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The chapter explores an overlooked theme across the literature: capturing the experience of childhood family disruption and transitional flux between foster family homes and the independent sensemaking into the present of young care-experienced parents. The chapter draws upon research that constructed 20 biographical life story accounts of a diverse sample of foster care-experienced young people. The chapter aims to reflect upon the findings garnered from six of these accounts through extracting the narratives of a selection of participants who were to become or had become parents. This chapter makes sociological connections between past family disruption, demarcating present families of choice, and reconciliation of the past through experiencing parenting into the future within constructed ‘family displays’ (Finch, 2007). The chapter illustrates this phenomenon through narrative accounts offering a family history of parents who have experienced a variance of transitions between family units and who were negotiating, or had negotiated, their post-care independence through the role of becoming a parent themselves. The chapter highlights the symbolic value of parenting to the lives of young people who have experienced care in recalibrating their past familial experiences, as demonstrated through their family displays. Through the family displays of care-experienced parents, the importance of the relational context to youth transition ultimately reveals itself, as does the development of relational agency, and ultimately the role of parenting in developing a young person’s independent ‘post-care’ identity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the types of ethical challenges and dilemmas researchers face when engaging in family consumption research.

Drawing from the concept of micro-ethics to bridge reflexivity with ethics in practice, the paper provides a reflexive account of the various ethical dilemmas encountered by two family consumption scholars during their fieldwork. Both researchers conducted qualitative research on family meals.

The paper reveals five types of ethical tensions that can arise when doing research on family consumption. These tensions are addressed as display, positioning, emotional, practical and consent dilemmas, all of which have ethical implications. The findings unpack these dilemmas, showing empirical and reflexive accounts of the researchers as they engage in ethics in practice. Solutions and practical strategies for dealing with these ethical tensions are provided.

Despite the growing interest in interpretive family research, there is less attention on the ethical and emotional challenges researchers face when entering the family consumption scape. As researching families involves entering an intimate area of participants’ lives, the field may be replete with tensions that may affect the researcher. This paper brings the concept of micro-ethics to family marketing literature, showing how researchers can do ethics in practice. The paper draws on reflexive accounts of two researchers’ personal experiences, showing their emotional, practical, positioning and display challenges. It also provides practical strategies for researchers to deal with dilemmas in the field.

Demographic and health surveys in the Philippines have shown a rise in cohabitation among young people. This chapter aims to provide an in-depth sociological understanding of a more specific phenomenon called serial cohabitation – referring to the dissolution of current cohabitation and entering a new one, and the continuation of the cycle if the new one ends again. By developing the framework of undisplaying and re-displaying family from Janet Finch’s displaying family, this study posits that serial cohabiters experience a cycle of wanting to display an ideal family and having to undisplay every time the dissolution of the cohabiting relationship happens. This study demonstrates how serial cohabiters with children, in response to social stigma, exhibit resiliency toward stepfamily formation and committed sexual relationships. This chapter, therefore, conceptualizes “family acceptance” which refers to embracing the fluidity, reconfigurations, and “imperfections” of their newly formed family and “community acceptance” which covers the same affirmation from friends, neighbors, and extended relatives who are considered as relevant others by serial cohabiters. Family acceptance comes in three forms: first is the acceptance of/by children, second is the acceptance by the parents to the repeated stepfamily formation within their own homes, and third is the acceptance of the woman herself to the possibility that cohabitation is the “happy ever after.” This study argues that once these forms are achieved, serial cohabiters become more capable of undisplaying their previous family and displaying their new family.

It could be argued that the sign of ‘maturity’ of an academic paradigm is when it moves to some kind of integration with existing theories or re-engages with elements which may initially have been perceived as ‘dangerous’ or antithetical to the original demarcation of the area. As with the re-integration of feminism and reproduction, and disability and embodiment, so perhaps also for the social study of childhood and family research. The necessary political emphasis on the agency and voice of the child in the emerging social study of childhood research may well have been overstating the case (Seymour & McNamee, 2012) and ignoring significant structural and generational impediments in children’s relationships and interactions particularly in domestic spaces. To redress this, as occurred with feminist and disability studies, a contemporary standpoint is required which merges an emancipatory agentic approach to the subject of study with conceptual developments from the previously separated substantive area. This chapter will outline the development of the return of children ‘back into the families’ which has occurred in the last decade. It will show how approaches using family practices, personal lives, family display and generagency can be combined with privileging children’s perspectives and voices at home.

This purpose of this study is to examine the fluidity of family life which continues to attract attention. This is increasingly significant for the intergenerational relationship between adult children and their elderly parents. Using practice theory, the aims are to understand the role of food in elderly families and explore how family practices are maintained when elderly transition into care.

A phenomenological research approach was used as the authors sought to build an understanding of the social interactions between family and their lifeworld.

This study extends theory on the relationship between the elderly parent and their family and explores through practice theory how families performed their love, how altered routines and long standing rituals provided structure to the elderly relatives and how care practices were negotiated as the elderly relatives transitioned from independence to dependence and towards care. A theoretical framework is introduced that provides guidance for the transition stages and the areas for negotiation.

This research has implications for food manufacturers and marketers, as the demand for healthy food for the elderly is made more widely available, healthy and easy to prepare. The limitations of the research are due to the sample located in East Yorkshire only.

This research has implications for brand managers of food manufacturers and supermarkets that need to create product lines that target this segment by producing healthy, convenience food.

It is also important for health and social care policy as the authors seek to understand the role of food, family and community and how policy can be devised to provide stability in this transitional and uncertain lifestage.

This research extends the body of literature on food and the family by focussing on the elderly cared for and their family. The authors show how food can be construed as loving care, and using practice theory, a theoretical framework is developed that can explain the transitions and how the family negotiates the stages from independence to dependence.

Drawing on accounts from 22 lesbian couples with children conceived using donor insemination, this chapter explores how the respondents’ selection of parent terms, such as “momma” and “mommy,” influences day-to-day negotiation of parenthood. Term selection was affected by personal meanings respondents associated with terms as well as how they anticipated terms would be publicly received. Couples utilized personalized meanings associated with terms, such as terms used by families of origin or reflected in a parent’s cultural background, to help non-biological mothers feel comfortable and secure in their parenting identities. Some families also avoided terms that non-biological mothers associated too strongly with biological motherhood and felt uncomfortable using for themselves. Families also considered whether parent terms, and subsequently their relationships to their children, would be recognizable to strangers or cause undue scrutiny to their family. However, not all of the families selected terms that were easily decipherable by strangers and had to negotiate moments in which the personal meanings and public legibility of terms came into conflict. Overall, these accounts illustrate the importance of parent terms for lesbian-parent families, and other nontraditional families, as a family practice negotiating both deeply personal meanings surrounding parent–child relationships and how these terms, and the families, are normatively recognizable in public spaces.

‘Living together apart’ (LTA) is the practice of remaining in close domestic proximity following the ending of an intimate relationship. Using the conceptual framework of families in motion, in which families are re-envisioned as in flow, responding to all kinds of disruptions, chosen and unchosen, by ‘holding on’, adapting, adjusting and redirecting, this chapter explores the family practices involved in LTA. Using collaborative autoethnography – a research process in which the authors jointly explored data from their own lives – the authors were able to develop an understanding of LTA that was attentive to everyday life and the interconnections of time and space within families. The authors found that when families are living within less normative constellations, there are fewer scripts to rely upon and the potential for non-legitimacy and anxiety increases. The data also showed how deeply families are embedded in practices that are always in relation to an experienced past and imagined future. The importance of having a family story to tell that ‘works’ socially and emotionally, as well as having a home that can spatially encompass such new flows in family lives, is crucial.

This paper aims to examine the effects of socio-emotional wealth importance (SEWi) in family firms and family firm-specific HR practices, namely professionalization and bifurcation bias, on their entrepreneurial orientation (EO).

The paper surveyed 133 small and medium-sized family firms in the USA. The respondents were recruited through Prolific Academic.

When SEWi is low, a family firm becomes more similar to a non-family firm, thereby enjoying the benefits associated with EO. When SEWi is high, a family firm leverages the unique resources and capabilities specific to family firms. Moderate SEWi levels are associated with lower EO levels. Additionally, the results support the argument that professionalization (involving non-family managers, formalization and decentralization) fosters EO, while bifurcation bias hinders its development.

Unlike previous studies, this paper posits a non-linear, U-shaped relationship between SEWi and EO. It contributes to the field by empirically investigating the effects of professionalization and bifurcation bias on EO in family firms.