This paper builds on the idea that any further development of the concept of 'welfare regime' must incorporate the relationship between unpaid as well as paid work and welfare. Consideration of the privateldomestic is crucial to a gendered understanding of welfare because historically women have typically gained entitlements by virtue of their dependent status within the family as wives and mothers. The paper suggests that the idea of the male-breadwinner family model has served historically to cut across established typologies of welfare regimes, and further that the model has been modified in different ways and to different degrees in particular countries.

Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes

The term ''neo-liberalism'' denotes new forms of political-economic governance premised on the extension of market relationships. In critical social science literatures, the term has usurped labels referring to specific political projects (Thatcherism, Regeanomics, Rogernomics), and is more widely
used than its counterparts including, for example, economic rationalism, monetarism, neo-conservatism, managerialism and contractualism.

/pdf/neo-liberalism-policy-ideology-governmentality-4zz4hkhjxh.pdf

Neo-liberalism: policy, ideology, governmentality

In this article, the author argues that we need to conceptualize gender as a social structure, and by doing so, we can better analyze the ways in which gender is embedded in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of our society. To conceptualize gender as a structure situates gender at the same level of general social significance as the economy and the polity. The author also argues that while concern with intersectionality must continue to be paramount, different structures of inequality have different constructions and perhaps different influential causal mechanisms at any given historical moment. We need to follow a both/and strategy to understand gender structure, race structure, and other structures of inequality as they currently operate while also systematically paying attention to how these axes of domination intersect. Finally, the author suggests we pay more attention to doing research and writing theory with explicit attention to how our work can indeed help transform as w...

Gender As a Social Structure Theory Wrestling with Activism

Using data from Australia and the United States, the authors explore the effect of spouses’ contribution to family income on how housework is divided. Consistent with exchange‐bargaining theory, women decrease their housework as their earnings increase, up to the point where both spouses contribute equally to income. In other respects, gender trumps money. The base level of housework for women is much higher. Among the small percentage of couples who are in the range where women provide 51%–100% of household income, the change in housework is opposite what exchange theory predicts: couples that deviate from the normative income standard (men make more money than women) seem to compensate with a more traditional division of household work.

/pdf/when-does-gender-trump-money-bargaining-and-time-in-51y8xc1cq0.pdf

When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work

This paper surveys the debate regarding Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states and reviews the modified or alternative typologies ensuing from this debate. We confine ourselves to the classif...

Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art report:

The 1990s have seen dramatic restructuring of state social provision in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This has occurred largely because of the rise of market liberalism, which challenges the role of the state. This important book examines the impact of changes in social policy regimes on gender roles and relations. Structured thematically and systematically comparative, it analyses three key policy areas: labor markets, income maintenance and reproductive rights. Largely driven by issues of equality, it considers the role of the state as a site for gender and sexual politics at a time when primacy is given to the market, developing an argument about social citizenship in the process. Eminent scholars in the field, Julia O'Connor, Ann Orloff and Sheila Shaver make a landmark contribution to debates about social policy and gender relations in this era of economic restructuring and deregulation.

States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States

The post-war expansion of many welfare states has seen 'reproduction going public', the development of social policies making reproduction a public and political concern. Though the phrase 'going public' has been applied most commonly to care work, it also describes the politi cisation of needs associated with biological reproduction. The present article is concerned with one such service, abortion, and what it can tell us about the development of the welfare state. The article focuses on a particular, 'liberal' type of the welfare state found in countries sharing the combined heritages of the British common law tradition and welfare residualism maintaining the primacy of market and family. This article explores the interplay of abortion rights, politics and services in the liberal welfare states of Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. It considers the relationship between liberalism and gender, and the distinction between abortion as a medical entitle ment and a 'body right'. The civil right...

Body rights, social rights and the liberal welfare state:

This article is concerned with questions about the amount of support given by welfare states towards the maintenance of a wife engaged in housework and child care. It compares the value of the support supplied by the tax/benefit packages of 15 countries. The article defines support for wifely labour as the difference between the net disposable income of a single person and a couple with the same earnings. In analysing the data, three models are used: the “traditional” model where the wife is economically dependent on her husband; the “modern” model where the wife remains outside the labour market while she has young children; and the “dual breadwinner” model where the mother of young children is in full- or part-time employment. Much of the analysis is concerned with patterns of social policy in which support for wives is associated with support for children. While the evidence shows that welfare states do provide support to wives, both with and without young children and engaged in paid as well as unpaid work, the levels of support vary greatly between welfare states. The variations are not associated with the generally discussed categorizations of welfare state types.

The Recognition of Wifely Labour by Welfare States

The defining characteristic of the liberal social policy regime is state intervention which is clearly subordinate to the market and the family. But, to a significant extent, liberal policy works through the market, as in the case of tax credits for the purchase of services such as child care, and regulation of the market, for example through anti-discrimination legislation or the setting of minimum standards for market-based services such as child care. It has a relatively strong emphasis on income and/or means-tested programs and while there may be a commitment to universalism, it is universalism with an equal opportunity focus. The implications of these arrangements for families and households and for gender relations have received little attention in comparative welfare state analysis. There are significant cross-national differences in the balance between market and family in providing benefits and services for individuals and households, and, specifically, there are significant differences in terms of gender and class consequences depending on which of the two forms of private responsibility, market or family, is supported by public policy. Does a liberal political tradition have a congruous set of consequences for gender relations across the three policy areas of income maintenance, labour market participation and reproductive rights in Australia, Canada, the United States and Britain? The concept of policy regime refers to institutionalised patterns of welfare state provision establishing systematic relations between the state, the market and the family. Our analysis of policies relating to labour markets, income maintenance and regulation of reproduction in Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States identified significant similarities in policy orientation but also some noteworthy differences across the four countries.

States, Markets, Families: States, Markets, Families

This paper examines the implications of welfare reform for the meaning of social citizenship in Australia. Australian welfare reform has been under way since the late 1980s, and reflects the themes of activity and participation that are shaping social policy in many advanced industrial nations. The paper suggests that Australian welfare reform is following a liberal trajectory of change which places a continuing emphasis on market and family as the preferred institutions for social support with a newly salient appeal to moral ideas about the responsibility of citizens to be self-sustaining. The paper argues that welfare is being transformed from a limited social right to support provided on condition, and from treating the claimant as a sovereign individual to a subject of paternalistic supervision. Together, these changes are redefining the meaning of equality in Australian social citizenship.

Sheila Shaver

Papers

States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States

Body rights, social rights and the liberal welfare state:

The Recognition of Wifely Labour by Welfare States

States, Markets, Families: States, Markets, Families

Australian Welfare Reform: From Citizenship to Supervision