Revisiting the Household for Housing Research

Abstract

Households are routinely adopted as units of analysis in housing-related research. The convergence of intensifying housing commodification with revisions to the social contract in Anglophone liberal market-based economies presents a salient juncture to revisit and reconsider the household, especially given rising and unequivocal expectations that contemporary households will operate as private “shock absorbers”. This article reviews conceptualizations and theoretical perspectives on households and draws attention to several “black box” issues. It argues that a relational perspective offers under-exploited opportunities to unlock and refine accounts of the impacts of this current convergence of pressures on households by foregrounding empirically important (shifts in) connections and (social) processes occurring within and between households, as well as across and between the “household sector” and other institutions. It specifies several strands of housing-related research where expanding debates in this way may be particularly productive.

Keywords:

• Households
• housing
• relationality
• political economy

Notes

1. Relational sociologist Charles Tilly (2005, 14) further distinguished within substantialist approaches a “systemic” approach from a dispositional account. The “systematic” approach posited “a coherent, self-sustaining entity such as [...] a community, an organization a household” [...and explained] “events inside that entity by their location within the entity as a whole”. A dispositional account meanwhile also assumed “coherent entities” (although usually individuals), “but explain the actions of those entities by means of their orientations just before the point of action”, thereby usually foregrounding “motives, decision logics, emotions, and cultural templates”.

2. In Welsh’s account of “forced” parental cohabitation, family ties were seen to provide no antidote since impunity from domination is not guaranteed by ties of family. As Welsh (2018, 11) argued, this is because it is not the “actual constraint of action, but the potential constraint of action” that is significant:

… it is living in this condition of unfreedom born of dependence, and the perpetual uncertainty over the arbitrary will of another overriding one’s own at any instant, that drives dependent individuals inexorably into the fear, anxiety and “slavishness” that is inevitable under such conditions.

This is important, whilst we might envisage this “arbitrary power” between a “carer” and “cared for”, as restricted to “matters within that household alone”, as Welsh (2018, 15) asserts using the example of delayed youth exits from the family home: “the fact that the individual youth is forced to be there by the politically contingent and circumstantial forces of an omnipresent capitalist society… means that there is little or no option to exit from that micro fief of arbitrary power”.