MONEY IN THE HOUSEHOLD - SOME UNDERLYING ISSUES OF POWER

This paper addresses criticisms of a number of papers (Vogler and Pahl , 1993, 1994; Vogler, 1994) in which we attempted to explore the relat ionships between money, power and inequality within marriage. Subseque nt criticisms have mainly centred around the concept of power that we used in those papers. It has been suggested that we either lacked a th eory of power (Rottman, 1996) or that our conceptualisation of power a s control over decision making was too limited (Shove, 1993). I would argue however, that while it was not made explicit in our original pap ers our findings point towards a more general theory of power in the h ousehold, namely to a modified version of Lukes' three dimensional mod el of power. While we initially conceptualised power as control over d ecision making (Lukes' first dimension of power) our findings also sho w the importance of ideological and cultural factors (Lukes' third dim ension of power) as both a cause and a consequence of the allocative s ystems couples use to organise money within the household. More theore tically, I also suggest that discourses about money within the househo ld may be part of, and operate in a similar way to discourses of decis ion making at the broader political level. It may therefore be possibl e to conceptualise the different ways of managing money within the hou sehold as mini political systems akin to different sorts of democracy at the broader political level, and with similar consequences for gend er relations.