Flexible Flexibility

Abstract

During the last two or three decades, both demographic changes and changes in family and working life have challenged existing welfare policy rationales. Standard models of adult and family life have lost accuracy as starting points for welfare policy making. Wage work outside the context of the family has become a normal part of women’s life course and, especially in the Nordic countries, women engage in paid work also when they have small children. Adults’ attachment to the labour market is also introduced as the key to sustaining countries’ levels of welfare, and many European welfare states are in a new situation as childcare has become an increasingly more central social question and a matter of active welfare policy making (Esping-Andersen, 2002; TaylorGooby, 2004). In the family policy sector, the focus has turned to the reconciliation of work and family life, and childcare policies are being reformed to support adults when they have to cope simultaneously with their responsibilities as parents and employees. A common trait for different welfare states and policy regimes seems to be the emergence of flexibility and free choice as a rhetoric device and policy rationale that frames childcare policy making (Lewis et al., 2008; Morel, 2007; Morgan and Zippel, 2003).KeywordsWelfare StateParental LeaveComparative PerspectiveDaycare CentrePolicy RationaleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.