Gendered capital: emotional capital and mothers’ care work in education

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the inequalities experienced by mothers in the performance of educational care work for their children. It is argued that the caring work carried out by mothers at transfer to second-level schooling is shaped by their ability to activate the significant resource of emotional capital; a gendered resource involving emotional skills, knowledge and experiences. Drawing on an in-depth study of mothers' routines of care, it is suggested that the possession of emotional capital subjects mothers to a normative order of care. Moreover, in exploring the idiosyncratic differences between mothers' capacities to activate emotional capital it is argued that the activation of this care resource is facilitated in the context of solidary relationships but also by mothers' access to other capitals. It is concluded that in order to tackle care inequalities those working in education need to recognise the significance of emotional resources, and need to challenge traditional codes of practice and policies around 'parental' involvement. Keywords: emotional capital; solidary relationships, moral imperative to careIntroduction Currently, in the West, political and economic climates have required that public policies including educational policy and practice be subject to often unquestioned criteria of rationality, measurability and performativity with little consideration for the affective/emotional context of life (Baker et al. 2004). This paper seeks to explore the relations of production of what has been regarded as the softer, non-productive and 'messier' aspects of social life (Delphy and Leonard 1992;Tavris 1993). It is concerned with the domain of the emotions and the reality of caring relations in the educational field. The paper explores the educational work mothers carry out in caring for their children at the transfer from first-level to second-level education. It concentrates on the emotional work of mothers rather than 'parents' as a considerable body of research has indicated that mothers are primary education workers in ways that men traditionally are not

Too Much of a Good Thing? Gender, ‘Concerted Cultivation’ and Unequal Achievement in Primary Education

“…Irish research to date has highlighted the key role of mothers in the education and career choice of their children (O'Hara 1998;McCoy et al 2006;O'Brien 2007O'Brien , 2008 with relatively less emphasis on how child rearing goals and parenting styles vary according to gender. Recent research in the Irish context suggests the lack of any significant relationships for child gender in relation to either child or parent behaviour 1 (Cheevers et al 2010;Halpenny et al 2010).…”

Schooling responses to youth crime: building emotional capital

“…These attributes tend to be cast in terms of weaknesses or deficiencies in the student. (136) This paper seeks to move beyond individualistic accounts using the concept of emotional capital, which is drawn from the sociology of education, cultural studies and interdisciplinary studies on care (O'Brien 2008). It is a useful framework because it captures what at first looks like a disparate set of practices.…”

“…Emotional capital is generally understood as confined within the bounds of affective relationships of family and friends and encompasses the emotional resources you hand on to those you care about (Allatt 1993, 143). It is also part of social capital in the form of strong social bonds, networks of small groups, and norms of reciprocity: the shared trust, safety and reciprocity that promotes involvement and commitment (McGrath and van Buskirk 1996, 1) and it is a form of gendered knowledge (Reay 1998;O'Brien 2008).…”

Theorizing emotional capital

“…For her, women's role in the family supplies them with more emotional capital than men. Following this logic, emotional capital has been developed and applied primarily to studies of education and family (Colley 2006;Gillies 2006;Nixon 2011;O'Brien 2008;Reay 2000Reay , 2004Reid 2009;Zemblyas 2007), though research in the sociology of occupations has begun to use the concept (Cahill 1999;Schweingruber and Berns 2005), particularly in healthcare (Erickson and Stacey 2013;Husso and Hirvonen 2012;Stacey 2011;Virkki 2007). Below I outline three conceptual limitations in this prior work on emotional capital: (1) the concept has been inconsistently linked to gender, (2) its use often conflates capital with practice, and (3) it has been inconsistently theorized as static or dynamic over time.…”