scholarly journals De unge og fremtidens ligestillingspolitik

Author(s):  
Ann-Dorte Christensen

This article discusses the attitude of the young generation towards the question of equal opportunities and social equality in the welfare state. There is a rather large polarization between young women and men as regards their attitudes towards the welfare state. While young women support collectivism and public care, young men express more individualistic, neo-liberal attitudes. But, this polarization is apparently not to be found in the attitudes towards equal opportunities policies: both young men and young women agree, for instance, that discrimination against women does take place. In the second part of the article I argue that it is necessary to develop an active and differentiated equal opportunities strategy for young people. On the one hand, there is a tendency among men and women in their early youth (15-20 years) encounter and negotiate more or less traditional gender relations in the labour market and the family. This demands an attentive and socially aware policy, reflecting the positions of young women and men as gender-specific individuals on their way to create an adult life both in their families and on the labour market.

Author(s):  
Tania Toffanin

The contribution aims to articulate in critical terms the condition of women in Italy, in light of the recent transformations that have affected the welfare state and labour market. In particular, the attention has been paid to the more hidden aspects of the recent reforms implemented by Italian governments, concerning the relation between care work and social and material changes. The casualization of labour among young women is producing a postponement of the reproductive choices while among older ones, especially the unskilled ones, it is producing a returning as a full-time housewives, with all the implications that this dynamic has in terms of loss of emancipation and autonomy. For many women the impossibility to balance work and personal life is leading to their exclusion from the labour market. The reflections developed in this paper aim to highlight the process of invisibilization that continues to mark the reproductive work and the consequences that this process has on the reproduction of class and gender inequalities.


Author(s):  
Luise Li Langergaard

The article explores the central role of the entrepreneur in neoliberalism. It demonstrates how a displacement and a broadening of the concept of the entrepreneur occur in the neoliberal interpretation of the entrepreneur compared to Schumpeter’s economic innovation theory. From being a specific economic figure with a particular delimited function the entrepreneur is reinterpreted as, on the one hand, a particular type of subject, the entrepreneur of the self, and on the other, an ism, entrepreneurialism, which permeates individuals, society, and institutions. Entrepreneurialism is discussed as a movement of the economic into previously non-economic domains, such as the welfare state and society. Social entrepreneurship is an example of this in relation to solutions to social welfare problems. This can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of the neoliberal understanding of the entrepreneur, but it also, in certain interpretations, resists the neoliberal understanding of economy and society.


1996 ◽  
pp. 73-101
Author(s):  
Renato Brunetta ◽  
Leonello Tronti ◽  
Renzo Turatto

Author(s):  
David Garland

The welfare state is, at its core, a problem-solving apparatus, designed to manage dysfunctions that are endemic to the economic and social life of modern nations. But welfare states also generate problems of their own—such as moral hazards, excessive bureaucracy, soaring costs, and labour market rigidities—that sometimes threaten to bring the whole enterprise into disrepute. ‘Problems’ shows that these issues are troubling and consequential, but in weighing their significance we ought always to ask: ‘what can be done?’ and ‘what are the alternatives?’ That the welfare state has its problems is undeniable. The real question is whether these problems are manageable and how they compare to those of other arrangements.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeriy Heyets

Nearly 30 years of transformation of the sociopolitical and legal, socioeconomical and financial, sociocultural and welfare, and socioenvironmental dimensions in both Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, has led to a change of the social quality of daily circumstances. On the one hand, the interconnection and reciprocity of these four relevant dimensions of societal life is the underlying cause of such changes, and on the other, the state as main actor of the sociopolitical and legal dimension is the initiator of those changes. Applying the social quality approach, I will reflect in this article on the consequences of these changes, especially in Ukraine. In comparison, the dominant Western interpretation of the “welfare state” will also be discussed.


2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Norbert Berthold

Abstract The situation on the German labour market is still a catastrophe. The institutional set-ups on the labour market and the welfare state obviously no longer fit the fundamentally changed economic environment. There is next to no competition on the labour market and unions and employers' associations use the generous welfare state to transfer the burden of adjustment to changes in the economic environment onto the public at large. Institutional mismatch is prevalent. The red-green coalition government has not only realized that persistently high unemployment inflicts tremendous economic damage but that it is also politically destabilizing. It has therefore announced that the performance on the labour market during its term of office shall be its own measure of success or failure. This paper discusses whether the regulatory steps taken by the red-green coalition government, like implementing stricter employment protection legislation, reintroducing full pay when sick, and changing the law concerning low-paid jobs, are suitable for reducing this institutional mismatch.


2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica Brito Vieira ◽  
Filipe Carreira da Silva ◽  
Cícero Roberto Pereira

Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portugal. The literature on social policy preferences predicts an increased polarisation in opinions towards the welfare state between different groups within society – in particular between labour market insiders and outsiders. However, the prediction has scarcely been tested empirically. A notoriously dualised country, Portugal provides a critical setting in which to test this hypothesis. The results show attitudinal change, and this varies according to labour market vulnerability. However, we observe no polarisation and advance alternative explanations for why this is so.


1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eli Zaretsky

Changes in psychoanalysis in the 1930s reflected a broader pattern of democratization associated with what historians have termed ‘the second industrial revolution,’ a revolution that included both modernist cultural experimentation and social democracy. On the one hand, Melanie Klein's radically new and ‘feminine’ focus on concrete relations with immediate others reflected the rise of personal life: forms of life not reducible to one's social role. At the same time, Klein's thought resonated with a working-class and popular-front belief in organicism, connection and group belonging. In both cases the relation to the mother was critical. Hence, there were deep connections between Klein's thought and the Beveridge welfare state. Psychoanalysis did not generate the welfare state's focus on the mother/infant bond; the welfare state did not normalize British analysis. But there was an ‘elective affinity’ between the two histories and it operated at a very deep level.


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