Introduction

How employed fathers experience their workplaces’ reactions to parental leave is the topic of this chapter. The aim is to understand how the Norwegian policy regime contributes to workplace practices and cultures that can promote active fathering. In Norway, the father's quota has become a mature institution. Internationally, fathers are increasingly becoming the target for government incentives to encourage their involvement in the family, father-specific leave from work being one such measure.

Work organizations contribute to construct fathering practices, and because they are increasingly confronted with the demands of social policy regulations, they are an interesting context for studying change in fathering practices (Liebig and Oechsle, 2017: 9). Research on greater father involvement has often been concerned with barriers represented by work organizations, and many work–family studies have shown how gendered assumptions at the workplace have made them changeresistant towards fathering. Lewis and Stumbitz (2017) raise the question of how research can progress beyond describing barriers and instead identify conditions of change and shifts in workplaces to contribute to involved fatherhood.

A concern of this chapter is to explore how national parental leave policies with a father's quota affect the workplace. Parental leave is now available to fathers in many countries, but its usage is often low (see Koslowski et al, 2019). This is different in the Nordic countries, something that directs our attention to the importance of institutional context, which not only includes welfare state regulations of parental leave rights, but also their implementation in working life.

How the leave is implemented in working life has received little attention by parental leave researchers, and compromises between fathers and organizations have hardly been addressed (Liebig and Oechsle, 2017). Scarce attention has also been directed towards the wider institutional contexts of which the parental leave regulations are part. According to Lewis and Stumbitz (2017), work–family studies in general have neglected context-sensitive research, particularly when it comes to understanding how the various contextual levels interact. Contextual awareness is important to catch the impact of different and changing institutions. Contexts include working life and social policies that vary over time as well as between countries, and include a country's family and gender norms. Responding to Lewis and Stumbitz's (2017) call for contextual awareness, this chapter focuses on two contextual levels: the welfare state in terms of parental leave regulations and working life culture.