activities nested within practices in the family’s everyday life, applying the concept of taskscape, presented earlier (see section 4-4), can be beneficial. Doing so provides a theoretical shorthand for framing family members’ lives and the ensemble of everyday practices as profoundly interrelated, interwoven and interlocking in what is termed a family taskscape. Hence the family taskscape designates the relationally organised and coordinated “socio-temporal order[ing]” of practices in the family’s everyday life (Shove 2002: 5). The family taskscape is at any moment a frozen snapshot of the family’s socio-temporal ordering of practices in everyday life as a function of the constant labour and skilful effort performed by family members in achieving resonance amongst “the multiple rhythms of which the taskscape is itself constituted”
(Ingold 2000: 196). In this light, the family taskscape should be understood as an analytical holdall for family members’ continual practical engagements with each other and the world in weaving everyday family practices together, and as fundamental to the successful accomplishment of their everyday life.
Thus the family taskscape is the outcome of the family members’ collective attempt to interweave and make everyday practices fit a specific socio-temporal ordering that successfully makes possible the accomplishment of everyday life in accordance with the image they have of being a family and the practical, social and emotional conditions of family members. Yet this does not mean the family is always able to make or maintain a family taskscape exactly to their liking10. Indeed there is a difference between the ideal family on one side and actual family life on the other, or as John Gillis (1996) has put it, “the families we live by” versus “the families we live with”. This means the family has a normative sense of family, everyday life and how they should be enacted, but does so within the particular conditions present in family members’ lives. The family has, as Claus Lassen and Ole B. Jensen (2006) state, an idealised and normative understanding of the good life and how it might be organised and realised.
Helen Jarvis uses the term “coping strategy” as a link between the family’s normative understanding of the good life and family members’ actual way of living (1999:
227-8). Hence the term coping strategy “convey[s] the combined operation of both
10 Indeed there is often a gap between the family actual way of doing family and their idealised view on doing family. As will be explored in chapter 8 the family is constantly in the performance of everyday life negotiating the family organisation and course correcting how their sense of family is actualised.
purposeful and unconscious action” family members engage in when “confronted with changing events and circumstances throughout their life-course and in daily ways of living” (1999: 228). Furthermore, Lassen, in his use of the term, describes coping strategy as family members’ “meaningful and manageable handling of external demands and internal intentions” (2009: 178). Thus the family’s everyday practices are more or less reflexively organised and configured relative to external demands, such as the obligation to sustain social networks (Larsen, Urry and Axhausen 2006: 52) and the expectation to performing as an effective co-worker, a law-abiding citizen, a caring parent, a good neighbour and so on. There is reason to believe external demands and expectations contribute to what has been termed “time squeeze” or “harriedness”
as a condition in contemporary everyday family life (Southerton 2003, Jarvis 2005).
Studies show that families in western societies experience stress to such a degree that it has become the normal phenomenon in everyday life (Southerton, Shove and Warde 2001, Shove 2002, Southerton 2003, Hjorthol, Hovland Jakobsen and Ling 2006, Deding, Lausten and Andersen 2006, Arbejdslivskommissionen 2007). Eric Darier (1998) even suggests that a busy and harried everyday life has become symbolic of a
“full” or “valued” life. Despite technological advances that have eased much of our quotidian manual labour and enabled us to travel faster and farther more comfortably and reliably, and despite having more time (outside of work), in a quantitative sense, than we did 50 years ago, families are experiencing time pressure and feeling rushed (Shove 2002, Southerton 2003).
Importantly, following Lassen’s approach to coping strategy, everyday practices are concurrently shaped by internal intentions comprised of needs, wishes, dreams, desires and preferences in the family. There is always tension between the individual and the collective in the family. Personal needs, wishes, dreams and ideas of the good life are continuously being negotiated against the welfare of the family. Yet as Holdsworth (2013: 9) points out, such tensions or conflicts are usually overcome by negotiating a consensus or compromise that makes sense to both the individual family member and the family as a collective. For instance, a father may be able to have a career and lead a work life that involves travel, working late and being free of obligations at home, as long as there is a consensus within the family legitimising this as the way the family has agreed to organise its everyday life. Furthermore, negotiating a balance between work and family life also entails handling social and emotional needs for quality time, togetherness, care and intimacy that manifests in what Southerton (2003) terms “cold spots” in the family’s everyday life. Cold spots are “time devoted to interaction with significant others” necessary to “maintain caring interpersonal relationships” in the family (2003: 22). In contrast, “hot spots” contain multiple everyday practices such as work, shopping, and are organised in order to make room for cold spots. Hence negotiating a consensus on the family’s internal needs and wishes is not only achieved by balancing workload and working hours and negotiating who has the lead career, but also entails finding a balance that enables the sense of being a family through the making of cold and hot spots in everyday life, carving out time for being together and having shared experiences. The result of such coping strategies, in which the family
juggles external expectations and demands and internal compromises of needs and wishes, is the family’s actual way of living, a “co-ordinated set of practices” (Jarvis 1999: 228), which in this thesis will be referred to as the family taskscape.
4-8: MOBILITIES
What is everyday family mobility? Based upon the previous sections on everyday life and family, everyday family mobility can be understood as the common and regular occurrences of movement family members engage in when going back and forth to activities and doings in the quotidian. Turning to family theory, everyday family mobility can be understood as a type of family practice (Morgan 2011). While everyday life and family provide necessary context for acquiring an understanding of everyday family mobility, they convey little of the phenomenon of mobility itself.
Turning to this, the two remaining sections in the chapter will focus on conceptualising mobility and, in particular, how this can be done through the concept of mobility practice.
As already touched upon in the introduction, one of the key claims in the mobilities turn is that mobility and mobility practices are much more than a utilitarian phenomenon.
Mobilities research acknowledges the purely rational and economic approach to conceptualising mobility and its ability to provide some insight into understanding everyday mobility, but at the same time mobilities scholars advocate moving beyond such limited and reductive understandings and approaching mobility as a much more complex and multi-faceted object of study (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, Cresswell 2006, Urry 2007, Adey 2010, Jensen 2013, Adey et al. 2014, Sheller 2014).
Hence a common trait of the mobilities turn is the heightened analytical focus on the material, affective, emotional, social and embodied dimensions of mobility, which in turn elucidate mobility not only as an instrumental but also as a social, spatial and emotional phenomenon. Indeed the mobilities turn has opened and broadened the understanding of mobility, and in doing so engendered both a new multi-faceted object of study and a theoretical frame of inquiry (Büscher and Urry 2009). The research agenda of mobilities studies ranges from investigating the genesis, experiences and implications of the “big mobilities” of large-scale movements of people, objects and goods across the globe to investigating the “little mobilities” of local movements in everyday life (Adey 2010: 7-12).
John Urry, one of the key academics in the mobilities turn, conceptualises mobilities (always plural) as corporeal movement intertwined with physical movement of objects, imaginary travel, virtual travel and communicative travel in complex socio-technical processes (Urry 2007: 59). According to this conception, the family’s everyday life encompasses a meshing of the modes of mobilities that take part in the shaping of everyday life (Larsen, Urry and Axhausen 2006). Prior to any corporeal movement, family members “imagine” (Watts 2008) their destinations and journeys.
Everyday family mobility is performed in transport modes, and often objects such as bags, money, mobile phones and so on travel alongside (Hui 2012, 2013). Indeed objects such as mobile phones are frequently used both inside and outside mobility performances to communicate and socialise with others (Ling 2004), coordinate and organise everyday life (Larsen, Urry and Axhausen 2006, Schwanen 2008) and to virtually access social networks, information, wayfinding, timetables and other online resources at almost any moment. However, as Kellerman (2012: 17) notes, differentiation among imaginative, virtual and communicative modes of mobilities has lost some of its practical meaning in the increased technological convergence of high-speed wireless Internet access, smart phones, the laptop and television. Nonetheless, this image resonates with Adey as he reminds us that “mobility is never singular but always plural … never one but necessarily many” (2010: 18). Although there are great divides in how families in everyday life assemble these modes of mobilities and in inequality in ease of accessibility and appropriation, all five modes of mobilities are usually present in the family’s life (Ohnmacht, Maksim and Bergman 2009: chapter 1) . Furthermore, as will be further elaborated shortly, such mobilities in everyday life are facilitated and shaped by material environments and technical systems of (complex) physical infrastructures of roads, parking lots, sidewalks, railway tracks, stations, terminals, landing paths, harbours, cables, satellites, transmitters etc. (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, Sheller and Urry 2006, Urry 2007).
MOTILITY AND UNSEEN MOBILITY IN THE FAMILY
Focusing on everyday life in the family, everyday mobility is not only materially organised and enabled by physical infrastructures and transport systems, but is also socially organised and facilitated (and sometimes restricted) by family members’
differentiated mobility potentials. The variations among family members’ mobility capacities can be conceptualised through what Vincent Kaufmann (2002: 37) terms
“motility”. Motility is the individual’s complete potential within a field of mobility, taking into consideration both objective conditions in terms of access and personal capabilities in terms of competencies and skills, and the person’s subjective attitude towards the available mobility options in terms of appropriation. In the words of Kaufmann, motility is “comprised of all the factors that define a person’s capacity to be mobile11” (2002: 38). Hence the concept of motility holds some interest in relation to the research ambition of this study, especially the notion of skill as a key aspect in the creation of elasticity (see chapter 8). Additionally, the concept of motility can be a framework for understanding the prerequisites for family mobility and the unequal distribution of mobility capacity in the family. However, while acknowledging the importance of taking into consideration the potential or capacity of being mobile when studying everyday family mobility, this study emphasises the actualised mobility, the family members embodied performances of mobility and what effects they produce.
11 See Kellermann (2012: 57-8) for an overview of the multiple definitions of motility.
Nonetheless, in the family, motility is often unevenly distributed amongst family members, as they hold varying levels of mobility knowledge, skills and competencies and have unequal access to the family’s mobility resources, which are both limited and shared. As Katharina Manderscheid argues, “mobilities and social inequalities are complexly interwoven” (2009: 27), and therefore, in order to understand everyday family mobility and family members’ relational mobility practices, it is important to consider the individual family member’s mobility in relation to the potential mobility or motility amongst other family members. The differentiated levels of motility in the family are both a basic condition that family members are forced to cope with and a resource for coping. Consequently, for individual family members, especially children, everyday mobility is often interwoven in mobile constellations with family members or significant others to compensate for uneven levels of motility.
The accomplishment of everyday life in the family entails helping each other and making sacrifices for the welfare of the family, which often manifests as various shows of forced mobility and immobility. Through this interrelatedness, everyday family mobility holds ambivalence, as it may at times be felt as a burden and at other times evoke a sense of family (Fotel 2007). Hence, as Malene Freudendal-Pedersen (2007, 2009) shows, immobility and mobility are closely intertwined, and mobility is always related to the “tension between freedom and unfreedom” (2009: 6). To understand this complex relationality characterising family mobility, Holdsworth (2013) advocates approaching everyday family mobility not only by paying attention to the social relations of the singular moving subjects, but by remaining sensitive to multi-relationality in the plurality of family members (and significant others) who are implicated and affected in the performance of family mobility. Moreover, this approach accentuates the asymmetrical power hierarchies and inequalities among family members, and consequently also considers how family members’ mobility and immobility are profoundly intertwined (Mikkelsen and Christensen 2009, Holdsworth 2013: 28). Indeed there is a lot of unseen mobility in the family. One family member being mobile in a specific time and space may in less visible ways force other family members or significant others to be mobile or immobile. Hanne Louise Jensen (2013) terms them “mobility helpers”. Family mobility, whether incited by obligations, expectations, sense of duty, care or affection, is not always an “act of choice, and the degree to which the mobile subject is autonomous will vary greatly” (Holdsworth 2013: 29). Recalling the theories of the relational family (in section 4-5), it will be argued throughout the thesis (in particular in chapter 8) that we cannot understand everyday family mobility without simultaneously paying attention to its embeddedness in the social context of the family.