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Mothers, Families, or Children? is the first comparative-historical study of family policies in Poland, Hungary, and Romania from 1945 until the eve of the global pandemic in 2020. The book highlights the emergence, consolidation, and perseverance of three types of family policies based on “mother-orientation” in Poland, “family orientation” in Hungary, and “child-orientation” in Romania. It uses a new theoretical framework to identify core and contingent clusters of benefits and services in each country and trace their development across time and under different political regimes, before and after 1989. It also examines and compares policy continuity and change with special attention to institutions, ideas, and actors involved in decision making and reform. As family policies continue to evolve in the era of European Union membership and new governmental and societal actors emerge, this study reveals mechanisms that help preserve core family policy clusters while allowing reform in contingent ones in each country.
By explaining the path of extrication from state socialism, this book clarifies the patterns of the welfare state's transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. It identifies the emergence of a peculiar Eastern European welfare regime through the fusionof pre-communist, communist and post-communist features.
Forty-five contributions from renowned international specialists in the field provide readers with expert analysis of the core issues related to the welfare state, including regional depictions of welfare states around the globe. The second edition of the Routledge Handbook of the Welfare State combines essays on methodologies, core concepts and central policy areas to produce a comprehensive understanding of what ‘the welfare state’ means around the world. In the aftermath of the credit crunch, the Handbook addresses some of the many questions about the welfare state. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include an in-depth analysis of societal changes in recent years. New articles can be found on topics such as: the impact of ideas, well-being, migration, globalisation, India, welfare typologies, homelessness and long-term care. This volume will be an invaluable reference book for students and scholars throughout the social sciences, particularly in sociology, social policy, public policy, international relations, politics and gender studies.
The social question is back. Yet today's social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized not only because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states, staying in touch with family and friends, receiving or sending financial remittances in transnational social spaces. Also of impor...
The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and social policies aren't helping. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies. Can American women look to Europe for solutions? Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country. Taking readers into women's homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers' expectations depend on context and that policies alone cannot solve women's struggles. With women held to unrealistic standards, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family.
The New Minorities of Europe: Social Cohesion in the European Unionargues that while the EU currently faces economic issues, it is pressed with larger questions and potential problems due to the backlash against those who move freely inside the union. It uses the intra-EU migrants, particularly the Polish community who moved post-2004 into Britain and to a lesser extent Ireland, as the case through which to examine these issues. The book argues that the traditional definitions of minorities and migrants are no longer valid in the EU and we should look at all groups collectively through a continuum of social cohesion based on their ability to access rights. The book traces the development of free movement in the EU, the movement of the intra-EU migrants, and the challenges and growing chilly climate they and other non-EU immigrants face across Europe. The book concludes with a proposal for the development of a High Commission on Social Cohesion in the European Union similar to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities who could use Quiet Diplomacy to try to work with minority groups in all their forms and the EU member states to address these issues.
Now fully updated, this text explores the post-communist half of Europe along with the problems and potential it brings, offering an authoritative and up-to-date analysis of the transformations in today’s Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and Ukraine.
When migrants reach their new home, we often interpret their settlement and integration as an individual process driven largely by the labour market. But family plays a crucial role. Putting Family First is the fruit of a four-year academic–community partnership to investigate the experience of immigrant families settling in Greater Toronto. Contributors explore the integration trajectory of immigrant families, from newcomers’ initial reception to their deep involvement in and attachment to their receiving society. Chapters examine the interrelated themes of the policy environment, children and youth, gender, labour markets and work, and community supports, making insightful connections between concepts such as neoliberalism, resilience, and social capital. Putting Family First applies rigorous academic research to solve practical problems, illustrating how the family context can be mobilized to facilitate the successful integration of newcomers and offering important guidance to practitioners and policy makers in Canada and beyond.
This book examines social change in Hungary, commencing with the period of late-stage socialism, the country’s immediate post-communist transition, its subsequent consolidation, and the emergence of authoritarian leadership since 2010. The volume seeks to employ a longitudinal and comparative perspective and provides comparison to other central and East European states that emerged from state socialism. The Hungarian regime change of 1989–1990 led to previously unimaginable social and economic transition. In recent decades, regime change and socioeconomic transition in Central and Eastern Europe have produced a library of literature, and transition studies has periodically become a discipline in its own right. The author uses an interdisciplinary approach – drawing from social history, sociology, statistics, and contemporary history – in order to understand and analyse social change in all its complexity. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, social scientists, historians, experts, and those interested in Hungarian and Central and Eastern European history and social change.
This book originates from a comparative research project involving extensive collection and analysis of primary and secondary materials (scholarly literature, statistical data, and interviews with key actors) on socioeconomic outcomes of the global financial crisis in all major world regions during the last years. Offering analytical and comparative insights at the global level, as well as an assessment of the overall social globalization phenomenon, this book will be useful for scholars, students, NGOs, and policy makers.