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Individualisation theory misrepresents and romanticises the nature of agency as a primarily discursive and reflexive process where people freely create their personal lives in an open social world divorced from tradition. But empirically we find that people usually make decisions about their personal lives pragmatically, bounded by circumstances and in connection with other people, not only relationally but also institutionally. This pragmatism is often non-reflexive, habitual and routinised, even unconscious. Agents draw on existing traditions - styles of thinking, sanctioned social relationships, institutions, the presumptions of particular social groups and places, lived law and social norms - to 'patch' or 'piece together' responses to changing situations. Often it is institutions that 'do the thinking'. People try to both conserve social energy and seek social legitimation in this adaption process, a process which can lead to a 're-serving' of tradition even as institutional leakage transfers meanings from past to present, and vice versa. But this process of bricolage will always be socially contested and socially uneven. In this way bricolage describes how people actually link structure and agency through their actions, and can provide a framework for empirical research on doing family.

Public discourse in Britain sees teenage motherhood as a pernicious social problem where mothers, their children and society generally will all suffer. Fathers are seen as feckless. This is reflected in New Labour's teenage pregnancy strategy, which understands teenage parents as victims of ignorance, mis-information, and low expectations. But a review of the research evidence finds that the age at which pregnancy occurs has little effect on social outcomes. Many teenage mothers describe how motherhood makes them feel stronger, and marks a change for the better. Many fathers seek to remain connected with their children. For both, parenting seems to provide an impetus to take up education, training and employment. Teenage parenting may be more of an opportunity than a catastrophe, and often makes sense in the life worlds inhabited by young mothers. The paper ends by asking how we can explain this yawning gulf between the experience of teenage parenting and policy, and concludes that this largely rests on assumptions of rational choice, in turn creating a `rationality mistake'.

This paper outlines the development EU policy discourse on 'the reconciliation of work and family life'. This imposes a policy disjuncture on New Labour, for, while the British government may be ideologically more attracted to the liberal US model of 'flexible' labour, it is bound by EU law to implement a more corporatist gender equality model. The paper notes how themes of economic competition, democratisation, and protecting gender contracts emerged at the foundation EU gender policy. It traces these themes into an 'equal opportunities at work' discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and, with the increasing importance of the 'demographic time bomb' discourse and of Scandinavian style gender equality, into discourses stressing the 'reconciliation of paid work with family life' and gender mainstreaming. The paper ends by addressing the 'half-empty or half-full' assessments of EU gender policy.

This article describes and evaluates three different strands of theorizing European gender systems on a comparative basis. Each strand is associated with a particular concep tual, empirical and disciplinary context. The first strand, 'gendered welfare modelling' is centred around feminist critiques of compara tive social policy and seeks to add gender into the theorization of state welfare regimes. The second strand, 'differentiated patriarchy' is more sociological in origin and attempts to de velop the concept of patriarchy to take account of geographical differences. The final strand, developed in the context of feminist critiques of Scandinavian political science and social history, attempts to delineate different 'gender contracts' on what men and women are, think, expect and do. The paper criticizes all these theorizations for neglecting regional and local processes of gender differentiation, and con cludes that a combination of the 'differentiated patriarchy' and 'gender contract' strands hold the greater promise for accounting for geo graphical difference in systems of gender in equality.

This book presents a new approach to understanding contemporary personal life, taking account of how people build their lives through a bricolage of 'tradition' and 'modern'. The authors examine how tradition is used and adapted, invented and re-invented; how meaning can leak from past to present; the ways in which people's agencies differ as they make decisions; and the process of bricolage in making new arrangements. These themes are illustrated through a variety of case studies, ranging from personal life in the 1950s, young women and marriage, the rise of cohabitation, female name change, living apart together, and creating weddings. Centrally the authors emphasise the re-traditionalisation involved in de-traditionalisation and the connectedness involved in individualised processes of relationship change. 'Reinventing Couples' will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including sociology, social work and social policy

This book presents a new approach to understanding contemporary personal life, taking account of how people build their lives through a bricolage of 'tradition' and 'modern'. The authors examine how tradition is used and adapted, invented and re-invented; how meaning can leak from past to present; the ways in which people's agencies differ as they make decisions; and the process of bricolage in making new arrangements. These themes are illustrated through a variety of case studies, ranging from personal life in the 1950s, young women and marriage, the rise of cohabitation, female name change, living apart together, and creating weddings. Centrally the authors emphasise the re-traditionalisation involved in de-traditionalisation and the connectedness involved in individualised processes of relationship change. Reinventing Couples will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including sociology, social work and social policy.