PhD Defense 8 July 2004

1. Elements of a Theory of Care in Contemporary Modern Society Tine Rostgaard Open Door Talk, Cork, 6 March 2006 PhD Defense 8 July 2004

2. Change and transformation • Relationships of gender and welfare mix • Comprehensiveness • Gendered consequences • Map • Method • Model Presentation of agenda • Place social care policies in the political agenda of the Adult-worker model • Research approach and questions • Definition of social care • Evaluative criteria for theoretical approach to the study of care:

3. 1. Placing care in the political agenda • Policy context: • Employment rates of women and mothers have increased but still a strong potential for a further increase • At the same time, fertility rates have declined • Ageing of the population is likely to increase the number of years where care is needed • Policies may alter the need for care

4. The emphasis on the adult worker model where women and men are assumed equally employable, has given impetus to a re-negotiation of formal and informal care responsibilities • Care policy laggard has led to a caring deficit

5. ”The role of social science is to translate personal worries to general problems.” • (C.W.Mills, 1985) • How we as individuals organise, provide, pay for, and receive care should not be an individual problem, but a societal concern. • A map, a method and a model of social care policies for children and older people, in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, England, Germany, Netherlands, France and Norway, across a time-span of 20 years. • Mainstream analysis of welfare state regimes have tended to be ‘malestream’, and the study of social care has remained a dark continent within male theorizing

6. 2. Basic research approach and questions • Interdisciplinary (feminist sociology and welfare state research, political theory of neo-institutionalism, system theory and more hermaneutic such as social constructivism) • Comparative (across time and countries) • Policy-oriented (in the focus on shifts in configurations of care policies) • Gender matters, context matters and politics matters.

7. Research questions Overarching research framework: • Who organises? • Who pays? • Who delivers? • Of what quality and for what cost for the user?

8. Chosen 8 countries, which all represent one of Esping-Andersen’s regimes: Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands (The Social-democratic regime), Germany and France (the Conservative model) and England (the Liberal model). •  The care benefits included are service and cash benefits for pre-school children: day care institutions and nursery education, family day care and leave schemes, and for older people: home help, institutional care and care allowances.

9. Dimensions of research questions: • What constitutes the social care policy area? How may we establish a methodological and conceptual framework for the comparison of social care policies? • What is the institutional design of care policies - the care architecture - in terms of the structure of policies, principles, logics and institutional instruments? • How do policies institutionalise and underpin certain care relationships and definitions of care obligations, be it family, state or market oriented? • What are the gender consequences of the care policy logics?

10. 3. Definition of social care: • as labour includes formal/informal as well as private/public signification • as a concept is situated in a complex normative framework of obligation and responsibility • as an activity with both financial and emotional costs • as policies cover formal and informal, paid and unpaid, public and private, services and cash transfers • for both children and older people

11. 4. Evaluative criteria of utility of the theoretical approach of social care Change and variation Process and relationships Content Relationships of gender and welfare mix Comprehensiveness Gendered consequences Outcome

12. Content 4.a. Content of design of care policies (care architecture) • “The comparative approach offers a degree of rigour and breadth of explanation, as concepts and explanations travel across a number of national borders.” (Daly, 2000, p.35) • How to identify the social care field and the development of a common framework for analysing social care?

13. Content Functional equivalence • Comparison of social care provision should be built on a perspective of functional equivalence in adopting a cross-sectional, cross-benefit approach of comparison: • Taking into account all relevant care provisions (eg both education/social welfare), cash as well as service benefits, including private as well as public • - Enables comparisons where high or low coverage is not directly translatable to being either good nor bad

14. Content Tendencies • Expansion • From standard to individually adapted services • From client to consumer • More rights • More welfare mix

15. Content • Reorganisation of social care in regards to the cash/service nexus, the welfare mix, and a changed distribution of costs between public and recipient of care. • Paradigms of efficiency, marketisation, and consumerism have entered the political arena. • Universalization, collectivisation and monetizationof care.

16. Process and relationship 4.b. The process and relationships of social care policies • How are care relationships and care responsibilities created and underpinned by the institutional design of social care policies? • Ex: Variation in social care policies can reveal how the ideology and social constructions of the role of the mother and father differ Denmark and Sweden.

17. Process and relationship • Sweden: Fatherhood and the modern father stand very strong. Conception that each parent contributes with something special in the care relationship • Denmark: sharing of care work and abolishment of father’s quota. The conception of parenthood as neutral gender relations.

18. Process and relationship • How are processes of informalisation of care set in motion by changes in social care policies, leading to different combinations of care relationships? • Ex: is home help given mainly to elderly without informal care ressources? • Overall, the use of home help is related to the availability of a partner in the household • Denmark: Implicit informalization of care where formal and informal care is provided concurrently. • Norway: a more explicit degree of informalization ever present and informal care resources are of great importance. • Sweden: high degree of informalization suggests that informal carers increasingly have to operate in isolation in the care provision

19. Process and relationship Home help, % of elderly 65+, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, 2002

20. Process and relationship • Variation in underpinnings of social policy lead to variation in degrees of informalisation • Plasticity (Anttonen, Baldock and Sililä, 2003)or complementary nature of social care? (Motel-Klingenbiel, 2003; ter Meulen, Arts & Muffels, 2001, Künemund and Rein, 1999; Sundström, 1999) • Different logics determine the quality, interests and rationales of care (Knijn and Verhagen, 2003), and even perception of what the social problem consists of • Recast of the public-private nexus

21. Outcome 4.c. The outcome dimension • What are consequences of the changes in social care policies and how can we evaluate these? A gendered perspective. • The generalisation of the male worker model to women ignores women’s unequal position in the labour market and the unequal division of unpaid care work • Men and women’s potential for exit/entry of family and labour market • Choice as a central criterion • The Universal care-giver model - ”What then might such a welfare state look like?” (Fraser, 1994, p.612)

22. Outcome • Avenue to full integration of women into paid labour and of men into care and of gender equality in division of paid work/unpaid care: • High provision of high quality, subsidized (public) services will enable especially women to take up paid work and create the necessary job openings • High compensatory cash benefits will, on the other hand, increase gender equality in division of unpaid care as men can afford exchanging a market income with a care income.

23. Figure 1: Day care provision in full-time places and total leave entitlement, maximum weeks multiplied by compensation rates, 1996. Figure 2: Home help, institutional care and compensation rates for main cash transfers for care of older people, 1996

24. Outcome Feminist criticism of GEA • Based on cash benefits such as pensions and unemployment benefits. Critique for overlooking the service aspects as being important elements in the institutional structure of welfare states. • Only focusses on how the welfare state helps you inf you loose your market income (principle of de-commodification) • Overlooks dependency on family

25. Outcome • De-commodification as an expression of citizenship for social rights can be critisized for overlooking how important are other forms of welfare, especially for women’s independency of both family and welfare (O'Connor 1993). • Not possible to analyse sociaol care benefits only from a decommodification aspect – eg service benefits make people able to participate on the labour market through taking over the care responsibilities. • Women are both direct and indirect users of care services. It is therefore often the dependency of care provisions which decides if women – and men – can participate in the labour market. Care provisions commodify!

26. Definition of care regime • A care regime is conceived as a given organisation of social care policies for children and older people which supports specific interventions, values and norms, and which presupposes a gender hierarchy and a gender division of unpaid and paid work. • Consequently the policy logic of a care regime priviledges certain principles of entitlements and responsibilities, implicitly and explicitly expressed as care rights and care obligations. • Rights and obligations may be described specifically in the law but most often the conception of a right or an obligation will develop in conjunction with one’s notion of reciprocity, fairness and reputation.

27. Outset • Women’s access to the labour market and men’s possibilities to devote themselves to caring will be strengthened by providing affordable, available and high quality care services as well as care allowances which are flexible and with a high compensation rate

28. Female care giver model

29. Adult Worker Model

30. Family-Work Model

31. Lessons from analysis of care regimes: • No straight-forward trade-off between services and cash • Context dependency; countries may belong to more than one model • Allows a more comprehensive approach (Cash/services, children/elderly, men/women)

32. A Map, a Method, and a Model of Care Elements of a Theory of Care in Contemporary Moden Society Individual preferences and power Regional differences Change and variation Central and Eastern European countries Relationships of gender and welfare mix Process Content Class and race Comprehensiveness Gendered consequences Outcome Consumerism

33. Thank you!

34. Outcome • Indicators of gender consequences of change to social care: (Chapters 4 and 8) • generosity of care (levels of provision and quality of care services; compensation levels and time to be off work in care cash benefits) • the cash/service combinations • social rights of entitlement • and the employment commitment.