Gender and Welfare States in East Asia: Confucianism or Equality?

Is a Confucian cultural climate hostile to gender equality in families and public decision-making? What is the impact of gender equality legislation in East Asia? Approaches to these welfare regimes have ignored gender, while gendered accounts of welfare have neglected East Asia. Comparisons with Western welfare states show strong economies with life expectancy in Japan and South Korea above those of Western social democracies but in contrast there are extremely large gender gaps in employment, earning, unpaid work and parliamentary representation and conjoined with this low fertility rates and and minimal public social spending on childcare and early education.

In this volume, contributors address questions about gender equality in a Confucian context across a wide and varied social policy landscape, from Korea and Taiwan, where Confucian culture is deeply embedded, through China, with its transformations from Confucianism to communism and back, to the mixed cultural environments of Hong Kong and Japan. Overall, the collections asks: Has East Asia's rapid economic transformation been accompanied by social and cultural transformation?

Mandated prevention in child welfare: Considerations from a framework shaping ethical inquiry

Summary: This article outlines a framework for approaching ethical dilemmas arising from the development, evaluation and implementation of child welfare policies. As such, it is relevant to policy-makers, social researchers and social workers. The central tenets of the framework are developed by drawing on ideas from moral philosophy and critical social theory. These ideas are presented as axioms, theorems and corollaries, a format which has been employed in the social sciences to offer a rational justification for a set of claims. • Findings: This process of reasoning leads to four principle axioms that are seen to shape the ethical scrutiny of social policy: 1) problematizing knowledge; 2) utilizing structured forms of inquiry to enhance understanding; 3) engendering enabling communication with those affected by the ethical concern; and 4) enhancing self-awareness. • Applications: The four axioms are then applied, by way of example, to the current and contentious, 'third way' policy of mandated prevention in child welfare, where the aim is to obviate deleterious outcomes in later life. It is argued that the framework can be applied beyond this specific concern to other pressing, ethical challenges in child welfare.

A kingdom united? Devolution and welfare reform in Northern Ireland and Great Britain

Welfare to work has received less attention in devolution studies than other policy sectors. Drawing on Hall’s (1993) ‘orders of change’ model as an analytical framework, this paper addresses this deficit. The devolution settlement and constitutional question in Northern Ireland limit the likelihood of radical departure from ‘parity’ with Great Britain but differences are emerging.

Choice and Welfare Reform: Lone Parents’ Decision Making around Paid Work and Family Life

Welfare-to-work policy in the UK sees ‘choice’ regarding lone parents’ employment decisions increasingly defined in terms of powers of selection between options within active labour market programmes, with constraints on the option of non-market activity progressively tightened. In this paper, we examine the wider choice agenda in public services in relation to lone-parent employment, focusing on the period of welfare reform following the 2007 Freud review of welfare provision. Survey data is used to estimate the extent to which recent policies promoting compulsory job search by youngest dependent child age map onto lone parents' own stated decision-making regarding if and when to enter the labour market. The findings indicate a substantial proportion of lone parents targeted by policy reform currently do not want a job and that their main reported reason is that they are looking after their children. Economically inactive lone mothers also remain more likely to have other chronic employment barriers, which traverse dependent child age categories. Some problems, such as poor health, sickness or disability, are particularly acute among those with older dependent children who are the target of recent activation policy.

Measuring the value to the public of pig welfare improvements: a contingent valuation approach

The welfare of farm animals is a policy area that has increased greatly in importance in recent years. When deciding whether a proposed policy should be implemented, it can be useful for policymakers to compare the costs of the proposed improvement with the perceived benefits. The costs are relatively straightforward to calculate but little is known about the benefits. The Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), a direct survey-based method, can be used to shed some light on this. This approach elicits the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the provision of some public good or service. This paper reports the results of a contingent valuation study of the value of welfare improvements for growing pigs. Attitudes and opinions with regard to form animal welfare are explored and WTP elicited for various pig welfare improvements including increases in space allowance, environmental enrichment and research into improved pig housing design. The results reveal a positive WTP for these improvements. However, it is also noteworthy that a significant proportion of the general public is willing to pay nothing for these improvements. Overall, the study illustrates the usefulness of the CVM approach as a tool for policymakers in assessing the merits of possible policy initiatives affecting the welfare of animals.

The Social Politics of Breastfeeding: Norms, Situations and Policy Implications

This paper aims to explore the assumptions concerning the dynamics of human action underpinning breastfeeding promotion campaigns in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with mothers, the ways in which three problematic assumptions shape both the promotion and experience of contemporary breastfeeding promotion campaigns are explored, in the light of Joas’s theorisation of action’s creativity and pragmatism. Public health efforts to establish breastfeeding as a rational standard against which good mothering can be judged, in ways which rely on a de-contextualised understanding of human action as instrumentally rational, where bodies are imagined as pliable instruments of human intentions, are explored as they play out in the experiences of women embarking on motherhood. The paper concludes that a target-driven health-promotion policy, relying on a mechanistic account of social and emotional life, is contributing to the burden of early motherhood in ways that are not conducive to infant and maternal health and attachment.

Some further implications of incorporating the warm glow of giving into welfare measures: A comment on the use of donation mechanisms by Champ et al

Champ er al. [J. Environ. Management 33, 151-162 (1997)] claim that they have (a) explored the welfare implication of warm glow for Hicksian measures of value for public goods and (b) established that actual donations place a

‘What Adult Worker Model? A Critical Look at Recent Social Policy Reform in Europe from a Gender and Family Perspective

Analyses regularly feature claims that European welfare states are in the process of creating an adult worker model. The theoretical and empirical basis of this argument is examined here by looking first at the conceptual foundations of the adult worker model formulation and then at the extent to which social policy reform in western Europe fits with the argument. It is suggested that the adult worker formulation is under-specified. A framework incorporating four dimensions—the treatment of individuals vis-à-vis their family role and status for the purposes of social rights, the treatment of care, the treatment of the family as a social institution, and the extent to which gender inequality is problematized—is developed and then applied. The empirical analysis reveals a strong move towards individualization as social policy promotes and valorizes individual agency and self-sufficiency and shifts some childcare from the family. Yet evidence is also found of continued (albeit changed) familism. Rather than an unequivocal move to an individualized worker model then, a dual earner, gender-specialized, family arrangement is being promoted. The latter is the middle way between the old dependencies and the new “independence.” This makes for complexity and even ambiguity in policy, a manifestation of which is that reform within countries involves concurrent moves in several directions.

Welfare regime and social class variation in poverty and economic vulnerability in Europe: an analysis of EU-SILC

In this paper we address a set of interrelated issues. These comprise increasing concerns about reliance on nationally based income poverty measures in the context of EU enlargement, the relative merits of one-dimensional versus multidimensional approaches to poverty and social exclusion and the continuing relevance of class-based explanations of life chances. When identifying economically vulnerable groups we find that, contrary to the situation with national income poverty measures, levels of vulnerability vary systematically across welfare regimes. The multidimensional profile of the economically vulnerable sharply differentiates them from the remainder of the population. While they are also characterised by distinctively higher levels of multiple deprivation, a substantial majority of the economically vulnerable are not exposed to such deprivation. Unlike the national relative income approach, the focus on economic vulnerability reveals a pattern of class differentiation that is not dominated by the contrast between the self-employed and all others. In contrast to a European-wide relative income approach, it also simultaneously captures the fact that absolute levels of vulnerability are distinctively higher among the lower social classes in the less comprehensive and generous welfare regimes while class relativities are significantly sharper at the other end of the spectrum.

Welfare regimes and household income packaging in the European Union

This paper uses harmonized data for the member states of the European Union to analyse household income packaging from a 'welfare regimes' perspective. Using data from the third wave of the ECHP, it looks at how the role of welfare transfers in the income package varies across countries and welfare regimes, and assesses whether this is consistent with the predictions of welfare regime theory, having first elaborated some specific hypotheses in that regard. It finds that when one focuses on averages across countries categorized into regimes, many of these hypotheses about the role of transfers are in broad terms borne out by the evidence. However, when one focuses on individual countries rather than regime averages the picture is a good deal more complex and consistency with the range of hypotheses more limited. It is essential that this variation across countries is taken into account in interpreting and using welfare regime theory and typologies.