Fiona Williams is Director of CAVA, the ESRC Care, Values and the Future of Welfare Research Group centred at Leeds University. She has written widely on issues of gender, 'race', ethnicity and class in relation to social policy culminating in Rethinking Families, published in 2004, which she describes as the "crystallisation" of the £1.3m ESRC research project. Her work and that of the other researchers in the programme highlight the huge shifts in family life that have taken place in recent years. They emphasise that there needs to be an 'ethic of care' promoted alongside an 'ethic of work'.
"This little book, Rethinking Families, has established an agenda which is very important to future policy for family. Rethinking Families brought all our research together and managed to attract wide attention. This was partly due to having a media fellow appointed to the programme. Most of our research is qualitative and doesn't yield easily to headlines so we knew that if we were going to get the attention that we wanted we needed to bring on board somebody who understands the media.
That appointment turned out to be the watershed in getting the research out into the wider world. We did not expect when some of the British Airways ground staff went on strike in July 2003 that we were going to be able to do just that. There was a lot of media coverage of the strike along the lines of 'how dreadful that people should be losing their holidays because of these strikers'. But then, thanks partly to the interviews which our media fellow conducted with some of the strikers, people started to look more closely at the underlying causes for the strike. They saw that most of the employees were women and that their grievances were more about the timing of their shifts and the need to give their children the best available care while the mothers were working. It was that strike which brought to the fore a recognition that work/life balance is about time and the quality of care for kids, and not simply money. The trade unions picked up on this and so did NGOs and so did government.
Our work has had an impact on policy and we are aware that the idea of an 'ethic of care' is beginning to take root in different places including in government. People are picking up on it. It's gratifying, but I think there's still a lot more to do.
For the future, I'm hoping to get the time and funding to develop new thinking about the place and value of care in contemporary society. I want to examine this historically and in other countries. 20th century thought focused so much on the organisation and value of production, but the big issue for the 21st century is about the organisation and value we attach to how we care for each other.
Another interest which I would love to pursue is a long way from what I have been doing with CAVA. I am very interested in clothes - as an aesthetic, as a global industry, as to what they tell us about identities and social differences. I heard recently a fashion designer say that 9/11 had changed the parameters of fashion design, and that really excited my intellectual curiosity. But I think that will have to wait until I am retired!"