No abstract

Drawing on qualitative interview data, this article examines how grandfatherhood relates to the assertion and transformation of masculinities in later life. Recent attention to ageing and masculinities has identified how older men are challenged to successfully maintain connections to hegemonic masculinity in light of altered family and life circumstances. We consider men's engagement with grandfatherhood as a means for so doing, illustrating how men make sense of the role through continuity with hegemonic masculinity. While grandfathers describe emotionally intimate and affectionate relationships with their grandchildren, their accounts reflect desires to re-affirm previous connections to masculinities. Attention to the way individualised masculinities are re-negotiated in later life can help to explain how men are making sense of the new family opportunities that arise from being a grandparent. Such an analysis of grandfatherhood, we argue, also offers significant critique of hegemonic masculinity and its distinction to non-hegemonic masculinities intersected by old age.

In recent years, research into grandparenthood has gained considerable momentum, particularly in the United States and increasingly in Europe. However, there has been little research focusing on understanding the contribution of grandfathers. While the perception of grandmothers as more involved than grandfathers remains commonplace, some recent research provides indications of a more changing picture. In attempting to address this knowledge gap, this paper provides evidence from ongoing qualitative research with grandfathers. It focuses on themes of emotionality and caring in men's understandings of being a grandfather. In so doing, it considers whether the salience of these themes points to the emergence of "new" grandfatherhood, particularly among younger cohorts of grandfathers. Finally, the paper explores these findings in relation to the wider policy context around grandparenthood, complementary care, and working families.

Who, or what, is English? Drawing on qualitative interviews with white majority interviewees in three locations in England, this article explores local interpretations of English and Englishness. The article investigates the way members view their local environment as being 'English', and examines the criteria underpinning such interpretations. While various meanings are identified, it is found that Englishness is more often accomplished through talking about people and ethnicity rather than through the use of geography. That is, members defined the Englishness of place by referring explicitly to people. Rather than moving away from social categorical accounting, the category English was interpreted through the mobilisation of 'non-English' others. In this rhetorical context, an English place is antithetical to a multiethnic place. Instead the term English is used to refer to white majority people. Although Englishness was defined in opposition to multiculture, this was not necessarily done in such a way as to exclude non-English 'others'. Above all, it reflects ambiguity amongst the white ethnic majority about how they can, and should, be named.s ore_1995 109..128The Sociological Review, 59:1 (2011) 'It just feels English rather than multicultural' 111 'It just feels English rather than multicultural' 113

There is an important strand of scholarship which argues that we need to explain 'ethnicity' within the social and personal contexts in which ethnic identities and sentiments are created and enacted. But there has been little attempt to consider whether, and if so how, attitudes to the nation may be informed by experiences and events at the personal level. Adopting a case-study approach, this paper focuses upon the lives of four 'white English' individuals. Treating each respondent's account of his or her social milieu as the analytical starting point, the paper investigates how wider self-understandings and personal experiences inform a particular orientation towards nation, place and the country. In further exploration of this, it argues that the salience of 'resentful nationalism' is intensified when articulated through a sense of personal or social decline and failure. This is then demonstrated through reference to those with both 'resentful' and 'indifferent' orientations.