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This chapter uncovers the destabilizing and transformative dimensions of a legal process commonly described as assimilation. Lawyers working on behalf of a marginalized group often argue that the group merits inclusion in dominant institutions, and they do so by casting the group as like the majority. Scholars have criticized claims of this kind for affirming the status quo and muting significant differences of the excluded group. Yet, this chapter shows how these claims may also disrupt the status quo, transform dominant institutions, and convert distinctive features of the excluded group into more widely shared legal norms. This dynamic is observed in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, and specifically through attention to three phases of LGBT advocacy: (1) claims to parental recognition of unmarried same-sex parents, (2) claims to marriage, and (3) claims regarding the consequences of marriage for same-sex parents. The analysis shows how claims that appeared assimilationist – demanding inclusion in marriage and parenthood by arguing that same-sex couples are similarly situated to their different-sex counterparts – subtly challenged and reshaped legal norms governing parenthood, including marital parenthood. While this chapter focuses on LGBT claims, it uncovers a dynamic that may exist in other settings.

Using the family activity of hobby stock-keeping (“petstock”) as a context, this paper aims to extend singularization theory to model the negotiations, agencies and resistances of children, parents and petstock, as they work through how animals become food within the boundaries of the family home. In doing so, the authors present an articulation of this process, deciphering the cultural biographies of petstock and leading to an understanding of the emergent array of child animal food-product preferences.

Data were collected from petstock-keeping parents through a mixture of ethnographic, in-depth interviewing and netnographic engagements in this qualitative, interpretive study; with parents offering experiential insights into animal meat and food-product socialization behaviours played out within the family environments.

The findings discuss the range of parental behaviours, motivations and activities vis-à-vis petstock, and their children’s responses, ranging from transgression to full compliance, in terms of eating home-raised animal food-products. The discussion illustrates that in the context of petstock, a precocious child food preference agency towards animal meat and food products is reported to emerge.

This research has empirical and theoretical implications for the understanding of the development of child food preference agency vis-à-vis animal food products in the context of family petstock keeping.

The research has the potential to inform policy makers around child education and food in regard to how child food preferences emerge and can inform marketers developing food-based communications aimed at children and parents.

Two original contributions are presented: an analysis of the under-researched area of how children’s food preferences towards eating animal food products develop, taking a positive child food-choice agency perspective, and a novel extension of singularization theory, theorizing the radical transformation, from animal to food, encountered by children in the petstock context.

Communication plays an important role in health decisions and behaviors. Friends and family exert influence through communication and, when considering smoking, this is particularly salient among those friends and family who smoke. Guided by primary socialization theory and integrated behavioral model, the present study examined the effects of having smoking friends and family on smoking beliefs (e.g. negative consequences, positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement), cultural normative beliefs, pro-smoking injunctive norms, smoking intentions and recent smoking behaviors.

Cross-sectional online survey data were collected from college students (N = 227). Multivariate analysis of covariance and path analysis were performed.

College students who reported having smoking friends were more likely to report higher levels of positive reinforcement, cultural normative beliefs, pro-smoking injunctive norms, positive attitudes, smoking intentions and recent smoking behaviors than those without smoking friends. Frequent communication with smoking friends was significantly related to cultural normative beliefs, pro-smoking injunctive norms, positive attitudes and smoking intentions. The analysis, however, did not yield statistical support for the associations between frequent communication with smoking family and smoking perceptions, norms and behaviors.

The present study highlights the vital roles of friends' influence for college students' smoking behaviors. Communication-based intervention can help better equip college students with communication strategies that prevent tobacco use by promoting more effective conversations with friends.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the role of employers in creating employment gaps among women returning to the labor market after parental leaves of different durations.

The authors use a controlled correspondence field experiment that orthogonally manipulates parental leave length and the quality of fictitious female job candidates. The experiment is complemented with a survey among human resource managers.

High-quality candidates receive more interview invitations when applying after a short parental leave, while low-quality (LQ) candidates receive more interview invitations when applying after a typical three years long parental leave. Survey results suggest that the difference in invitations between short and typical leave treatments is driven by a social norm that mothers should stay home with children younger than three. Productivity gains from employing a LQ job applicant with a shorter career break might not be high enough to outweigh the adverse social norm effect.

The presented results point toward the strong effect of prevailing social norms on job search prospects of women returning to the labor market after parental leave.

A correspondence experiment has not been used before to study the relationship between time spent on leave and the labor market prospects of mothers. It also extends research on social norms to the domain of hiring decisions.

This research article explores several questions about assessing the impacts of fathers' parental leave take up and gender equality. We ask: How does the conceptual and contextual specificity of care and equality shape what we focus on, and how, when we study parental leave policies and their impacts? What and how are we measuring?

The article is based on a longitudinal qualitative research study on families with fathers who had taken parental leave in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Québec), which included interviews with 26 couples in the first stage (25 mother/father couples and one father/father couple) and with nine couples a decade later. Guided by Margaret Somers' historical sociology of concept formation, we explore the concepts of care and equality (and their histories, networks, and narratives) and how they are taken up in parental leave research. We also draw on insights from three feminist scholars who have made major contributions to theoretical intersections between care, work, equality, social protection policies, and care deficits: Nancy Fraser, Joan Williams, and Martha Fineman.

The relationship between fathers' leave-taking and gender equality impacts is a complex, non-linear entanglement shaped by the specificities of state and employment policies and by how these structure parental eligibility for leave benefits, financial dimensions of leave-taking (including wage replacement rates for benefits), childcare possibilities/limitations and related financial dimensions for families, masculine work norms in workplaces, and intersections of gender and social class. Overall, we found that maximizing both parental leave time and family income in order to sustain good care for their children (through paid and unpaid leave time, followed by limited and expensive childcare services) was articulated as a more immediate concern to parents than were issues of gender equality. Our research supports the need to draw closer connections between parental leave, childcare, and workplace policies to better understand how these all shape parental leave decisions and practices and possible gender equality outcomes.

The article is based on a small and fairly homogenous Canadian research sample and thus calls for more research to be done on diverse families, with attention to possible conceptual diversity arising from these sites.

This research calls for greater attention to: the genealogies of, and relations between, the concepts of care, equality, and subjectivity that guide parental leave research and policy; to the historical specificity of models like the Universal Caregiver model; and to the need for new models and conceptual configurations that can guide research on care, equality, and parental leave policies in current global contexts of neoliberal capitalism.

We call for a move toward thinking about care, not only as care time, but as responsibilities, which can be partly assessed through the stories people tell about how they negotiate and navigate care, domestic work, and paid work responsibilities in specific contexts and conditions across time. We also advocate for gender equality concepts that attend to how families navigate restrictive parental leave and childcare policies and how broader socio-economic inequalities arise partly from state policies underpinned by a concept of liberal autonomous subjects rather than relational subjects who face moments of vulnerability and inter-dependence across the life course.

The ideal worker norm refers to the belief that employees can and should be singularly devoted to work. Our purpose is to understand the extent to which workers buy into various components of ideal work and how unpopular components of the ideal worker norm persist. We hypothesize they persist, at least in part, because of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance entails situations in which most people privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume others accept it.

Drawing on original survey data, we examine the extent to which US workers subscribe to a range of factors described in the ideal work literature. We test the pluralistic ignorance hypothesis by comparing workers’ agreement with, and their perceptions of their coworkers’ agreement with, these factors.

We find workers embrace some components of ideal work. Yet, regardless of gender or parental status, they dislike those components that involve working extremely long hours and prioritizing work at the expense of personal or family life. In addition, regardless of gender or parental status, workers experience pluralistic ignorance with respect to those components that involve prioritizing work at the expense of personal or family life.

Our findings suggest that researchers distinguish between different components of ideal work. They also suggest that everyone – not just women or parents – desire work–family balance. Lastly, because people often behave in ways that are congruent with what they mistakenly believe to be the norm, our findings suggest workers may unintentionally perpetuate family-unfriendly workplace standards.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of parental and peer norms on idol worship as well as the effect of idol worship on the intention to purchase and obtain the idol’s music products legally and illegally.

A stratified, two-stage, cluster sampling procedure was applied to a list of high schools obtained from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. A return rate of 80 per cent yielded 723 usable questionnaires, the data from which were analysed by the LISREL structural equation modelling software.

The results suggest that both social worship and personal worship have a significant and positive impact on the intention to purchase music. However, personal worship has a negative impact on the intention to pirate music while social worship appears to strengthen it.

The findings suggest that idol worship is more complex than previously understood. The constructs chosen in this research should be seen only as a snapshot but other variables such as vanity trait, autonomy, romanticism or involvement are not taken into account. Future studies would benefit from inclusion of these variables and a wider geographical scope.

The findings contain many implications to help marketing executives and planners better revise their existing marketing and communication strategies to increase their revenue.

Existing research has tended to examine the impact of idol worship as a whole on the reduction of music piracy, but overlook the two-dimensional aspects of idol worship, hence ignoring the fact that many music firms have not properly utilised idol worship to deal with the challenges associated with music piracy. The findings broaden existing understanding about the causes of two different dimensions of idol worship and their different impacts on the intention to music piracy.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

The purpose of the study is to research the current state of fathers' involvement in childcare during parental leave and to assess attitudes of Russian population towards possible measures that can expand the use of parental leave by fathers in Russia.

The authors conducted a survey of Russian parents with children under the age of 18 months in 2022. The sample accounts for 1,000 people; the survey covered almost all Russian regions.

The authors found that the ideal workload of fathers is not expected to exceed a third of the total parental workload. Russian parents are not ready to admit dissatisfaction with the existing distribution of workload during parental leave. However, an egalitarian demand for greater involvement of fathers in parental responsibilities is forming, and an interest in transforming the parental leave policy is emerging.

The value of the study consists of assessing the effectiveness of measures that may have a beneficial effect on the use of parental leave by fathers, as well as identifying consequences of the possible introduction of mandatory parental leave for fathers.

Social marketing has been applied to alcohol education, changing adolescents’ knowledge, attitudes and intentions toward binge drinking for the better. However, there remains limited research in the social marketing literature examining multi-stream models considering social-contextual factors and individual differences in the applied context of adolescent drinking.

A multi-group structural equation model approach was applied to analyze cross-sectional self-report data from 2,234 (mean age = 15.3 years, 48.7 per cent female) Australian adolescents. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the role of attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control in adolescents’ binge drinking intentions were examined. Potential moderating effects of peer and parent drinking behaviors and drinking status were tested.

The model explained 47.3 per cent variance in intentions for drinkers and 31.6 per cent for non-drinkers. Subjective norms were more strongly related to intentions than attitudes. Peer and parent behavior modified those associations, and drinking status further moderated interaction effects. Under conditions of favorable norms and attitudes, family and friends’ behavior fuels adolescents’ binge drinking intentions. Conversely, exposure to modeling of non-drinking peers and parents can bolster negative binge drinking beliefs.

Social marketing programs seeking to change adolescent drinking culture should include peers and parents whose drinking behavior modified associations between attitudes, norms and intentions to binge drink.

This study investigated how social-contextual factors (midstream) and drinking status influence relationships between adolescents’ attitudes, norms and perceived behavioral control (downstream factors) and their intentions to binge drink. These moderating effects have not previously been examined within the theory of planned behavior framework, and limited previous research has examined multi-stream models.