The Marriage We Each Contribute to: Dual-income Couples' Monetary Practices in Taiwan
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2024-08-12
Author(s)
Abstract
This study uncovers Taiwanese dual-earner couples’ monetary practices and explores how the marriage institution is conceived of in the context of East Asian familism and the sweeping trend of individualism. Ample cross-national research has investigated household finances and money management among couples over time, yielding mostly Western-oriented insights. It is nevertheless matched with little evidence from increasingly individualized East Asian societies. Drawing from interviews with 22 couples and 3 married individuals (N=47) in Taiwan, who are at least university-educated, middle-class, and on average in their mid-30s, this paper analyzes couples’ monetary practices while taking their relationship constellation into account. Individualized management was found to be exceedingly prevalent among Taiwanese couples, unlike couples elsewhere that predominantly adopt pooling. Institutionalized individualization on the one hand posed higher hurdles for joint management and pooling. On the other hand, most interviewees were individualistically oriented in their practices, which can be seen as a strategy to anticipate and manage risks—marriage dissolution among others—in a highly uncertain world. Through the lens of monetary practices, this study unveils how the traditional marriage institution is implicitly challenged by not only increasing institutionalized individualization, but also individualism that is often assumed to not have taken root in East Asia. The empirical evidence from Taiwan sheds a new light on both resource management in marriage and on how intimate relationships are constrained by institutional and socio-cultural contexts.
Event Title
119th American Sociological Association Annual Meeting
Event Location
Montreal, Canada
Event Date
August 9-13, 2024