Population ageing and conjunctural action

One of the most promising conceptual and empirical breakthroughs to emerge from combined anthropological and demographic thinking is the theory of conjunctural action. Developed in a sequence of articles and books by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, this approach provides an effective alternative to rationalist decision-making models that have prevailed in population studies over the whole post-War period. Observation and analysis of vital conjunctures show how social, economic, and political differences between groups in society are manifested in individual agency at specific points across the life course, and how people’s behaviour in this way differentiates the many subpopulations making up a society. The approach thus addresses directly two major shortcomings in population research: the need to explain mechanisms underlying the evolution of population heterogeneity, and the dynamics that entrench inequalities. To date, the study of conjunctural action has been addressed chiefly to fertility. In this chapter, we explore how health issues facing older people, their families, and communities are illuminated by this approach, drawing on multi-site, longitudinal ethnographic and demographic research in Indonesia. We begin with the nature of uncertainty and vulnerability at older ages, and how it can be modelled across the life course. This leads to consideration of the dynamic relation between individual action and subpopulation memberships, and how it articulates the compositional demography of status, network, ethnic, and related subpopulation memberships.

Stability and Change in Motherhood Status and Fertility Problem Identification: Implications for Changes in Self-Esteem

Because motherhood is a valued status, the life course perspective and the theory of conjunctural action suggest the following hypotheses: for women in the United States, gaining the valued identity “mother” should lead to an increase in self-esteem, while identification with a fertility problem identity should lead to a decrease in self-esteem. Using the nationally representative two-wave National Survey of Fertility Barriers (NSFB), we conducted change-score analysis with chained multiple imputation (MICE) to model attrition. We compared changes in self-esteem by change and stability in motherhood and self-identified fertility problem status among women who initially had no children. Results provide support for the hypotheses. All but one group—those who no longer identified a problem and who had a baby—had declines in self-esteem. Women who persisted with a fertility problem identity and did not have a baby had the steepest decline in self-esteem.

Attitudes towards Women’s Paid Labor and Children in East Asia

Using data from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) fourth module on family and changing gender roles, the authors explore cross-national differences in the prevalence of non-traditional attitudes towards women’s paid labor and children’s interference in parents’ lives in China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Their results show that variation in attitude configurations and their determinants differ across each setting in ways that are inconsistent with existing theoretical explanations formulated to explain both macro- and micro-level mechanisms of differences in attitudes. The authors therefore propose a paradigm shift in cross-national attitudinal research along the lines proposed by the Theory of Conjunctural Action (TCA), which recognizes the path-dependent interplay of local schematic and material elements of social structure that operate at multiple levels of analysis.