Partings and Reunions

Abstract

An earlier generation of sociologists would have looked at the oil industry in the context of a body of work concerned with ‘extreme occupations’. Much of that material was predicated upon the notion of a radical separation of home and work, apparently visible in the lives of fishermen (Tunstall, 1962), lorry drivers (Hollowell, 1968), miners (Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, 1969) and others. This separation allowed the work-place to become the focus of attention, reducing family, kinship and community to the level of dependent variables. As we have already seen (pp. 12–19) such a distinction often serves to mask the complex interrelationships between work and family and is likely to obscure important gender differences with shape experiences in the two arenas. A growing body of writing has therefore begun to examine the work/family nexus and the concept of incorporation (Callan and Ardener, 1984) has been especially helpful in revealing the variety of ways in which women may be co-opted as unpaid collaborators in their husbands’ paid employment. Whilst occupations such as the ministry, general practice or those in which the worker is self-employed provide obvious examples of this phenomenon (Finch, 1983), some of the very jobs which were once classified as ‘extreme’ in character also merit attention.

The research reported in this paper was financed by a grant from the Oil Panel of the SSRC (now ESRC).