Framework Of Welfare State Research Articles

If unpartnered at the birth of a child, how would you fare? A life-course perspective on contemporary single motherhood

ABSTRACT In this article, we use population-based administrative data and multichannel sequence analysis to investigate the trajectories of single mothers in Norway who had a child while unpartnered in 1993, 2001 and 2008. Our observation period is from 1994 to 2015. This period covers several structural transformations in Norwegian society and changes in family policies and welfare policies concerning single mothers. Furthermore, the period saw the growth of alternatives to the nuclear family as the prevailing normative ideal. Our findings demonstrate both complexity and heterogeneity among single mothers and their trajectories. Even so, the population of this group of single mothers is both younger and have lower education than the comparable population of non-single mothers. Nearly half of the single mothers followed trajectories characterized by strong labour market integration and family re-establishment. The other half followed more precarious trajectories characterized by unemployment and health related benefits. Importantly, age and life stage have strong implications for the labour market and family trajectories. Thus, early parenthood combined with leaving school early increases the probability of following precarious trajectories. The results further suggest that both economic cycles and changing welfare state framework is of great importance for single mother trajectories.

Nursing professionalization and welfare state policies: A critical review of structural factors influencing the development of nursing and the nursing workforce

Nursing professionalization is both ongoing and global, being significant not only for the nursing workforce but also for patients and healthcare systems. For this reason, it is important to have an in-depth understanding of this process and the factors that could affect it. This literature review utilizes a welfare state approach to examine macrolevel structural determinants of nursing professionalization, addressing a previously identified gap in this literature, and synthesizes research on the relevance of studying nursing professionalization. The use of a welfare state framework facilitates the understanding that the wider social, economic, and political system exercises significant power over the distribution of resources in a society, providing a glimpse into the complex politics of health and health care. The findings shed light on structural factors outside of nursing, such as country-level education, health, labor market, and gender policies that could impact the process of professionalization and thus could be utilized to strengthen nursing through facilitating increased professionalization levels. Addressing gender inequalities and other structural determinants of nursing professionalization could contribute to achieving health equity and could benefit health systems through enhanced availability, skill-level, and sustainability of nursing human resources, improved and efficient access to care, improved patient outcomes, and cost savings.

Либеральный консенсус: дрейф от неолиберализма к коммунитаризму?

The article is devoted to the crisis of liberal ideological consensus. It is shown that liberalism is hard to consider as meta-ideology today. It implies the need for at least reformation of ideological consensus, if not its radical change. There are two ideologies which pretend to be the new meta-ideology, namely neoliberalism and communitatianism. These ideologies are trying to solve the problem of contradictions between the morality, institutionalized in the framework of welfare state, and the Modern background. It is shown that neoliberalism cannot successfully perform the function of meta-ideology because of its undisguised class character. In this regard, the author considers the prospects of communitarianism as a more adequate candidate for the role of meta-ideology. Communitarianism is interpreted as a kind of experimental laboratory of liberal-conservative-socialist consensus. Just as in the melting crucible, the problem of ideological consensus is melted in a new version in this “laboratory”. This article argues that new, supposedly communitarian, format of ideological consensus will be crucial also for Russia. A search for an “ideology for Russia” cannot lead to anything meaningful, until reformation of ideological consensus takes place.

Social rights and the United Nations – Child Rights Convention (UN-CRC): Is the CRC a help or hindrance for developing universal and egalitarian social policies for children’s wellbeing in the ‘developing world’?

Children’s social policies, which are crucial for attaining social rights and welfare/wellbeing, are influenced by the Child Rights Convention (CRC). However, despite the CRC becoming the unilateral framework for interpreting child wellbeing, its inherent complexities and the persistent deprivations experienced by children in ‘developing’ countries calls for alternate approaches while formulating children’s social policies. Key limitations of the CRC include inappropriate prioritisation of rights when resources are limited or when rights conflict, the apolitical nature of the Convention itself and its failure to integrate into wellbeing analysis the existence of two different welfare states/or lack of it in the world. Despite the usefulness of ‘welfare state frameworks’ in combating absolute child poverty in the West, it is rarely applied in the South. This article analyses CRC from the political economy perspective focusing on social rights and the ‘developing’ world which offers a useful critique to the mainstream child rights discourse.

“What Rights?” The Construction of Political Claims to American Health Care Entitlements

Despite a growing health care crisis, Americans remain reluctant to treat “health security” as a right or entitlement of citizenship. This article examines the effects of unmet health care needs on the beliefs that individuals hold about family, market, and state responsibility for health security. Drawing on a study of individuals caring for family members with chronic diseases, I find that when imagining solutions to unmet long-term care needs, individuals evaluate a range of alternative social arrangements, but they select the model that is most consistent with previously existing beliefs about family, market, and state responsibility for care provision. This process of discursive assimilation, of integrating new needs for public provision with more familiar ways of thinking about social welfare, produces claims for entitlements that challenge existing social arrangements but do so within a welfare state framework that conceives of only a minimal role for the state in safeguarding social welfare.

Gender Group Interest or Gender Ideology? Understanding U.S. Support for Family Policy within the Liberal Welfare Regime

Many market-centered democracies have more comprehensive and generous family policies than the United States. While there is an assumed lack of public support for such policies, little research exists on Americans' family policy attitudes, especially in a comparative perspective. The authors examine the United States within the liberal welfare state framework, comparing it to nations with the greatest institutional, historical, and cultural similarities (Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand). Using data from the 1994 and 2002 International Social Survey Program, the authors explore support for and determinants of paid maternity leave and financial benefits for childcare. Results show that despite common assumptions, Americans are as supportive and often more so than citizens in other liberal welfare states. However, Americans differ significantly according to sources of policy support. Specifically, the gender gap in policy preferences is larger in the United States than in other liberal welfare states. Conversely, there is a weaker relationship in the United States between liberal work/family attitudes and support of these policies. The results have implications for proponents of family policy and theoretical debates concerning gender, public opinion, and family policy.

Towards a European social model: preconditions, difficulties and prospects of a European social policy

The first part of this paper gives an overview on the difficult preconditions of a European social policy by analysing the different models of market economies ('varieties of capitalism'), types of welfare states and systems of labour relations within the EU. These different types of market economies form the social background for building up a common European social policy and at the same time are under the pressure of internationalisation of capital and the restructuring of finance markets. In the second part the authors outline the five pillars of an upcoming European social model, although they deny the existence of a closed system of social and economic regulatory mechanisms designed to correct the operation of markets. Yet, what exists in all western European member states is a comparatively high level of welfare state protection, and, at the European level, a certain number of elements for the development of a specific welfare state framework has been established.

Combining Work and Family in Two Welfare State Contexts: A Discourse Analytical Perspective

AbstractThis paper describes and compares the way in which British and Finnish mothers of dual‐career families construct discourses on the work and family interplay. Through this comparison, the paper also considers the presence or visibility of larger welfare state frameworks at the level of the discourse of mothers. The paper argues that, despite the many structural and ideological differences between the British and the Finnish welfare states, mothers living in them often construct their daily lives by using similar discursive frameworks. These discourses are, however, contextualized and interpreted differently. This level of contextualization and interpretation of the discourses is argued to be the stage where the structures and gender constructs of welfare states step in.

Drugs and change in the welfare state framework as reflected in newspaper editorials

This article presents a comparative analysis of the treatment of the drug problem and drug policy issues in Finnish newspaper editorials across three periods, viz. 1966–1971, 1972–1985 and 1993–2000. The material for the first two periods was obtained through Alko Inc.'s library and information service, while the editorials published in the 1990s were drawn from the newspapers' own electronic archives. The analysis reveals three main shifts in the welfare state's drug policy rationality over the past 35 years. First, there has been a shift from the closed nation to a global world. During the first drug wave of the 1960s Finland was categorised as a separate, isolated corner beyond the reach of the world's trafficking routes, and the aim was to create a united national front in defence against the external enemy. In the 1990s, the enemy is both on the outside and in, and Finland is positioned as an integral part of global processes. Secondly, there is evidence of a transition from the protection of deviant individuals and groups to the protection of the whole population. When drug use began to attract attention in the 1960s, it was categorised mainly as a problem for youths. The aim was to keep Finland clean above all by protecting the youth: this, it was hoped, could be achieved through police control, on the one hand, and education, on the other. In the 1990s drugs were no longer categorised solely as a youth problem, but the whole population is affected. The newspapers began to deconstruct the deviant label by arguing that drug users were ordinary Finnish youths who needed to be helped rather than isolated. The need for help and support was raised alongside the issue of protection (care and harm reduction). The shift in emphasis from deviance control to the development of treatment and care clearly illustrates the shift in the welfare state framework from paternalistic protection to client-ism that underlines the individual's rights and clienthood. Third, there has been a shift in the way that the actors in the drug problem are positioned. The control-oriented action programme that stressed the subject position of the police in the efforts to combat the first drug wave, was widely endorsed in the print press in the 1970s, even though there were other proposed positions in the newspapers in the 1960s. In the 1990s this model was called into question. The position take in the press was that it would no longer be possible to fend off the second drug wave simply by means of control and policing. There were growing calls for prevention, treatment and harm reduction alongside criminal control. According to the predominant line of thinking in the editorials, the new action programme was to be based upon equal cooperation among control authorities and other actors. In this programme the concept of drug offender was broken down into the components of sellers and users. The subject position of the control authorities was defined above all through combatting drug trade. Drug users, by contrast, were to be integrated into society: responsibility for this was given to the welfare state's service system and to various community actors. In the division of labour among state authorities, this model implied a strengthening of the position of the service system in the field of drug policy. There are also important continuities to be seen in the welfare state's drug policy rationality. Key among these is that related to the view of young people as the major group at risk that requires national protection. There has also been a strong emphasis in all three periods on collective welfare state responsibility.