Why does Religion Matter to get into Kindergarten?

The division of labour in its temporal ordering of contemporary German society, between labour-markets and family policy, makes equal access to a ‘good life’ for the existing variety of identities impossible. This social structure is reified through a range of formal policies, for example parental leave or the education system with its weekly schedules and different institutions throughout childhood and early adulthood. But it also includes things that affect time indirectly, like city geography in its effect on commuting, communication technology in the flexibilisation of workplaces and acceleration of information diffusion, or human biology from daily sleep needs to the best age to have children. Temporal structures are thus the cumulative effect of many mechanisms of social coordination. Hierarchic identifications, self-understandings, as well as membership to various collectives function therein to direct and restrict parents’ capabilities to juggle childcare and work. On the central problem for most parents: “Who to get a scarce place in public childcare?” I will illustrate how the institutionalisation of family and labour market affects local stakeholders’ capabilities to resolve this central life conflict, or rather, how degrees of inability to resolve it are keyed to certain identities that are reified in the processes how childcare is provided. As one example: the institutionalisation of the Christian churches in the German welfare state, and the daily practices of selection executed in Church-run kindergardens explain the privileged access of Christian families to public childcare. Theoretically this work is based around Foucault’s concepts of power and governmentality, D.E. Smith’s insight to put “work” into the centre of sociological analysis, which corresponds well with a performative understanding of identity that struggles with discursive mechanisms of identification. The data is based on interviews with local stakeholders and policy documents.