The male breadwinner model, which dominated both policy assumptions and social ideals in the post-war welfare state, is increasingly being supplanted by an adult worker family model. In this new model, both men and women are assumed to be primarily workers in the labour market, who as fathers and mothers pool their earned income in supporting children. In this article we assess this assumption. First, we examine the gendered moral rationalities of particular social groups of partnered mothers, defined in terms of class, conventionality, ethnicity and sexuality, about how mothering is combined with paid work, and how time and labour is allocated with their partners. Second, in the light of this empirical research, we examine three leading approaches to understanding change and decision making in families - new household economics, individualization in late modernity, and `post-modern moral negotiation'. We conclude that both the empirical and theoretical assumptions of the adult worker model are severely limited.

Archival storage of data sets from qualitative studies presents opportunities for combining small-scale data sets for reuse/secondary analysis. In this paper, we outline our approach to combining multiple qualitative data sets and explain why working with a corpus of ‘big qual’ data is a worthwhile endeavour. We present a new approach that iteratively combines recursive surface thematic mapping and in-depth interpretive work. Our breadth-and-depth method involves a series of steps: (1) surveying archived data sets to create a new assemblage of data; (2) recursive surface thematic mapping in dialogue with (3) preliminary ‘test pit’ analysis, remapping and repetition of preliminary analysis; and (4) in-depth analysis of the type that is familiar to most qualitative researchers. In so doing, we show how qualitative researchers can conduct ‘big qual’ analysis while retaining the distinctive order of knowledge about social processes that is the hallmark of rigorous qualitative research, with its integrity of attention to nuanced context and detail.

In this article we highlight the way that different qualitative analytic methods implicitly place the interpretive analyst in different sorts of relationship to their interview subject and their data. The process of data analysis constructs an analytic mode of being in relation to the interviewee and their social reality. In particular, we illustrate this point through a detailed consideration of the analytic process involved in producing I-poems from qualitative longitudinal interview data (derived from Gilligan and colleagues’ ‘Listening Guide’), to explore change and continuity in a case study young person’s sense of self over time. We contrast how we understood those changes and continuities through the different analytic angles provided by the gaze of thematic analysis and the voices identified through I-poems.

Ideas that the quality of parental nurturing and attachment in the first years of a child’s life is formative, hard-wiring their brains for success or failure, are reflected in policy reports from across the political spectrum and in targeted services delivering early intervention. In this article we draw on our research into ‘Brain science and early intervention’, using reviews of key policy literature and interviews with influential advocates of early intervention and with early years practitioners, to critically assess the ramifications and implications of these claims. Rather than upholding the ‘hopeful ethos’ proffered by advocates of the progressive nature of brain science and early intervention, we show that brain claims are justifying gendered, raced and social inequalities, positioning poor mothers as architects of their children’s deprivation.

This article explores the understandings of academics who carry out unfunded research and the nature of their academic identity, in a context where research funding is realigned to government and corporate needs, and the academic career is recast as an entrepreneurial project. It draws on in-depth interviews with academics working in UK universities, at different career stages in a range of disciplines. Main findings include that research is ‘self-funded’ rather than unfunded, and that participants often decided not to apply for external funding. A major reason for this was a sense of resistance motivated by intellectual creativity and flexible autonomy. At the same time, unfunded research also could be compliance with a neo-liberalised university agenda, viewed as entrepreneurial. Unfunded research can be viewed as a way of managing tensions between wanting and needing to do research, throwing light on the identity of being a contemporary intellectual-entrepreneurial academic in the neo-liberalised university.