ABSTRACT
This chapter examines family day care as a setting that offers important challenges to contemporary conceptualizations of women's identifications of their activities. It argues against looking for a single identification on both empirical and theoretical grounds. The chapter offers the new child care arrangement of family day care as an empirical activity with no easy, single identification. It argues that assuming a single identification exists prohibits researchers from investigating the processes by which people make and change identifications. The chapter explains how current research in cognition challenges the tacit assumptions about cultural categories that underlie the above academic and subject-driven approaches. This line of argument serves as a basis for reconceptualizing the category of women's activities in process terms. Situational goals would seem to provide the link between particular identifications and the ongoing demands of social life.
