Interview with Professor Fiona Williams

CAVA is an unusual project, how did it come about?

I would have to say that it came about partly in response to the ESRC having a research competition, asking for research proposals that were to be about the future of welfare. What we did in the department was to gather together the ways in which our different areas of research may contribute to an original approach to looking at the future of welfare.

What I was also aware of is that we are at this moment, especially with a New Labour government, in a period in which the post-war settlement is being re-settled again. To some extent, Margaret Thatcher set this off in the Eighties, but actually New Labour have been much more clear about the way in which a resettlement around welfare, welfare reforms, are themselves a moral project. That they are an attempt to give some sort of moral reordering in society; they have, as Tony Blair has often said, a moral purpose. I think that the other thing that I and others were aware of, is that quite central to this idea of moral purpose is the question of the family, and the family's relationship to the state.

And when we looked at it a lot of what we shared was an attempt to look again at the question of morality from the point of view of those who experienced their own changing values. The idea that we could do a project which looked at what New Labour was concerned about - moral purpose, moral reordering - but look at it in terms of what matters to those people themselves in the changes in their family lives that they are experiencing, that, it seemed to us, would be a new way of looking at a whole number of questions that are crucial to the development of social policy.

Those questions centre around the idea of how you can have universal policies, policies that reflect universal values, but actually can address themselves to diverse practices. Because if nothing else, recognising changes in family is to acknowledge that people do family in lots of different ways. Therefore just raises the question how is it on the most practical basis enable people to work out the time in which they work in a way that suits them and their household or family circumstances best. How can you have this, when the whole development of policy, the whole basis of trade union negotiation has been on a very collectivist, a very standardised basis. So how can you move towards thinking about universal principles that can have diverse and different applications. That is really what is at the centre of it.

The proposal that we then developed was one that would use these changes in what we as sociologists call parenting and partnering, changes around the relationships between the people who have intimate relations and those intimate relations extend beyond sexual relationships to close family and friendship relations. How those are changing, but also how relationships between parents and children are changing. What we're trying to do is to use these changes in partnering and parenting as a lens to look at how people's values, and what it is that matters to people, are changing and how this may inform the normative basis to social policy in the future.

What features of the CAVA programme make it stand alone from other ways of thinking about these issues?

I think that probably as a way of researching social policy it is very different. It brings sociological imagination to social policy. In particular it operationalises, through the empirical projects, an idea of morality. And morality has been so central to the development of social policy and yet somehow always talked about without reference to any evidence or empirical work. CAVA is an attempt to do that. I'm not saying others haven't attempted that, Bill Jordan's work has. But it is usually an attempt to do it in relation to things that are seen as morally bad behaviour, scrounging for example. Whereas here we are looking at everyday behaviour, everyday life in terms of morality.

I think as well the programme as a whole appeals to key political changes. We were also concerned to operationalise an idea of, to use sociological language, the active welfare subject. In other words we knew that the changes that have occurred at the political level were about thinking about people who use welfare services as people who have agency, as people who are active. And yet research was way behind on that. Research was tending to not think through what this meant for the way you research people. Or it was stuck as researching people simply as consumers - you know, agency meant you did or didn't have money to spend on privatised services. It didn't have this all encompassing view of what does it actually mean to take charge of welfare? Does it mean that you should become more conversant with a privatised welfare market or does it, at the complete opposite, mean that people need to have more say in the running of welfare. Or does it mean, as New Labour have presented it, that people exercise their responsibilities by getting to paid work, to make sure they are good parents and so on. So we thought this view of the active welfare subject operates at a political level but it really hadn't been taken into account at the research level.

What do you see to be the conceptual and methodological innovations of CAVA?

Well a key one is to think about what we mean by the active welfare subject, and I'll come back to how we've operationalised this in the project. I think that the other one is to operationalise this idea of moral agency. We've done that with reference to some of the work that people like Jennifer Mason have done, some of the work that Carol Smart and Simon Duncan have done and some of the work that Sasha Roseneil and I have done on social movements.

Methodologically that meant two things. One is to ask people what mattered to them, what is, in Janet Finch's words, the proper thing to do in given situations. But also we've combined that idea of researching moral agency with an idea of social change as well. So the situations we are looking at in our empirical projects all take some element of social change in family life. Elements of change that have been talked about by sociologists like Beck and Giddens, talked about by people writing on gender and people writing on race. But not actually systematically looked into.

The four areas of change we are looking into are firstly, mothers of very young children re-entering the labour market. We are concerned not simply to look at what they do but how they arrive at the decision about what they are going to do, what it is that matters to them when they decide that they may re-enter the labour market after having a child.

The second area that we are looking at is families where that have been a divorce or separation, and looking at the impact of that on family members, what happens to family members and how they reconfigure the important relationships when a split has occurred, across generations.

The third project looks at another dimension of change which has not been accounted for, particularly in policy documents, where appeals to notions of family and community often assume that family and community are not only locally based but are also nationally based. One of the biggest changes in the post-war period has been the increase in migration, families migrating to live on different continents. And this means that families, even second and third generation families living in Britain, can have family who are on other continents either because they have brothers and sisters who have migrated to different continents or they have family back home. What does this mean for family obligations? How are those networks maintained? And how at birth, death, these sorts of occasions, do people manage?

Recently I was talking with a colleague who comes from Pakistan. And she was explaining how her aunt, who lives in England, had just died. Her cousin, the aunt's daughter, wanted to come from Pakistan to go to her mother's funeral. She was detained at Heathrow for two or three days and then sent back to Pakistan because they didn't believe she was coming in for her mother's funeral. Stuff like that is appalling, and it goes on everyday, and I think we need to be able to document it, and talk to people about what they require - not just what is going on, but what people need.

The fourth area is friends. Because one of the other big changes, big demographic changes - and I suppose that is what we are about, looking at demographics but how people experience in a day to day way those changes in demographics - is the rise in singletons. The rise of people who live on their own - either because they are deciding not to move in with their partner, or deciding that they don't want to be partnered, or they're deciding that they've been partnered and they're divorced, particularly women in their 50s and 60s and they're deciding they're not going to re-partner, or at least in a cohabiting way. And that means that if there is this assumption that people turn to their family, who do people who live on their own turn to? And have friends become the new family? What is the nature of those sorts of relationships? Are they forging new patterns of inter-dependence or are they basing themselves on old familial patterns of inter-dependence? So we're interested in non-conventional family forms as well.

These projects are all qualitative, intensive, interviewing small numbers of a theoretically derived sample of people in their networks.

But we're also concerned with collective agency as well as individual agency. And another of the projects is looking at the development of grass roots movements campaigning for demands around changes around parenting and partnering. Say, for example, the rights of disabled women to motherhood. And we're trying to map what sorts of demands are coming up and what's important there and how far they challenge existing policies.

So we have these empirical groups which are operationalising the idea of moral agency, operationalising the idea of people as actively thinking about what their actual welfare needs are. But also looking at focal points of change, of social and economic change.

In order to off set this work, in order to stand back a bit, we have a further strand where we're bringing together international researchers, who are doing similar sorts of research in other countries, just to see what they're arriving at and how far different policy frameworks in different countries give rise to different issues.

In terms of concepts around which the work is organised, care is an important one. It's a difficult one because it has a touchy-feely ambience to it and it doesn't generate a lot of spin or media interest. But it is one that we have become very interested in. To begin with, if we talk about people's care - care for themselves and care for others - these are priorities for people's lives, we've come to recognise that these are priorities in people's lives. Both the way in which they are concerned with their own wellbeing but also concerned to offer others care, support and love and so on. This is a major aspect of our lives and one that is taken for granted.

There are all sorts of ways in which care has become more visible. For example, setting up a National Carers Association which recognises that women spend a lot of their time caring for others. But I still think we don't have a notion of how important it is in people's lives. To give you an example, in the current pre-occupation with work life balance what is taken as necessary is the organisation of work and that what people need to be able to do is to fit their caring relationships around the requirements of work. I think that what we're pushing for is to think in terms of a new political ethic of care in which the question of care itself becomes central to the recognition of what people are and what people do. And therefore we don't think so much in terms of 'how can we ensure women can get home from work in time to pick the children up from school'. But we actually look at these things and ask 'how can we organise work so that it fits in with what matters in people's lives, in their personal lives and their caring responsibilities'. Clearly that is a challenge to business in all sorts of ways. But we know that people are thinking about these things more and more, that there has to be a synergy between these things rather than the one - work - taking precedence over the second - life. So it think the practical application of what people like Selma Sevenhuijsen and Joan Trondheim have been working on around what care is about, that practical application is a very important policy issue. And it's not one that is just relevant for women looking after children or elderly relatives, its relevant for every body, because everybody is involved in caring for themselves and to some extent caring for others.

We would also argue that it is a vital aspect of citizenship - being responsive, being attentive to people, being tolerant taking account of, taking on board diversity are civic virtues. And people learn those, not through paid work - well the may, we know that paid work is becoming more important for people's social lives - but they learn it in their caring relationship and in their intimate relationships.

I think intimacy is also important for CAVA, because intimacy gives us a way into to talking about family relationships and other relationships, other close relationships, which can take us away from the trap of talking about family values. So we're concerned with values, but we're not for or against family values, we're not going to enter into that debate. We're concerned with what actually matters to people in their everyday lives and how that is changing. To talk in terms of care and intimacy is a better way in than to talk of family.

How do you see the research concerns of CAVA fitting in with - or conflicting with - current New Labour welfare goals?

The main one is this emphasis on paid work ethic. I think that they are ill advised to concentrate so much on the idea of the key responsibility of citizens to be involved in paid work. Not because I don't think paid work is very important - I do. It provides people with self-esteem and so on. But I think that it simply neglects the realities of people's lives. One interesting reality is the fact that men in Britain work some of the longest hours in Europe. There are reasons for why this happens, to do with the lack of child care facilities. Man will often find that if they have a partner who has a baby the earning capacity of their partner diminishes and the easiest way to maintain family income is for fathers to work longer hours, to take on overtime. What is interesting is that fathers themselves are saying they don't like the situation, they want to spend time with their kids. Why ever that has come about there is an increasing emotion investment by fathers in their children. Possibly because these are no longer fixed, you can no longer as a father take for granted that your family is fixed and will be there for you. You actually have to put something in to make it work. And if you want to have close relationships with your kids, then you have to work at it. And there is some sort of realisation of that. And I think that says a lot about the way people are actually balancing their commitment to the work ethic and their commitments to their caring relationships, and care is increasingly important.

I think the second problem with the work ethic is that it means that people who can't enter paid work, and there are lots of people who can't for various reasons, are seen as residual, as not fulfilling their civil responsibilities. And that is dangerous.

And the other thing that is dangerous is the idea that responsibilities should come before rights. The problem with that is that in a sense responsibilities do come before rights, the do pre-exist to rights. Our responsibilities for one another … women's responsibility for their children do pre-exist their rights to enter paid work. But what New Labour is suggesting is that we can only have rights if we can show to have delivered on our responsibilities. It just simply doesn't work like that because sometimes … also you can only exercise your citizenship responsibilities through having rights. Women can only enter paid work if they've got someone to look after the kids. So how can they have responsibilities before rights? They've actually got to have those rights to fulfil their responsibility to work. At a very simple level it has been shown that when unemployed people have their benefits cut they are less likely to be motivated to get a job than when their benefits are a bit higher. So you have got to have that right to some kind of protection to enable you to carry out your responsibilities. I think that that thinking is a bit wonky and I suppose in the end that is something we might challenge.

The other thing - coming back to your earlier question about how we're doing this differently, what is original about CAVA - is our concern is around policy makers who assume that you only have to give an economic rationality, you only have to make it possible for people to earn a bit more money in order to change their behaviour or their practices. And what we argue is that that is only one element, there are other things: whether people have time, whether people have quality time with their kids, their own needs in motherhood, how they were looked after and what they expect to give their children. All of these things are as important in whether people take up paid work or what they're going to do about divorce.

How do you hope to convert empirical research findings into policy?

This also touches on the question of methodology, and what is an original aspect of the research. These days, it is very important - and it is not a bad thing - that research should be seen to be socially useful. That's not to say 'blue skies' research is not important - it is terribly important. But I think the conversion of sociological investigations into policy is tricky and we need to know better how to do it. And one of the ways that we are attempting to do this is … we have these different research projects which will produce findings not on policy but on what matters to people in these different situations. And our job is then to convert that into policy.

And the way we have thought about doing this is that we want to take those research findings, both individually from the research projects and also we want to integrate them collectively, and come up with some important statements about what we think people are saying about care and intimacy and how its changing. And then we have a whole set of different forms of dialogues that we're going to enter into with these findings with different groups of people - so we'll go back to those localities and bring together people who were interviewed, key local policy makers, key welfare and health providers and talk to them about how they think this translates into policy, what it means for them, what will be helpful. And having got some ideas there we'll then talk with groups of national policy makers and try to work out between us what are the implications of these findings for policy.

So rather than go away into our ivory tower and do it ourselves, while we will come up with some suggestions, we need to take this out to people and have a continual dialogue before we end up with something which we think will be helpful.

What is important about that is that we asked for the research money to do it, and usually that's something that simply a follow on at the end of the research. But its become something that is a demand from government that we provide evidence based policy and I think that we're doing it.

I have to say, a lot of the evidence based policy debate assumes that only quantitative work leads to evidence - although that has changed in health arenas - whereas what we're doing is seeing how qualitative work can produce evidence based policy recommendations.

Another aspect of our methodology that is particularly interesting is the geography of our sample. Because we're not doing extensive quantitative surveys, we're doing intensive localised interviews with people, we needed to make sure that the samples of people we had drew from the different social and familial groups that one might find in society. And one of the ways we did that was Simon Duncan carried out a social geography of family formations in Yorkshire and Lancashire, coming up with some very exciting findings. There are certain places that you are more likely to find your traditional male breadwinner family and other places where you are much more likely to find say alternative families, same sex families, cohabitees and single parent families. That these are geographically located. And his plotting of these different family formations enabled us to chose locations that represented different types of families. And so we based our samples on those localities. And these localities are very varied in terms of socio-economic characteristics. Some are very well off and some very poor. And difference in terms of different forms of family formation, race and ethnicity, sexuality, these have been built in to our sample.

So you can claim it is national research - even though it is based in Yorkshire and Lancashire?

Yes, very much so. People from the south tend to think that the south represents much more what is national. And in fact in terms of socio-economic characteristics we can claim that our research covers areas that are representative as much nationally as it is regionally. In other words, there is as much variation in the areas we are researching as there are nationally.

Strands One and Two are now completed - the workshops that sought to develop a conceptual and methodological framework. What would you say are the key themes that emerged from this stage of the research?

That work was very much about setting theories in context. To really begin to question how much the very influential sociological theories of Beck and Giddens, and to some extent Baumann - to have a critical questioning of those and to begin to think more about the concept of individualisation and to wonder what this has to say about relationships, about the diversity of people's intimate relationships.

I think that we are much clearer about the idea that rather than being involved in simple formulation of values that what we're concerned with is the way in which people have their own very valid forms of moral reason. That rejects the idea of somebody as the rational subject, somebody who simply rationally responds, somebody who is a unitary subject - so we see people as actually being quite multiple in how they conceive of themselves, how they talk about themselves and how they operate. I suppose the classic thing that women operate at the level of worker, mother, lover, sister and friend and these things mean different things to them and these things are mediated by their diversity. I think we've managed to incorporate a notion of multiplicity, a notion of the reasoning subject rather than the rational subject into our work.

What's happening now and what is coming up?

We're in the middle of starting all the empirical projects. I think one of the really interesting things is the geography of family formations. We've joked that we could sell it to estate agents in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but actually I think that we could! Other people are beginning to do this kind of work - private organisations are talking about Scalmsdale (???) being the divorce capital of England … so clearly that sort of work is becoming of interest, because it is of interest to people who are concerned with consumption.

We've managed as well to map the development over the last twenty years of a whole range of organisations and activities involved in grass roots and national campaigns around parenting and partnering. And I think one of the things that we've become aware of is that there are a number of key political issues that we need to be able to talk about - particularly work-life balance. Greg's work on Trade Unions quite clearly shows that the intricacies of the argument around family friendly policies have such a considerable bearing on our work, and our work has considerable bearing on this debate. But also, the question of political strategy around work-life balance. I mean, do you go all out to improve mothers' conditions or do you attend to the rights of fathers as well. These are real political choices to be made and we are much more aware of them.

We're starting our international seminars and we have researchers coming to stay with us and talk to us about their research from the US, Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands in January. The next international seminar takes place next autumn on the End of Marriage? And we are hoping to have some sort of public event associated with that.

Recently I gave a presentation at the ESRC's National Social Science Conference, around one of the key issues that was being debated there: work-life balance. This was well received and stimulated a good debate among a mixed audience of policy makers, members of national voluntary organisations, journalists and so on - this talk is also on our website.

And we're developing contacts in preparation for strand 6. It is very important for us is to find out who is interested in our work, who are the potential users of our work, who are interested in these issues and have some thing to say about it. Through this, the research enables us as academics to have more contact with the community - which is very important to breaking down barriers between the university, research and those who are interested and want to contribute to it.

If you had three wishes for CAVA, what would they be?

I hope we are able to influence policy in a creative way. I hope that we are able to influence the way research is done, both around families and around this question of agency. And I hope we can highlight some of the very positive values emerging, and changes in family life, and to bring to bear a sensibility and an awareness.

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