ABSTRACT
This chapter will centrally address the second aim of the collection – to explore innovative theoretical approaches to understanding personal life. It will also seek to disrupt ‘normative’ idealisations – those made by individualisation theorists.
We start with a story about Christina, a working-class wife, mother and part-time employee living in what was a coal-mining village near Barnsley. She felt conflicting desires for self-improvement through developing a career and for emotional fulfilment as a good mother. Christina’s responses were sometimes reflexive, sometimes habitual and sometimes taking tradition for granted. She rarely took decisions just thinking about herself, rather, her choices were set within emotional relationships with her husband, her dead mother and above all her children. She also faced imbalances of power with employers, while her own resources were limited. Her agency was both constrained and ‘bonded’, formed through ties with others.
How are we to understand this story? Individualisation theory, with its emphasis on individual projects and its romanticised view of autonomous agency, does not seem a good place to start. Rather we develop the notion of bricolage as a theory of social action. People respond to new and changing situations by consciously, and unconsciously, adapting to what is easily available to them and has the most social fit. Tradition, what has gone before, becomes both a resource and legitimation device for what happens in the future. We exemplify this approach through two further case studies of same-sex weddings and marital-naming practices. By piecing together data and examples from past and present, we present a grounded theoretical approach for understanding contemporary intimate life.
