137position. Whereas the state today strongly promotes work-family recon-
ciliation in both Lithuania and Portugal, financial difficulties may make
family solidarity, particularly across generations, crucial for many indi-
viduals. Moreover, family solidarity is impregnated with strong commit-
ment values and practices inherited from the past. In contrast, in
Switzerland, work-family reconciliation is seen as a private issue, mostly
solved by women’s part-time employment and interdependency within
couples. This leads us to the question of gender and the potential differ-
ences between women’s and men’s sociability patterns. As previously dis-
cussed, kinship relationships are at the core of sociability. Doing kinship
(Carsten 2004 ) has traditionally been a woman’s job. Indeed, the male
breadwinner role is associated with the woman’s home-carer role going
hand in hand with the kin-keeper-role (Adams 1970 ; Hagestad 1992 ).
This may translate into women developing more intergenerational con-
figurations. Nevertheless, the changing balance in gender roles and work-
family reconciliation may contribute to changes in the role of women in
personal networks, at least for countries with dual-earner models like
Lithuania and Portugal, and flush away the differences. Finally, individu-
als do not have the same amount of cultural and economic capital and
ownership of resources in a hierarchically stratified society (Bourdieu
1979 ). As homophily is a strong social mechanism, personal networks
may also reflect social position (McPherson et al. 2001 ), leading to indi-
viduals endowed with cultural and economic capital being better able to
develop diversified patterns of sociability.
This introduction clearly highlights the importance of considering
how specific ties are organized in personal configurations. Therefore, we
first need to explore personal configurations by focusing on the combi-
nation of different ties. We expect to find a diversity of personal con-
figurations accommodating kin and non-kin, different types of kin
(both primary and extended kin), men and women, and various genera-
tions. Secondly, we believe that a set of multidimensional factors
dynamically interact in shaping the development of personal configura-
tions. At the macro-contextual level, we expect countries to enhance
different sociability patterns. It may appear that countries like Portugal
and Lithuania, which promote dual-earner models and a shared recon-
ciliation of work and family life with extensive childcare facilities, are
Mapping the Plurality of Personal Configurations