Public Management Reform. A Comparative Analysis

Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children

In most families today, childcare remains divided unequally between fathers and mothers. Scholars argue that persistence of the gendered division of childcare is due to multiple causes, including v...

How Mothers and Fathers Share Childcare: A Cross- National Time-Use Comparison

Research has associated parenthood with greater daily time commitments for fathers and mothers than for childless men and women, and with deeper gendered division of labor in households. How do these outcomes vary across countries with different average employment hours, family and social policies, and cultural attitudes to family care provision? Using nationally representative time-use data from the United States, Australia, Italy, France, and Denmark (N = 5,337), we compare the paid and unpaid work of childless partnered adults and parents of young children in each country. Couples were matched (except for the United States). We found parents have higher, less gender-equal workloads than nonparents in all five countries, but overall time commitments and the difference by parenthood status were most pronounced in the United States and Australia.

Parenthood, Gender and Work-Family Time in the United States, Australia, Italy, France, and Denmark.

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Nancy E Cott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2000. 297 pp. ISBN 0-674-- 00320-9. $27.95 (cloth). In this synthesis of the substantial historical literature about marriage, historian Nancy Cott demonstrates that an institution we have traditionally labeled private has in fact always served public purposes, operating through the apparatus of the state. Marriage laws, in the service of moral, economic, and civic objectives, have shaped and continue to shape gender roles inside the home and out; they control the choice of suitable partners, at times in the past establishing racial barriers and at present determining the (il)legitimacy of samesex unions. In addition, marriage law trenches on the conveyance of citizenship, which affects both nationality and suffrage. Most citizens most of the time accept and therefore confirm legal limits; others resist, making marriage law over time a common site of contest about social mores. The revolution that separated the United States from Great Britain affected not only international relations and domestic legal systems; marriage theory also incorporated the repudiation of subjection implicit in monarchical governments. American women "consented" to be governed by husbands of their own choosing, although they lost substantial autonomy when they did so. But the American form of marriage reflected the values not only of a democratic republic but also of a Christian nation. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Native Americans, European and Asian immigrants, religious dissidents such as the Mormons, Utopian socialists-all who espoused nonmajoritarian marital practices could not withstand the demands of Congress and of states that families form themselves into the units prescribed by the Christian church. Thus, tribal arrangements, polygamy, "common law" couples, and communities of "free lovers" largely disappeared by 1900, while tolerance of arranged marriages vanished in the twentieth century. "If marriages produced the polity," Cott notes, "then wrongfully joined marriages could be fatal" (p. 155). Choice and consent notwithstanding, Christian marriage doctrine could countenance rules making interracial marriage unacceptable; and if marriage signified state-sanctioned sexual association, laws controlling prostitution and sex outside of marriage (through restrictions on abortion and birth control) represented the other side of the coin-all in the service of a single model of marriage. …

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

Long division : state schooling in South Australian society

This article is an exercise in historical sociology. It deals with inconsistencies, absences, and unresolved issues in understandings of children’s usefulness. Demography, histories of childhood, feminist research on housework and welfare states, time-use studies, psychology, ethnography, and “new sociology of childhood” often use incompatible notions of the productivity of children’s time and effort. What does and does not constitute work is also one of the most keenly contested issues between children and adults. Taken together, these debates and skirmishes are at the heart of fundamental social categories. They help constitute the distinction between children and adults, work and learning, self-care and helping others, current and future usefulness, academic excellence and mediocrity, paid and unpaid effort and time, home, school, and workplace, altruistic and commercial exchange. The bulk of the article deals with countries of the North and draws on English-language studies. The concluding section uses material on countries of the South to suggest that the “majority world” might be pioneering new understandings and practices of growing up. This article is an exercise in thinking through some inconsistencies, absences, and unresolved issues in social science understandings of the usefulness or otherwise of children and young people. 1 Above all, it is an exercise in historical sociology. Without attempting a comprehensive coverage of each discipline, I refer to representative historical, quantitative, ethnographic, and psychological studies to

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Useful and Priceless Children in Contemporary Welfare States

In a climate of fiscal austerity, Australia’s neo-liberal government is continuing to fund and implement an expensive National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). This article presents a demographic, funding and policy context for the introduction of the NDIS. Its success, we argue, must be situated in the context of development of a post-industrial workforce, and owes a lot to its embrace of social investment, marketisation of welfare services, and cash for care. We then look at two tensions unfolding during the scheme’s implementation: increasing demand for care work alongside a shortage of care workers, and the market-driven reform of the Australian vocational education and training system. The changes to vocational education, we conclude, have produced more problems than they solved. Since they anticipate key aspects of the NDIS, they raise questions about the intent and future of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Social policy ‘generosity’ at a time of fiscal austerity: The strange case of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme:

Introduction 1. The Consolidation of Patriarchalism in Early Modern Europe 2. Patriarchalism Challenged 3. Revolutions 4. State Formation, Personality Structure and the Civilising Process 5. Worlds of Social Control: Civilising the Masterless Poor 6. Assembling School Systems 7. Social Movements, Individual Agency and the School 8. The Reconstruction of Private Life Conclusion Selected Bibliography Notes Index

Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900

(1989). Historiography of compulsory schooling: what is the problem? History of Education: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 123-144.

Pavla Miller

Papers

Long division : state schooling in South Australian society

Useful and Priceless Children in Contemporary Welfare States

Social policy ‘generosity’ at a time of fiscal austerity: The strange case of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme:

Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900

Historiography of Compulsory Schooling: What Is the Problem?.