Introduction

Over the past decade, the study of Parental Leave has burgeoned into a ‘minor academic industry’ that straddles many substantive and interconnected theoretical fields such as work/labour/industry, care, family policies, gender divisions of labour, mothering and fathering, welfare state regimes and comparative social policies. As a policy instrument, a set of practices and a potential facilitator of gender equality, Parental Leave is a complex and multi-layered object of investigation (Moss and Deven, 2015). Key studies have addressed, for example, the gendering of Parental Leave policy design (Escobedo and Wall, 2015; Eydal et al, 2015; Michoń, 2015), the facilitators and inhibitors of fathers’ take-up of Parental Leave and their experiences while on leave (McKay and Doucet, 2010; Tremblay and Lazzari Dodeler, 2015; Wall and O’Brien, 2017), the relationship between fathers’ take-up of leave and gender equality (Almqvist and Duvander, 2014; Meil, 2013; Romero-Balsas, 2015), and, more recently, class differences embedded in social policy design (McKay et al, 2016; see also Chapter Thirteen in this volume).

Across this thriving field, Gosta Esping-Andersen's (1990) seminal work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, his concept of stratification, and his tri-fold characterisation of welfare state regimes (social democratic, conservative and liberal) have been highly influential for social policy and welfare state researchers. This work has been simultaneously ‘loved and debated’ (Rice, 2013, p.93). The burgeoning literature on Esping-Andersen's (1990; 1999) welfare state typology and concepts of stratification and commodification/ decommodification has attempted to refine his framework to address how the typology plays out at a ‘more granulated level’ (Baird and O’Brien, 2015, p.199), a scalar level (Mahon, 2006), and a policy level, rather than at a regime level (Saxonberg, 2013). Some scholars have identified the need for more than three welfare regime types in light of particular national policies (Abrahamson, 1999; Bambra, 2006; Escobedo and Wall, 2015; Rice, 2013), how some countries were ‘misclassified’ in his seminal text (Castles and Mitchell, 1993, p.106), and how these ‘typology-based analyses…have probably reached the point of diminishing returns’ (Orloff, 2009, p.330), especially given the varied ways that neoliberalism intersects with national policies (Deeming, 2017).