Given the varied claims made about the new economy and its implications for the organization of work and life, this article critically evaluates some conceptualizations of the new economy and then explores how the new media sector has materialized and been experienced by people working in Brighton and Hove, a new media hub. New technologies and patterns of working allow the temporal and spatial boundaries of paid work to be extended, potentially allowing more people, especially those with caring responsibilities, to become involved, possibly leading to a reduction in gender inequality. This article, based on 55 in-depth interviews with new media owners, managers and some employees in small and micro enterprises, evaluates this claim. Reference is made to the gender-differentiated patterns of ownership and earnings; flexible working patterns, long hours and homeworking and considers whether these working patterns are compatible with a work-life balance. The results indicate that while new media creates new opportunities for people to combine interesting paid work with caring responsibilities, a marked gender imbalance remains.

Female labour force participation has been increasing in recent decades, in part encouraged by state policies to raise the employment rate to encourage economic competitiveness and combat social exclusion. Social provision for care, however, has lagged behind this increase, creating practical and moral dilemmas for individuals and for society, facing parents with complex choices about how to combine work and care. In this paper, we draw on a qualitative study in London to explore the extent to which the large-scale entry of women into waged work is altering women's understandings of their duties and responsibilities to care for others. We conclude that their decisions are influenced by class position, entrenched gender inequalities in the labour market, varying abilities to pay for care and complex gendered understandings of caring responsibilities.

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Historically migrants have been constructed as units of labour and their social reproductive needs have received scant attention in policy and in academic literature. The growth in ‘feminist‐inflected’ migration research in recent decades, has provoked a body of work on transnational care‐giving that poses a challenge to such a construction, at least as it relates to female migrants in general and mothers in particular. Researchers, however, have demonstrated less interest in how migrant men give meaning to and perform their fathering roles. Such neglect is increasingly problematic in the context of rising social, political and academic interest in the significance of fathering in European (and other) societies. With the purpose of making a preliminary contribution to knowledge on migrant men's fathering narratives, practices and projects, this article draws on findings from interviews conducted with recent migrants from Poland to the UK. By focusing on migrant fatherhood, we add to the understanding of transnational care‐giving by illuminating the many parallels between migrant mothering and fathering. Our findings are consistent with much of the literature on transnational mothering, highlighting tensions between breadwinning and parenting and the various strategies fathers deploy to reconcile these tensions. Nevertheless, we find that migrant men's fathering narratives, practices, and projects, while challenging the construction of male migrants as independent and non‐relational, remain embedded within the dominant framework of the gendered division of labour. More uniquely, the article also demonstrates the importance of situated transnational analyses, in this case the institutional arrangements between the UK and European Union new Member States, which gave the Polish migrants privileged labour market access and social rights within the UK's highly differentiated migration regime. This access allowed mobility, settlement and or family reunion according to the migrant's specific circumstances and preferences with respect to the labour market and parenting.

In a recent revival of the older tradition of community studies, sociologists and geographers have begun to address the changing nature of attachment to locality in contemporary cities in advanced industrial societies. Challenging older definitions of attachment to place, a new form of communal attachment has recently been identified, termed 'elective belonging'. This sense of place is particularly important among the middle classes and is, it is argued, closely associated with the growing significance of reproduction, especially access to schooling, as a key part of the reasons for choosing to live in a particular urban neighbourhood. Sociologists of education have also argued that school choice is important. A recent paper has suggested that pre-school childcare also figures in locational choices and in urban differentiation, leading to different traditions of caring/mothering in different neighbourhoods in London. This paper critically assesses these arguments about school and childcare choices and the associated development of place-based middle-class cultures. Based on an empirical study in three London neighbourhoods, it explores the extent to which occupational position and sector of employment-class-based factors-as well as place-based factors continue to play a key role in the types of opportunities and choices that middle-class households make about childcare.