Introduction

In fordist industrial society, the term ‘citizen’ was constructed as employed citizens who, by virtue of their relatively strongly standardised employment biographies on the basis of full-time employment, received social rights that were connected to the cultural concept of ‘decommodification’, that is, rights to maintain a reasonable standard of living during periods beyond employment, including unemployment, retirement and illness (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1999). The ‘worker citizen’ was, in many societies, also defined as the male breadwinner who, through his employment income and social security claims, was able to support a financially dependent wife and children. Housewives were seen as ‘non-working’ and therefore did not have their own social rights. Their citizenship status was indirect, meaning that it was derived from the employment position and citizenship of the male breadwinner (Lewis, 1992).

During the transition to a post-fordist service society, this basic cultural construction of citizenship has changed. The development can be characterised as a shift from a notion of citizenship as passive towards a model of active citizenship (Pfau-Effinger, 2003; Jensen and Pfau-Effinger, Chapter One). The main features of ‘active citizenship’ include autonomy, self-responsibility, flexibility, geographical mobility, a professional education and the ability to engage in civil society to fulfil one's own interests. In this context, claiming responsibility for one's own life and well-being is not seen as merely an option; to a increasing degree it also represents an obligation. At the same time, the active citizen is also the ‘Sozialcharakter’ (societal character), who is expected to be particularly able to deal with the demands of a globalised and highly competitive European knowledge society.

The traditional model of the housewife family, where care was allocated to the group of housewives who stayed outside the employment system and provided hidden and unpaid care in the family has fundamentally eroded. By integrating themselves to an increasing extent into waged work, women have individualised themselves and have come to behave as active citizens whose main social integration is via the labour market. In this context, their social rights as family members have been increasingly individualised, whereas their derived social rights – for instance on the basis of survivor pensions – are losing importance (Lewis, 2002).

In the course of the 1990s, the welfare states of modern western societies were confronted with new and changing challenges that were, in part, contradictory. These challenges were caused by exogenous processes, including globalisation and EU integration, as well as endogenous processes involving social and economical change within European societies (Esping-Andersen, 1999, Esping-Andersen et al, 2002). As a consequence of such processes, social security systems came under pressure (Ferrera and Rhodes, 2000; Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000; Hinrichs, 2001). At the same time, new demands pertaining to social security developed as a result of changes in the life histories of individuals (Naegele et al, 2003; Guillemard, Chapter Four, this volume). Processes such as increasing rates of unemployment in the 1990s, increasing labour-force participation of women, increasing migration to EU member states, demographic developments (particularly an increase in the proportion of older people) and the proliferation of unstable forms of employment, together with the related prospect of insecure income, have contributed to these changes (Lind and Møller, 1999). At the same time, new discourses concerning the legitimacy of welfare state spending have emerged at the cultural level. These have often been based on neoliberal and communitarian thinking and have led to the active alignment of welfare states towards the market, resulting in part in the questioning of the state's role in redistribution.

As a consequence of the processes by which welfare states have attempted to find solutions to these new challenges, many European welfare states were restructured in the 1990s and at the beginning of the new millennium. The nature of these changes is a contested issue among social-policy researchers. Some argue that European welfare states are converging towards a neoliberal type of welfare regime in which the welfare state assumes a more marginal role in relation to the market (Gilbert, 2002). Alan Walker (Chapter Three) argues that neoliberal economic globalisation has led to a transformation of European welfare systems along at least two dimensions: firstly, in deregulation, privatisation and marketisation and secondly, in the shift from social justice to economic investment (the productive role of welfare) in the guidance of social policy. Other things being equal, these new developments may increase the risk of poverty and social exclusion.

This book is an outcome of COST Action A13, ‘Changing Labour Markets, Welfare Policies and Citizenship’.The purpose of COST Action A13 has been to examine the effects of social security systems and welfare institutions on the processes of political and social marginalisation and exclusion. So far, COST Action A13 has published or is in the process of publishing the following books and articles in journals:

Jørgen Goul Andersen and Per H. Jensen (eds) Changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship, Bristol: The Policy Press.

Jørgen Goul Andersen, Jochen Clasen, Wim van Oorschot and Knut Halvorsen (eds) Europe's new state of welfare: Unemployment, employment policies and citizenship, Bristol: The Policy Press.

Tony Maltby, Bert de Vroom, Maria Luisa Mirabile and Einar Øverbye (eds) Ageing and the transition to retirement, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Jean-Claude Barbier and Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer (eds) ‘The many worlds of activation’, European Societies, vol 6, no 4, Special issue on activation policies.

Harriet Bradley and Jacques van Hoof (eds) Young people in Europe: Labour markets and citizenship, Bristol: The Policy Press.

Birgit Pfau-Effinger and Birgit Geissler (eds) Care and social integration in European societies, Bristol: The Policy Press.

COST is an intergovernmental organisation for the coordination of scientific and technical research, aiming at the coordination and formation of networks on a European level between nationally funded research projects. Some 80 experts, appointed by 17 countries, have participated in COST Action A13. The COST Action A13 network was in force for five years (1998-2003). For further information about COST Action A13, see www.socsci.aau.dk/cost.

The transformation of service structures has been an important topic in international comparative social policy research for several years. Due to neoliberal-oriented policy discourses, government budget crises, demographic shifts, as well as new discourses on and demand for civil participation in society and the restructuring of the relationship of state and private responsibility, considerable reorganisation processes are taking place. Indeed, there has now been a move beyond the typology of welfare state regimes developed by Esping-Andersen. Since the 1990s, in the framework of theoretical approaches relating to the transformation of services, concepts for the classification of welfare states in terms of the way in which it shapes the provision of care provided formally as services and the informal care delivered within the family have also been developed (Langan and Ostner, 1991; Lewis, 1992; Orloff, 1993; Lewis and Ostner, 1994; Anttonen and Sipilä, 1996; Hanssen, 1997; Knijn and Kremer, 1997; Land and Lewis, 1998; Mósesdóttir, 2000; Siim, 2000; Pfau-Effinger, 2001; Rostgaard, 2002). In this context, it has been argued that the way in which care work is organised is based on gender-specific roles and tasks, and that it influences life opportunities in a gender-specific way. Concepts such as ‘care policies’, ‘gender policies’ or ‘care regimes’ express the distribution of care tasks among private and public actors, and the access to social services, financial aid, or other social welfare rights of those in need of care, or family members providing care, is varied. Moreover, it is stressed that such factors affect the life opportunities of women (Daly and Lewis, 1998; Ungerson, 2000).

A main aim of cross-national analyses of the restructuring of social care services was to identify changes of the ‘welfare mix’, the degree to which the family, the state, the market, and the non-profit sector contribute to the provision of social care (Evers and Olk, 1996). By comparing welfare-state policies in relation to care, it has been possible to identify national care profiles, corresponding to the different dominating actors in the delivery of social services in each case (see Anttonen and Sipilä, 1996), or European care regimes, corresponding to the amount of freedom of choice between paid work and care (Rostgaard, 2002). In addition, familial-versus-individualistic strategies have been discerned (Daatland, 1992, 2001; Daatland and Herlofson, 2003).

In this part, the focus is on the diverse forms of welfare state regulation of care work. In the framework of both case studies and cross-national comparisons, the contributions analyse modes of regulation and their consequences for gender relations, the lifestyle of families, and the labour market position/social integration of women. Nearly every European society is included.

Welfare-state policies affect all characterisations of care work: informal, semi-formal, as well as formal. The provision of public services with formal employment is therefore only one form of the welfarestate policies in this sector, for – as emphasised by Chapter Six – “the very essence of social care lies in … the care provided by family members and relatives”. On the basis of comprehensive studies, the chapters present the different new developments that have been developed in the course of the societal modernisation of the last few centuries for the support of families and the promotion of gender equality policies.

The societal organisation and welfare state support of social care and the relationship between social care and the employment sector is one of the central criteria for a classification of European societies according to equal social rights and integration opportunities of men and women. The chapters in this part discuss the effects of different welfare state policies and care arrangements for the access of women as carers to social rights. The conventional model of the relationship of social rights and social integration with participation in the labour market is analysed theoretically and the modification of this model in the course of the more recent developments of the care arrangements in different welfare states is shown empirically. In a growing number of European societies – as has long been the case in the Nordic countries – social rights due to carers are being granted. This is resulting in the emergence of new patterns of social integration.

Change in welfare state policies on social care has been often neglected in the cross-national research on welfare state restructuring in Europe in recent years. In current discourse and research on welfare-state policies in relation to gender, as well as on the question of social exclusion and social integration in relation to care, this issue plays a more important role.

In general, however, analyses have mainly focused on the question of to what degree social care has been formalised and transformed into formal employment, and how this has contributed to an increase in the social integration of women (Kröger, 2001, p 3), while less emphasis has been put on the way informal care work itself has changed, and how such changes can be explained.

In this chapter, we discuss on a conceptual/theoretical level what it means to analyse change in informal care work, as well as, in a comprehensive conceptual framework, processes of the formalisation of care work.

Concepts of ‘care’

As an initial approach, the concept of care should be understood empirically thus:

With the concept of care in social sciences research, or the established English term ‘social care’ (Daly and Lewis, 1998), scientific concepts of welfare production were broadened with a critical intention: to emphasise the dichotomisation of societal life into public and private spheres, whereby care is included in the latter (secondary) private sphere, with the consequence of downgrading social care – also in its occupational or professional form – and with that, the work of women (Lewis, 1992; Daly and Lewis, 1998). Social science and economic gender research on ‘care work’ in the family and labour-market has been carried out (and received) by multiple disciplines from the beginning, and that applies equally to the welfare state debate.

‘Care’ is not just a comprehensive, descriptive approach to the analysis of the work of accompanying and educating people and attending to their personal needs.

In many countries, social rights in relation to formal and informal care have been expanded despite tight state budgets. In Chapter Fourteen, the role of political actors in relation to this policy change will be analysed, and the relationship between cultural change and policy change will be examined. In the final concluding chapter, it will be shown how the findings of the book contribute to the further development of the academic discussions on ‘care’.