Morfogénesis social de la paternidad : configuración de la paternidad en contextos migratorios

Abstract

This PhD dissertation, titled: Social Morphogenesis of Fatherhood. Configuration of Fatherhood in Migratory Contexts argues that parents modify their way of exercising fatherhood in migratory contexts and thereby contribute to modify what is meant by fatherhood in the following generations. The questions that give rise to the investigation are the following: How does international migration affect the exercise and meanings of fatherhood? Do these meanings and practices of fatherhood vary in situations of social vulnerability compared to other socioeconomic contexts? Would the meanings and practices of non-resident fathers be different in the case of divorced men and in the cases of non-resident fathers due to migratory factors? I analyze this phenomenon through the theoretical lens about "realistic social theory" of Margaret Archer. Archer's morphogenetic approach offers conceptual and methodological guidelines that allow the analysis of social processes at any time or place. This theory implies a methodology based on analytic dualism in which people and parties-or agency and structure-relate to each other in a mutual play of conditional and generative mechanisms. On the one hand, it recognizes that the structure precedes the action that takes its reproduction or transformation. On the other hand, it proposes that the structural elaboration necessarily follows after the sequences of the action that precedes them. In methodological terms, this thesis is a mixed qualitative and quantitative, giving greater emphasis to the qualitative scope to understand in greater depth both the perceptions and experiences of fatherhood and the structures and functions that underlie the action of the father. Fieldwork was carried out in the city of Santiago de Chile. 40 interviews were conducted with migrant and native men with at least one child under the age of 18. In addition, 456 surveys were performed on fathers with the same inclusion criteria as on the collection of qualitative data. The findings of this research are as follows. 1. Migrant parents can modify the fatherhood structures they inherited when they increase their socioeconomic status. 2. Migrant parents can change the fatherhood structures when children reject the contents of socialization that they promote and adopt the socialization content of the dominant culture. The findings of this research will help to fill the gap within this subfield of migration and fatherhood in contexts of developing countries. Therefore, my dissertation will contribute to improve the current quantitative instruments that have been applied to study this phenomenon. My results, based on Archer's theory, will make possible the recognition of the properties of fatherhood structures, and father`s agency in specific relational contexts. Finally, with this thesis it is confirmed that fatherhood can be understood as the inheritance of a structure that is continually agencied by men, to generate new structures of fatherhood for the following generations.