Suchergebnisse

The traditional male breadwinner model, where men are responsible for economic provision while women are responsible for the home, is in decline across the western world as women are increasingly taking up paid employment. However, the meaning of breadwinning in the context of people's everyday family lives has received little academic attention. Based on qualitative interviews, this article analyses how the adult children of Pakistani immigrants in Norway understand and justify women's employment, with particular attention to how the economic aspect of women's work is conceptualised. The study finds that women's employment is accorded distinctively different meaning, and it is argued that the key distinctions are captured in two analytical dimensions: (1) the extent to which the economic contribution of women's work is recognised; and (2) the ideal gender division of participation in paid work. The male breadwinner ideal is more explicitly challenged along the second dimension, than the first.

Across Europe, children of low-educated migrants are entering high-status occupations. While the research literature has accounted for the determinants of this social mobility, few studies have explored how social mobility affects the lives of second-generation immigrant men and women in different ways. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 62 descendants of migrants in high-status occupations in Norway, this article asks how second-generation women and men experience their gendered opportunities and constraints after achieving upward social mobility. The analyses show how social mobility brings the second generation into social milieus where their majority Norwegian colleagues become their most relevant references for how to do work and family. Both the second-generation women and men share a strong dedication to work, however, while this requires the women to challenge gender-complementary expectations, the men largely rely on gender-complementary arrangements. The analyses thus suggest that social mobility changes the lives of women more than those of men.

A large body of work has demonstrated the substantial intergenerational mobility experienced by children of immigrants, yet the institutional determinants of incorporation are poorly understood. Building on insights from neo-classical assimilation theory, this article analyzes in-depth interviews with 62 high-achieving children of labor immigrants from Pakistan, Turkey, India, and Morocco and investigates how they maneuvered through Norway's educational system and reached their current positions as medical doctors, lawyers, and business professionals. We show that these children of immigrants from low-income households capitalized on a series of institutional opportunity structures provided by Norway's egalitarian welfare state, such as a school system with high standardization and low stratification, free higher education, and a cultural and institutional context that supports women's employment. In line with neo-classical assimilation theory, we argue that the specific institutional structures and cultural beliefs in the Norwegian context shape the strategies and forms of adaptation chosen by ethnic minority groups. However, our analyses suggest the need for careful consideration of how such strategies and adaptations vary across national contexts.