Practice exam question: Inside the black box of the family

Practice exam question: Explain why policy makers should invest more time in understanding processes internal to the family.

Hmm, can start here with Okin's notion of justice, and her contention that underlying all the inequalites specifically affecting women is the unequal distribution of unpaid labour in teh household. And Hobson's contention that the family is a site of great inequality, of a sort which doesn't mirror societal inequality. They should invest more time in understanding it because we have limited understanding of it - i'll discuss the theories of household bargaining that we have. But mainly they should invest more time in understanding it because, as feminist theorists observe, social policy is both shaped by and shaping of what goes on within the so-called black box of the family. And social policy understanding has always been skewed towards the public sphere, but as Hobson argues, the policy divide between public and private is arbitrary, ideological, and not gender neutral. Because women take on more of the caring duties within the family and tend to have weaker bargaining positions economically, policy which does not seek to peer into the black box is policy that tacitly supports, approves of and furthers the current gender gap.

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As taylor-Gooby has argued, the home is the site of the majority of welfare in society. Why should it not be investigated and understood.Traditionally policy makers have been far more interested in the public domain than in the private world of the family. Reasons include the difficulty of forming policy that is meant to play out within the household as compared to in public institutions such as schools or workplaces (Waldfogel), as well as the notion that the public private divide is one that should not be crossed. Hobson argues that this notion is ideological and gendered. More importantly, though, have been tacit, gendered assumptions about unpaid labour and women's roles in teh household. In the early days fo the welfare state, those assumptions were not so tacit. Beveridge argued, eg, that women's role was in the home, enabling her husband to produce the labour on which the nation depended. Beveridge valourised this womanly role, calling it all important. However, Hobson points out that resources are distributed unfairly within families.

Current thinking, particularly by conservatives, often harkens back to Beverdige's day, particularly the idealised 1950s of the nuclear family and family wage. However, what is idealised is not necessarily just. For example, Allan Bloom in the US cites this model of the family - man as worker, woman as carer - as the ideal model. Sandel does as well, quoting Ruskin's view of the family as 'the place of peace' and the shelter from 'all terror, doubt and division'. This image of the family as a haven from the woes of the world is highly gendered: here males escape the slings and arrows of the public world - but are women faced with the slings and arrows of the private one? Hobson, like many feminist scholars, argues that the family is the site of great inequality for women, and finds that inequality for women does not mirror inequality in societies as a whole - that is, the two are separate functions, and must be studied separately. Within the household, she argues, it is essential to understand the role of voice and exit within the household. Hirschmann, coiner of the concept, felt that loyalty was the key component of intra-household bargaining, but feminist scholars have argued that without understanding the gendered weakness of voice and exit for women, we cannot understand ineuqality within the household. Okin argues that to understand the the ineuqality that women suffer from in the world, we must look into the black box of the family, because, as she says, all inequality specific to females springs from the unfair division of unpaid labour.

One of the first economists to peer into the black box of the family was Gary Becker, whose Treatise on the Family advanced the New Home Economics. Much like those who idealise the nuclear family of the 1950s, Becker's NHE postulated that the family was a single unit with shared interests, working together rationally to achieve shared aims. As Sen argues, Becker waved away conflict within the family. Instead, Becker substituted altruism on the part of the head of household (the male), and a shared utility function within it. Working from these assumptions, Becker argued that families are economically rational actors, which function best when the males and females specialise in different types of work: paid work in the public sphere for men, unpaid work in the private sphere for women.

Not surprisingly, many scholars have been extremely critical of the NHE. Bergman, pointing to Becker's "proof" that polygamous marriages were more beneficial to women than monogamous ones (the former showed better utility curves), called his theories preposterous. If becker was to be judged by teh simplicity of his theorem, he was a success, she said, but if he were to be judged by its capacity to actually explain the phenomenon it purported to explain, he was a completel failure. Worse than this, by arguing that fheads of household are inherently benevolent and that families are inherently good for everyone in them, Becker's message for policy was that intervention in the internal processes of the familly was at best misguided and at worst deleterious to welfare.

A more enlightening approach to intra-household dynamics can be found in cooperative bargaining models, such as that put forth by Nash. In these models, several improvements are made over the unitary or complementary model offered by the NHE. There is no single unitary utility function, instead, and more inkeeping with the real world, household members have different, often conflicting interests, despite their strong affection for each other. In order to deal with these conflicts, each household member has bargaining power, which is shaped by their access to external resources. When in conflict, the key is each household member's threat point or fallback position - that is, their estimation of the utility or quality of life they will have if cooperation breaks down. In effect, it is their estimation of the outcome of exit. For example, a mother might judge that it is better to stay in an unhappy relationship because she knows that divorce tends to financially penalise women; a father, knowing that divorce tends to result in a better economic position for men, might have a different fallback position. On the other hand, the father's desire to not lose his children will affect his fallback position. While Nash's framework was better than Becker's it lacked dynamism, something that has been added later via an understanding of the first mover advantage: that is, decisions made now can affect the later decision-making process. For example, by discouraging his wife from working, a husband can reduce her chance of working in the future, giving him greater bargaining power within the relationship. Cooperative bargaining models also benefited from understanding that conflict can exist within collusion: cooperative solutions may be more beneficial to one player than the other.

While cooperative bargaining models utilise players' estimations of the results of exit, they make the mistake of assuming that each player has equal power of exit. As Sen argues, this is often not hte case: there is assymetry of exit, and thus assymetry of voice. This can come about through a variety of reasons, eg internalised beliefs by women that they should put first not their own well-being, but the well-being of children or husband. As one example, it has been found that in low income households where the woman controls the money, she tends to ensure that her male partner gets more of it than she does; the reverse is not true when the male controls it. Sen argues that self-interest is often socially determined, and that there are perceived interest responses and perceived contribution responses: that is, when there is collusion, if one perceives one's own self-interest as less important than that of others, one is likely to benefit less from the cooperative solution. With perceived contribution, the person perceived to make the biggest contribution is likely to get the best cooperative result. Perceived self-interest is a highly gendered issue, as women are socialised to put others' needs before their own. Sen discusses India, but this is also the case in, eg, the US, where Douglas documents the rise of the New Mom-ism: an attempt to valourise women's role as a carer first and an individual second.

Katz argues that non-cooperative bargaining models give a stronger understanding of household power dynamics than any other. These models take account of assymetry of information within the relationship, as well as enforcement problems and inefficiency. With regard to enforcement problems, an excellent examples can be found in Hichschild's Second Shift, where workign mother after working mothers complains that they feel forced to nag their husbands into contributing equally to unpaid labour, but this is a form of enforcement that is both uneffective and highly unpleasant for both parties. With regard to efficiency, Becker assumed that household decisions were inevitably based on maximising overal utility, but there is extensive evidence of the willingness to reduce household efficiency in order to maximise individual power. The most common example would be when a husband discourages or refuses to allow his wife to work, despite need for the money. Another example might be in terms of care, when mothers refuse to allow fathers to help as much as they would like, in an effort to maintain a "caring superiority" or stronger relationship with the child.

These means of looking at economic processes internal to the family give us varying degrees of insight into household dynamics, and it is only by understanding such dynamics that we can get a fuller picture of welfare as a whole, particularly for women. Hobson, for instance, argues that women's economic dependence within the family is key to perpetuating the weak bargaining position of women in the paid labour market. Hobson finds that decision making wiht families is linked to earning power outside of it, and notes that woman's breadwinner status is correlated wtih better houshold division of labour. The household must thus be seen not as a unitary body but as a site of negotiation, in which econoimc power and gender play key roles. And whereas for Hirschmann the family was like a merger of two firms, Hobson points out that it tends to be the merger of two firms of markedly different levels of power. Hobson's analysis of economic dependency with the household can shed new light on inequality. For example, she finds that in Germany and the Netherlands, states with relatively low inequality, inequality between men and women within households is high. As "women's economic dependency within the family is both directly and indirectly built into social policy in welfare states", it is only through understanding that dependency within the household that we can improve the welfare of women.