ABSTRACT
Every day, millions of comfortably off couples with children have breakfast, together or separately, with varying degrees of haste or leisure, and set about their daily tasks. Their subsequent activities reflect decisions that they have made, individually or jointly with varying degrees of planning and coordination. The coherence of a biographical account of the self is therefore analyzed in terms of choice, based on risk assessment, producing a “more or less integrated set of practices”. This chapter defines individualism and shows how this common framework of accountability is revealed in the interviews. It shows how responsibility for income for retirement is incorporated into men’s accounts of their labour-market decisions but absent from all but a few accounts by women. The book analyzes the extent to which narratives framed in terms of individualism and lifestyle choices give rise to discourses of the public sphere.
