This book uses data from Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden to rethink welfare policy.

This book explains why countries have adopted different policies for working parents through a comparative historical study of four nations: France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States.

On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important activity: the federally funded after-school programs that offer tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision to millions of American children. Nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students’ math and reading skills, these programs also have a profound impact on parents. In a surprising turn—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated—government-funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement by shifting power away from bureaucrats and putting it back into the hands of parents. In State of Empowerment Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

In the 1930s, buoyed by the potential of the New Deal, child welfare reformers hoped to formalize and modernize their methods, partly through professional casework but more importantly through the loving care of temporary, substitute families. Today, however, the foster care system is widely criticized for failing the children and families it is intended to help. How did a vision of dignified services become virtually synonymous with the breakup of poor families and a disparaged form of "welfare" that stigmatizes the women who provide it, the children who receive it, and their families? Tracing the evolution of the modern American foster care system from its inception in the 1930s through the 1970s, Catherine Rymph argues that deeply gendered, domestic ideals, implicit assumptions about the relative value of poor children, and the complex public/private nature of American welfare provision fueled the cultural resistance to funding maternal and parental care. What emerged was a system of public social provision that was actually subsidized by foster families themselves, most of whom were concentrated toward the socioeconomic lower half, much like the children they served. Analyzing the ideas, debates, and policies surrounding foster care and foster parents' relationship to public welfare, Rymph reveals the framework for the building of the foster care system and draws out its implications for today's child support networks.

The five Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, are well-known for their extensive welfare system and gender equality which provides both parents with opportunities to earn and care for their children. In this topical book, expert scholars from the Nordic countries, as well as UK and the US, demonstrate how modern fatherhood is supported in the Nordic setting through family and social policies, and how these contribute to shaping and influencing the images, roles and practices of fathers in a diversity of family settings and variations of fatherhoods. This comprehensive volume will have wide international appeal for those who look to Nordic countries and their success in creating gender equal societies.

A comparative analysis of social policies in Britain and France between 1914 and 1945.

Inventing the Needy offers a powerful, innovative analysis of welfare policies and practices in Hungary from 1948 to the last decade of the twentieth century. Using a compelling mix of archival, interview, and ethnographic data, Lynne Haney shows that three distinct welfare regimes succeeded one another during that period and that they were based on divergent conceptions of need. The welfare society of 1948-1968 targeted social institutions, the maternalist welfare state of 1968-1985 targeted social groups, and the liberal welfare state of 1985-1996 targeted impoverished individuals. Because they reflected contrasting conceptions of gender and of state-recognized identities, these three regimes resulted in dramatically different lived experiences of welfare. Haney's approach bridges the gaps in scholarship that frequently separate past and present, ideology and reality, and state policies and local practices. A wealth of case histories gleaned from the archives of welfare institutions brings to life the interactions between caseworkers and clients and the ways they changed over time. In one of her most provocative findings, Haney argues that female clients' ability to use the state to protect themselves in everyday life diminished over the fifty-year period. As the welfare system moved away from linking entitlement to clients' social contributions and toward their material deprivation, the welfare system, and those associated with it, became increasingly stigmatized and pathologized. With its focus on shifting inventions of the needy, this broad historical ethnography brings new insights to the study of welfare state theory and politics.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Though women’s employment patterns in Europe have been changing drastically over several decades, the repercussions of this social revolution are just beginning to garner serious attention. Many scholars have presumed that diversity and change in women’s employment is based on the structures of welfare states and women’s responses to economic incentives and disincentives to join the workforce; How Welfare States Care provides in-depth analysis of women’s employment and childcare patterns, taxation, social security, and maternity leave provisions in order to show this logic does not hold. Combining economic, sociological, and psychological insights, Kremer demonstrates that care is embedded in welfare states and that European women are motivated by culturally and morally-shaped ideals of care that are embedded in welfare states—and less by economic reality.

This work focuses on the social constructions of motherhood in Scandinavia and discusses questions of central concern to western industrialized nations, asking what is the relationship between women and the welfare state and, how do women reconcile work and family responsibilities.