(I Can't Get no) Satisfaction

Both these books are stimulating analyses of the relationship between employment and personal identity in the new, anxious age of late, 'flexibilised' industrial modernity. Both bring together the sociology of work, the sociology of the family and psychology (principally psychoanalysis): three disciplines whose avoidance of each other is mutually impoverishing. They ask grand questions which pulls us away from too 'applied' a perspective and offer intriguing theoretical insights, as well as more particular delights such as Pahl's impish appendix on method. But, like much contemporary sociology, I find they read uncannily like Cosmopolitan at times, in both their focus on the self, identity, and authenticity, and the analysis which is offered. Is it I who has a problem, doctor, or is it the discipline? Through ten case studies (eight men, two women) and, I suspect, some autobiographical reflection, Pahl examines whether worldly success in employment (exemplified by Thatcherism) provides a secure source of identity or whether that very search for identity results from the insecurities of modernity. In traditional society (where identity was less a concern than 'the appalling hazards of everyday life' (119)) gender, place and class provided existentially necessary 'roots' and the fundamentals of identity: 'the need to know who we are' (120), but individualisation has destroyed this. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that as individualisation has developed, the central contradiction of industrialism has moved from class conflict to that 'between the demands of the labour market and the demands of relationships' (6). This is because industrialism requires an emotional division of labour in the family (to produce instrumental, employment obsessed men and nurturant women who sustain them) which depends on the maintenance of unequal, ascriptive identities, while at the same time indivi dualisation destroys the maintenance of such gender ascription. It puts love and democratised personal relationships at the centre of people's identities but (for example through the requirement of geographical labour mobility) frustrates their attempts to realise it. As the back cover blurb puts it: 'The struggle to harmonize family and career, love and marriage, new motherhood and fatherhood, has today replaced class struggle.' Pahl's findings are reassuringly mixed: some respondents are hopeless neurotic workaholics; some read novels and do a three-hour, satisfying day. He avoids over-simplistic conclusions, but masculine instrumentalism, as analysed by Dinnerstein (1987) and Chodorow (1978), looms large and he draws on Karen

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• The Reproduction of Mothering

  Nancy J Chodorow, Nancy Chodorow et al.•Reproduction of Mothering•1978

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• The Importance of Disappointment

  Ian Craib•Importance of Disappointment•2002

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• Mothering Psychoanalysis

  Open Access•Adria F Schwartz•Psychology of Women Quarterly•1993

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