uptake in Belgium and Sweden: Self-Evident or Subject to Employment Characteristics?," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 8(11), pages 1-21, November.
    9. Pauline Cullen & Mary P. Murphy, 2021. "Responses to the COVID‐19 crisis in Ireland: From feminized to feminist," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(S2), pages 348-365, July.
    10. Kwan Choi, 2009. "Tackling Domestic Violence in UK: Persistent Problems," International Area Studies Review, Center for International Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, vol. 12(1), pages 17-43, March.
    11. Kingsley Purdam & Mark Elliot, 2007. "A Case Study of the Impact of Statistical Disclosure Control on Data Quality in the Individual UK Samples of Anonymised Records," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 39(5), pages 1101-1118, May.
    12. Esther Geisler & Michaela R. Kreyenfeld, 2009. "Against all odds: fathers’ use of parental leave in Germany," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2009-010, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    13. Monika Strell, 1999. "The Housing Situation of Lone-Mother Families: Austria and Finland in a Cross-National Perspective," MZES Working Papers 2, MZES.
    14. Therese Jefferson & John King, 2001. ""Never Intended to be a Theory Of Everything": Domestic Labor in Neoclassical and Marxian Economics," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(3), pages 71-101.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:3:y:1997:i:2:p:29-61. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.