Chapter 8 - Synthesis: overview and discussion
199
freely from social structures, but often have subtle and complex origins in
childhood.
Moreover, in the qualitative study, there were only few parental anti-examples
– it appears relatively rare that mothers feel they needed to resist parental
expectations, values and norms, both implicit and explicit. This is interesting in
itself, and might express a relatively stable culture within the Netherlands since
the 1970s and 1980s, where despite the obvious
increase in the employment
activity of current mothers, there seems to exist continuity and conformity
between generations of current mothers and their parents. Presumably the parents
(especially the mothers) of the respondents of this study already paved the way
for their daughters, which then opened alternative scripts of behaviour to the
traditional stay-at-home option once their daughter became a mother herself. This
clearly differed from their own upbringings during the 1950s and 1960s, which
were deeply implicated within the figuration ideal of “harmonious inequality’,
since the ideal of women as housewives and men as breadwinners had by then
reached its most glorious days. For the mothers of the respondents who
themselves were raised during this period, the withering
away of the ideal of
being a housewife had not yet led to new ideals or guidance for behaviour. And
thus their trials of new behaviour would have been automatically and more often
acting against their parents’ norms, values and attitudes.
Nonetheless, there might
also be a selection effect. Daughters who have ‘chosen’ the opposite behaviour of
their own parents might have not become parents at all, and therefore they were
not included in this research. Whatever the reason may be, the association with
several parental verbal and mental codes shows that part of mothers’ gender
values and ideal family lives maintains some stability throughout the course of
their life, and that these do not easily adapt to changing circumstances. Part of the
individual has become what is transmitted by significant others (Berger and
Luckmann, 1967, p.152; Handel, 2006, p.15; Mead, 1934).
8.5
A mother endorses more egalitarian values and attitudes if she
has perceived the professional and career support of
significant others
Mothers do not continue to live in one normative social system.
As their lives go
on, they interact with different social settings or circles, and each circle has its
own normative and cultural system, with its own specific rules, norms and values.
This study’s particular interest is the character of transitions from primary to
secondary socialization. Is this process characterised by reproduction and re-
enforcement, or by recreation? Handel (2006) concluded that there is still no
satisfactory explanation for the transitional process of primary socialization to
adult socialization (p.18). According to Berger and Luckmann (1967), within
secondary socialization, there is always a problem of consistency between the
original and new internalizations when individuals
are confronted with new
alternative realities and potential identities that appear as subjective options
Socialized Choices - Labour Market Behaviour of Dutch Mothers
200
(p.160). People tend to re-enforce their values and attitudes by clinging to self-
affirming relationships (referring to the process of self-selection) rather than
subject themselves to new subjective normative realities. Others scholars instead
argue that people try to establish throughout their lives a new acceptable position
for themselves, expressing a less deterministic view of the effect of primary
socialization (Bandura, 1977, p.48; Eagle, 1988; Handel, 2006).
This study aims at revealing whether mothers tend to sustain their (acquired)
attitudes through secondary social relations by creating and recreating the
familiar, or whether they adapt their attitudes when confronted with new models
of behaviour or supportive others. Nonetheless, clearly a limiting frame of this
examination is the cross-sectional research design of this study. Mothers were
invited to look back upon their lives, while I tried to reconstruct, using qualitative
and quantitative research methods, patterns in the possible influences of
significant others on their diverse values and attitudes. For this reason, I have
chosen to focus on mothers’ own perceived support of significant others towards
their professional choices and career ambitions. This
theoretical choice is also
induced by the socialization theory of Berger and Luckmann (1967), the theory of
planned behaviour (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1991, 2005) and the social learning
theory of Bandura (1977), as well as by different partial theoretical notions
(Grube and Morgan, 1990; Tiemeijer et al., 2009, p.142). These theories all
emphasise that the perceived approval of significant others towards specific
behaviour will have a positive impact on people’s own values and attitudes
towards the behaviour of interest.
Before I elaborate and compare the qualitative findings and quantitative
results with respect to the process of secondary socialization, some initial
remarks
can be made here. A disadvantage of the qualitative study is that it is impossible
to draw representative conclusions about the strength of social influential
processes. We can only detect some indications of mechanisms or patterns that
emerge from the research material. Yet, an advantage of the qualitative study is
that we can listen to mothers’ labour market biographies and try to disclose
consistent and contradictory patterns within their narratives especially in relation
to their social relational contexts and job relevant choices. In this way I could
display something about the supposed continuity between primary and secondary
socialization (Berger
and Luckmann, 1967). Whereas, with the quantitative
analysis, I could shed some light on the statistical representativeness of the
disclosed mechanisms.
Teachers
The qualitative findings revealed that in general, mothers could not remember any
teachers who stimulated or supported them in choosing a certain professional
direction. Full-time home-makers in particular appeared rather negative about
their received guidance at (high) school. Only a few interviewees described how
teachers at school had encouraged them to consider their working life – stories