Change in welfare state policies on social care has been often neglected in the cross-national research on welfare state restructuring in Europe in recent years. In current discourse and research on welfare-state policies in relation to gender, as well as on the question of social exclusion and social integration in relation to care, this issue plays a more important role.

In general, however, analyses have mainly focused on the question of to what degree social care has been formalised and transformed into formal employment, and how this has contributed to an increase in the social integration of women (Kröger, 2001,...

The transformation of service structures has been an important topic in international comparative social policy research for several years. Due to neoliberal-oriented policy discourses, government budget crises, demographic shifts, as well as new discourses on and demand for civil participation in society and the restructuring of the relationship of state and private responsibility, considerable reorganisation processes are taking place. Indeed, there has now been a move beyond the typology of welfare state regimes developed by Esping-Andersen. Since the 1990s, in the framework of theoretical approaches relating to the transformation of services, concepts for the classification of welfare states in terms...

Faced with ageing populations and the growing participation of women in the conventional labour market, welfare states in recent years have developed innovations that are designed to resolve the problem of the ‘care deficit’. In so doing, they have tried to find ways to bolster informal care through the payment of informal carers, and, sometimes, the introduction of a formalised contractual relationship between the care receiver and the caregiver such that the informal carer is obligated to care through a stronger system of obligation than that arising out of affect alone. The methods of bolstering the conditional incomes of informal...

In the 1970s, long-term care regimes in industrialised countries differed according to the welfare state regime employed in the nation states. However, all of the institutionalised care regimes rested on the assumption that women care for elderly people in their families without any payment. Due to the rise in female labour-force participation, this assumption has not held true since the 1980s. Thus, an explosion of costs for the growing group of elderly people in need of care forced major shifts in long-term care policies in most of the countries during the last three decades. New forms of formal, semi-formal, and...

All over the globe, women and men with middle and high incomes hire migrant workers in the private sphere of care. Women from Mexico and Central America leave to work for double-income families in the US; Indonesian women leave for economically more prosperous regions in Asia and the Arab countries; women from Sri Lanka migrate to Greece and Southern Europe, where quota systems have been introduced, especially for care workers¹. Women from Eastern Europe migrate to Germany, France, Italy, the US and Canada. The Philippines systematically developed the export of care and domestic workers. Here a substantial part of the...

Social care is a growing concern in welfare states and an ever more frequent object of comparative social research. A greater focus on social care is necessary to construct a better understanding of the principles and functions of modern welfare states and family life. We start out from the view that social care arrangements are an integral part of the wider order and structure of a society, as Pfau-Effinger (1998), for instance, has suggested. The forms that care arrangements take are deeply rooted in social and cultural contexts and they vary considerably across countries and even inside one country (see...

Although the French welfare state is characterised as a conservative corporatist welfare regime in most research comparing social protection systems in Europe, it differs from the other corporatist welfare states when social care is taken into account. Following the Esping-Andersen classification (1990), conservative welfare regimes build on corporatism and rely on families taking responsibility for providing care for children, older and disabled people. However, the French welfare state differs from other corporatist-conservative countries in that the state has responsibility for providing social care. However, is it a woman-friendly welfare state? Social care services have a real impact on the social...

In the welfare literature, it is common to group the Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and label them as the Scandinavian or Nordic welfare model (for example, Esping-Andersen, 1993, 1999; Millar and Warman, 1996; Sipilä, 1997). However, the fifth independent Nordic country, Iceland, has rarely been included in the comparative research¹. While Iceland has developed a somewhat smaller welfare system than the other Nordic countries, the countries are all characterised by high female employment and comprehensive public support to parents caring for young children (Ólafsson, 1999; Daly, 2000; Gornick and Meyers, 2003).

This chapter examines whether the five...

This chapter focuses on the following question: how can (and does) care work within the family contribute to the social integration of women in Austria? Women still carry out the main part of care work. Austria seems to be an interesting example as major changes in the care arrangement towards payments for care have been realised during the last decade. A care allowance for people with long-term care needs was introduced in 1993, and a childcare allowance for children up to the age of three years in 2002. Both instruments are directed to improve the conditions of informal care within...

Since the mid-1970s, increasing signs of political and social crisis have emerged due to restructurings in the capitalist mode of production resulting in changing patterns of employment. The European model of social inclusion via labour market participation, and with it access to social rights, seems to be in a crisis. The concept of ‘social exclusion’ has been developed as a tool to analyse the dimensions of new forms of social cleavages and to define new forms of research strategies for the issues of ‘social inequality’ and ‘poverty’ (see, for example, Roche and van Berkel, 1997; Askonas and Stewart, 2000; Sen,...

Modern citizenship is rooted in individuality. Modern societies have abandoned the feudal ‘orders’ whose legitimacy was rooted in the sacred nature of royal power. At the heart of the modern concept of social cohesion are individuals whose freedom and equality enable them to enter into the rights and duties of contractual exchange. It was access to full individuality that was long denied to women. Such access depends on autonomy; it is, therefore, incompatible with the dependency and, particularly, the tutelage or authority of the husband that for a long time lay at the heart of the ‘female condition’, particularly in...

Social policy measures related to the family and high labour market participation rates of women have more than a half-century tradition in Slovenia. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the socio-economic, social policy and individual level influences seen on the production and reproduction of gender divisions in care work in the last few decades in Slovenia. It is based on the following assumptions:

social policy measures significantly influence women’s participation in the labour market;

women’s participation in the Slovenian labour market has changed to a limited extent the distribution of some tasks between men and women in the...

At the Lisbon Summit in 2000, the European Council set for the first time a separate target of 60% for female employment in addition to the existing target of 70% for male and female (overall) employment. The employment gap between women and men has tended to hover around 20 percentage points in the EU. In 2000, women’s employment rate was 54.0% and men’s 72.5%. Increasing female employment is therefore the most challenging goal in European employment policy (Joint Employment Report, 2001).

From the gender perspective, the increased female employment is a challenge for economic equality, equal independence and autonomy both...

Recent comparative studies on welfare state changes in Europe have focused on the structural constraints that social policy makers face. These constraints are seen to set the reform agenda for national welfare states. First, there is a widespread consensus that, in the context of economic globalisation and European integration, there is little room for budget expansion and that all changes have to be cost neutral (Pierson, 2001). Second, socio-demographic trends – population ageing, the change of household structure and an increase in female employment participation rates – are seen to increase the demand for individualised systems of social protection and for more...

The recent welfare state reforms in European countries are often interpreted as a mere adaptation to a lack of funds and the demand for an increase in efficiency. However, changes in the field of childcare and elderly care bring about the need for a more selective approach to analysing the internal restructuring and rearrangement of institutional and financial resources as well as the interaction between labour market structures and family structures. In the area of care policies and care politics, new structures have been created in terms of the relationships between the family, market, the state, and non-profit organisations, and...