Keele Research Repository

The interdependence of industrial production and domestic production, and socialisation into gender and work roles constitute the central themes of this work.
The investigation aims to clarify the relationship between ideology and practice, concentrating on the reproduction of prevailing ideology in the course of daily practice. The wage-earner's non-involvement in domestic production and his control of family expenditure is explained with reference to the ideological status of domestic as opposed to industrial work, which results from the privatised organisation of domestic work.
Traditional gender roles are not substantially modified when both spouses become wage-earners because of the social and economic constraints confronting married women employees, and because the family's response to both spouses earning is both structured by, and serves to reproduce, prevailing ideology.
The family exerts a privatising influence on the goals and aspirations of industrial workers. Ex-full-time houseworkers tend however, unlike their male co-workers, to seek self-fulfilment in the course of their industrial work. Their previous experience of domestic isolation inclines them to adopt a non-instrumental approach to industrial relations, which is expressed in a form of consciousness which is more assertive than established trade-union consciousness.