This article is based on a unique empirical investigation of the contribution that informal childcare – relatives, friends or neighbours looking after children, usually on an unpaid basis – makes in allowing parents to go out to work. There has been little research on either the use of such complementary childcare by parents, or of the carers who undertake it, and this is a review of a two-stage investigation of both. One of the earliest initiatives of the Labour government elected in 1997 was to put a National Childcare Strategy in place. The strategy recognised the importance of childcare both for the development of children and in enabling parents – particularly mothers – to go out to work. To date, however, childcare needs and provision have been assessed almost entirely in terms of formal childcare. A clear understanding of why working parents use complementary childcare (particularly from grandparents) is essential for any childcare policy that hopes to be attuned to what families actually want. The article argues that policy makers, lured by a simplistic vision of economic vitality into adopting a behavioural paradigm from economics – in which parents are assumed to respond to purely financial incentives – are likely to find themselves distracted from important issues of the social well-being of working families with children. Childcare needs are related to dramatic changes in women's labour market participation over recent years, where the largest increase in female employment has been among mothers of children under the age of five. Neither mothers nor fathers may be in a position to provide the desired amount of childcare inside the nuclear household. This situation gives rise to the possibility of a ‘childcare deficit’. In failing to acknowledge and underpin the value which parents place upon complementary forms of childcare, policy makers are in danger of committing themselves to institutional arrangements which may make that deficit worse in the longer term.

JANE WHEELOCK IS READER IN SOCIAL Policy and Susan Baines is an ESRC Management Research Fellow, both at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to better understanding of the concerns, needs and achievements of the 'business family', which may include a very wide variety of formal and informal relationships between family and business. Some of the results of a study of 200 micro-businesses, defined as businesses with up to nine employees, in the business services in the north-east and the south-east of England are reported here. Although the northern and southern location had very different socio-economic characteristics, patterns of family support for businesses were extremely similar. In both locations, there was extensive family involvement, in particular the involvement of spouses. Family labour could be a vital resource without which a struggling business would fail to survive but the extent of self-exploitation and the sacrifices made by some individuals should not be glossed over. Employment growth was a goal for only one in four of the businesses interviewed. Case study material confirmed survey findings that growth seeking business owners were the most likely to seek out partnerships with non-family members and to participate actively in non-family networks.

SummaryIn each of 5 cows, 2 quarters which had been regularly milked throughout the whole of pregnancy produced less milk in the next lactation than the other 2 quarters which had a normal dry period. The concentrations of the individual constituents in the milk of all 4 quarters of each cow were similar. The effect appears to be due to factors located within the individual quarter of the mammary gland rather than to factors such as the hormonal background or plane of nutrition which affect the whole animal.

More and more women and men are becoming dependent on some form of small business activity for all or part of their livelihoods but there is little research offering insight into gender and working practices in small businesses. In this article we assess some theoretical approaches and discuss these against an empirical investigation of micro-firms run by women, men and mixed sex partnerships. In the 'entrepreneurship' literature, with its emphasis on the individual business owner, we find little guidance. We argue that in the 'modern' microbusiness, family and work are brought into proximity as in the 'in between' organizational form described by Weber. The celebrated 'flexibility' of small firms often involves the reproduction within modernity of seemingly pre-modern practices in household organization and gender divisions of labour. This is true in the Britain of the 1990s in a growing business sector normally associated neither with tradition nor with the family. Tradition, however, is never automatic or uncontested in a 'post-traditional society'. A minority of women and men in micro-enterprises actively resist traditional solutions and even traditional imagery of male and female behaviour. For this small group alone new economic conditions seem to bring new freedom.

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