Mara Yerkes
Biographic Data
| ID | 307496 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mara Yerkes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mara |
| FAMILY NAME | Yerkes |
| SIGNATURE | YERKES M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5480-4878 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 326 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Perspectives on the future
The work-family interface is in constant flux and faced with numerous future challenges. Yet much work-family scholarship problematizes current work-family issues or analyses past experiences with little detailed consideration of the risks and opportunities individuals are likely to encounter in the future. This perspective is needed to challenge and extend current work-family scholarship to how external developments are likely to affect the ways…
Fathers Combining Work and Care
Flexible work arrangements significantly impact childcare divisions among dual-earner parents, yet few studies address their impact on fathers as primary caregivers. This article explores the relationship between fathers’ ability to work flexibly and their share of childcare responsibility across financial situations. A capabilities perspective is applied to better understand why fathers’ childcare aspirations may not align with what they are cap…
Health is wealth and documents are the currency
Undocumented migrants (UMs) in the Netherlands face significant barriers to accessing healthcare despite legal entitlements to ‘necessary medical care.’ Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play a critical role in facilitating healthcare access for UMs, yet empirical research on their contributions remains limited. This study aims to explore how NGOs perceive their role in facilitating healthcare access for UMs in the Netherlands and how these p…
European Union Youth Policy
Many young adult Europeans face difficult times. High unemployment rates, flexible labour markets, housing shortages, and low minimum wages can limit young adults' current and future development. European Union (EU) policy could encourage Member States to counter these circumstances, offer resources to support Member States in improving the lives of young adults, or at least recommend solutions. We aim to study the EU's 2010–2020 social policy ap…
To the Fifties and Back Again? A Comparative Analysis of Changes in Breadwinning Arrangements during the First Year of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Four European Countries
Over the past decades, opposite-sex couples have moved away from the traditional ‘male breadwinner model’ towards a more egalitarian division of paid work. However, lockdown measures and the closures of schools and childcare services during the COVID-19 pandemic may have challenged egalitarian divisions of paid work, pushing couples into traditional breadwinning arrangements. This study investigates whether opposite-sex couples experienced short-…
Between Benefits and Burdens
This study investigates how parents' perceived accessibility to childcare benefits differs among parents with and without migrant backgrounds, focusing on the roles of functional and digital literacy. Despite the increased availability of childcare services, complex policy procedures and digital requirements can create barriers to access, particularly among parents with a migrant background. Using representative panel data from the Netherlands, w…
Local implementation of long-term care and the shaping of carers’ capabilities in the Netherlands and Slovenia
This article explores the implementation of long-term care (LTC) systems in four municipalities in Slovenia and the Netherlands against a context of decentralisation and deinstitutionalisation. As these reforms have increased reliance on carers for home-based care, local implementation shapes the capabilities of carers. Our analysis identifies three main challenges at the local level: fragmented information sources; treating carers as resources i…
The Strength of Weak Ties? Understanding Educational Differences in Parents' Childcare Benefit Knowledge by Applying a Social Capital Approach
Childcare benefits are an important policy instrument to increase the use of formal childcare and often women's participation in the labour market. However, lower-educated parents continue to make less use of childcare benefits and subsequently less use of formal childcare services. We argue that lower-educated parents are potentially less knowledgeable about childcare benefit regulations, a knowledge gap that may be explained by educational diff…
Five blindspots in reform studies of early childhood education and care (Ecec) policy
Policy reform evaluations are an important source of knowledge regarding the (in)effectiveness of policies and have become increasingly influential in informing policymaking. A key advantage of these studies lies in their careful description of a single reform, observing outcomes before and after the reform was implemented, and making precise statements about the effectiveness of the policy reform among its beneficiaries. However, the very nature…
Extending theoretical explanations for gendered divisions of care during the Covid-19 pandemic
ObjectiveThis article extends pre-pandemic theories, empirically testing the salience of pandemic-based absolute and relative resources and time availability mechanisms for understanding gendered divisions of childcare across the COVID-19 pandemic.BackgroundMultiple cross-sectional studies have examined gender differences in pandemic divisions of childcare, yet few longitudinal studies exist, particularly using pandemic-specific theoretical mecha…
Unprecedented injustice
The Netherlands recently experienced a crisis in childcare benefits, leading to 'unprecedented injustice' for many parents falsely accused of defrauding the childcare benefit system. This crisis highlights multiple barriers in parents' ability to access childcare already evident prior to the crisis, including the far-reaching digitalisation of social policies and childcare benefits in particular. Digitalisation can make parents feel childcare ser…
The risks of job flexibility
While welfare states and work organisations often provide policies to facilitate a reconciliation of paid work and informal care, the literature pays little attention to employees’ actual capabilities to engage with such policies. In this article, we apply the capabilities approach to interview data from managers and employees in the Netherlands to understand employees’ use or non-use of the policies. We found that job flexibility may help worker…
Resources for whom? Conceptualizing and comparing childcare policy design for parents of children with additional or complex care needs
Affordable, good quality childcare creates opportunities for many parents to better reconcile work and care or reduces family care to enable other valuable contributions to society. However, childcare studies often overlook parents of children with additional or complex care needs. These parents spend a greater amount of time on caregiving, providing care that goes beyond that of parents of typically developing children. As such, their opportunit…
Comparative Measurement of Citizens’ Perceptions of Local Policies
Comparative social policy research continues to face considerable methodological challenges. Scholars particularly struggle to capture sub-national policy variation in comparatively reliable ways, including subjective perceptions of local policies. Local-level variation increases the need for conceptual and methodological attention to comparability across differing national, cultural, and linguistic settings. The article outlines a conceptually g…
Women’s stress during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany and the Netherlands
Flexible work arrangements in collective agreements
Collective labour agreements are an understudied yet key aspect of flexible work policies, which are crucial resources for workers in combining work, family and other life domains. Despite a rich comparative work-family literature on flexible work arrangements at the company and national levels, little attention has been given to those negotiated collectively. Evidence on this topic is needed because such agreements can complement low levels of p…
What Role Do Occupational Differences Play in Subjective Working Conditions Throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic
Evidence on the role of occupational differences in subjective working conditions during the pandemic is limited. However, an understanding of how such inequalities develop throughout the pandemic is needed to prevent an overall worsening of social inequality in society. We study occupational inequalities in subjective working conditions-work pressure and work-life balance-throughout the pandemic. We use four waves of the representative, probabil…
The Covid-19 pandemic and temporal change in metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular disease
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, including the restrictive measures taken to reduce the spread of the virus, negatively affected people's health behavior. We explored whether the pandemic also had an effect on metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) in women and men. We conducted a natural experiment, using data from 6962 participants without CVD at baseline (2011-2015) of six ethnic groups of the HELIUS study in …
Fathers stepping up? A cross-national comparison of fathers’ domestic labour and parents’ satisfaction with the division of domestic labour during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted work and family life around the world. For parents, this upending meant a potential re-negotiation of the ‘status quo’ in the gendered division of labour. A comparative lens provides extended understandings of changes in fathers’ domestic work based in socio-cultural context – in assessing the size and consequences of change in domestic labour in relation to the type of work-care regime. Using novel harmonized data…
Flexible work arrangements for work-life balance
Purpose This paper aims to assess the design of national-level flexible work arrangement (FWA) policies, evaluating their potential to serve as an effective resource for employees to work flexibly depending on how they set the stage for flexibility claims that will be subject to industrial and workplace dynamics. Design/methodology/approach Using a capability approach, the authors conceptualize and operationalize two aspects of FWA policy design,…
Where to from here? Social policy research in future European societies
In this concluding chapter, we reflect on future research about social policy in Europe. We note three key developments in research about social policy before outlining where how future research should be directed. We note the need for research to broaden the view on social policy once again, the need for greater theoretical development to ensure a robust future of research on social policy, and the need to further strengthen and exploit the mult…
Social Policy in Changing European Societies
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach this book provides a cutting-edge, in-depth account of social policy research today, how we got here, and where future research should be headed. It defines the core research agenda for the future covering multiple social policy fields, including care, family, health…
Research Handbook on Leave Policy
status: Published
Gender and employment
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of women in the labor market and the unrecognized value of essential occupations such as care and education In many countries across the world, people applauded care workers from their balconies in the spring of 2020 (Wikipedia, 2022), in essence clapping for the many women employed in the strongly feminized care sector. Similarly, workers in the strongly feminized educational sector have shown…
A trade-off between the employment of older and younger workers? An historical approach to the political framing and reframing of labour market crowding out in the Dutch welfare state
Against a background of population ageing, rising welfare state costs, and the potential for intergenerational conflict, there is continued belief in the unsubstantiated idea that older and younger workers crowd each other out in the labour market. Taking a longitudinal approach, we historically describe the framing and reframing of the idea of crowding out in Dutch political discourse between 1977–2017. Using a rich dataset of all political part…
Gender differences in the quality of leisure
Considerable work-family research has investigated the gendered division of work and care. Gender differences in leisure time have received much less attention from work-family scholars, despite the potential importance of such inequalities for women’s quality of life. Combining key insights from the substantial gendered leisure studies literature with work-family scholarship, the current study examines cross-national variation in gender differen…
Community, work, and family in times of Covid-19
We are living in challenging and uncertain times. At the time this article was edited, there were already more than 2.4 million confirmed cases of the corona virus (COVID-19) (World Health Organization, 2020). Nearly every country across the globe is struggling to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus and limit its health, societal, and economic consequences. The full impact on community, work, family, and its intersections is not yet clear. As…
Mothers and work-life balance
This article presents data from a project exploring women's experiences of work and care. It focuses primarily on work-life balance as a problematic concept. Social and economic transformations across advanced post-industrial economies have resulted in concerns about how individuals manage their lives across the two spheres of work and family and achieve a work-life balance. Governments across the European Union have introduced various measures t…
Creating capabilities
This article analyses childcare services in six countries, assessing this policy instrument’s potential to facilitate parents’ capabilities for arranging childcare in a way they have reason to value. It draws on Sen’s capability approach to conceptualize and assess childcare policy design across five key aspects of childcare provision (accessibility, availability, affordability, quality and flexibility) in a country-comparative perspective. The c…
Part-time work in the Dutch welfare state
The Netherlands is often heralded for the success of its ‘part-time model’ of employment. Yet the supposed success of this model raises the question whether the Dutch part-time variant is the ideal gender-neutral policy approach. A comparative, longitudinal analysis of employment transitions in the Netherlands and the UK shows that while the Dutch part-time model may be unique, its outcomes are not. In both cases, gender inequality in employment …
Sometimes they just want to cry for their mum’
This study investigates how couples negotiate and rationalise gendered divisions in infant care. We take a social constructivist approach to analysing qualitative data from 11 couples with infants (aged 6 to 8 months). We find that even where fathers are actively involved in infant care there are strong gendered divisions in the types of care that parents provide. These divisions are rationalised by gendered discourses regarding mother's superior…
Fathers stepping up? A cross-national comparison of fathers’ domestic labour and parents’ satisfaction with the division of domestic labour during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted work and family life around the world. For parents, this upending meant a potential re-negotiation of the ‘status quo’ in the gendered division of labour. A comparative lens provides extended understandings of changes in fathers’ domestic work based in socio-cultural context – in assessing the size and consequences of change in domestic labour in relation to the type of work-care regime. Using novel harmonized data…
Where's the community in community, work and family? A community-based capabilities approach
Community is a key dimension in the work–family interface as highlighted by the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Yet it is critically understudied by much work–family scholarship. We highlight and address crucial barriers preventing the integration of the community concept, developing an interdisciplinary community-based capabilities approach. This approach conceptualizes three components of community: local relationships, local policies and locality (p…
An Institutional Embeddedness of Welfare Opinions? The Link between Public Opinion and Social Policy in the Netherlands (1970-2004)
A major shortcoming in the existing literature on welfare state legitimacy is that it cannot explain when social policy designs follow public preferences and when public opinion follows existing policy designs and why. Scholars examining the influence of public opinion on welfare policies, as well as scholars investigating institutional influences on individual welfare attitudes, find empirical evidence to support both relationships. While a rela…
Attitudes Toward Parenthood, Partnership, and Social Rights for Diverse Families
Attitudes toward the civil and social citizenship rights of individuals in diverse family forms are underresearched. We use cross-national data from a pilot study among students in Denmark, Spain, Croatia, Italy, and the Netherlands to explore cross-country differences in beliefs about partnership, parenthood, and social rights of same-sex couples vs. heterosexual couples or married vs. cohabiting couples. The results suggest a polarization in st…
Diversity in Work
Employment patterns are gender‐driven, yet analyses of women's employment have yet to explain this diversity across time. This article examines the variation in women's employment patterns across time and across countries. It focuses on the effects of individual differences in educational level, marital status and motherhood in The Netherlands, Germany and the UK across four birth cohorts for the period 1992–2002. The results from a quantitative …
Crisis and Welfare State Change in the Netherlands
The current economic crisis is assumed to create new pressures for the welfare state. In this article we investigate to what extent the crisis leads to changes in Dutch welfare state policies and institutions. Usually these changes are operationalized in terms of retrenchment (cost reduction) or restructuring (institutions). We focus, however, on developments in social rights in the hope of gaining better insight into the content and extent of po…
One welfare state emerging? Convergence versus divergence in 16 western countries
In this article we try to investigate the empirical validity of the convergence thesis, which assumes that welfare states are increasingly similar because more generous universal welfare states are adopting policies of retrenchment and neo-liberalization. Using data on the popularity of neo-liberal ideology, welfare state expenditures and the generosity of this spending for 16 western countries, we find that there is no general trend towards neo-…
Choice or constraint? Women’s weekly working hours in comparative perspective
This article analyses the influence of individualworking preferences onwomen’s labour market behaviour in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, addressingthe question: to what extent do individual preferences have a causal effect onwomen’s averageweeklyworking hours? Using longitudinal panel data from all three countries, a fixed-effects model is applied to measure the effect of individual preferences in year t-1 onwomen’s averageweekl…
Unequal but balanced
One year after the European work-life balance directive, which recognises the need for work-family policy support, measures to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic began shaping parents' work-life balance in significant ways. Academically, we are challenged to explore whether existing theoretical frameworks hold in this new environment with combined old and new policy frameworks. We are also challenged to understand the nuanced ways in which …
Workers' well-being in the context of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic
In this Voices article, we use emerging evidence to reflect on the consequences of Covid-19 for various aspects of workers' wellbeing. This brief review emphasises how COVID-19 exacerbates existing, well-understood inequalities, along the intersections of community, work, and family. Workers on the periphery of the labour market, including non-standard workers and the self-employed, but also women and low-paid workers, are experiencing significan…
Central‐local tensions in the decentralization of social policies
European welfare reforms often involve the decentralization of social care services. This potentially creates central‐local tensions for professionals implementing and delivering policies on the ground. Using the capability approach (CA) as a conceptual frame, this article compares local professionals' experiences in the decentralization of social work and care services in an urban and a rural mid‐sized municipality in the Netherlands. It offers …
An unsettled bargain? Mothers' perceptions of justice and fairness in paid work
Mothers' return to work following childbirth is widely recognized as a key stage in establishing employment arrangements that disadvantage them in the long run. This article investigates why mothers accept these unequal arrangements using data from a qualitative study of 109 Australian mothers. It focuses on mothers' perceptions of the fairness and justice of the flexibility of arrangements they commonly enter into upon return to work. The articl…
Between Benefits and Burdens
This study investigates how parents' perceived accessibility to childcare benefits differs among parents with and without migrant backgrounds, focusing on the roles of functional and digital literacy. Despite the increased availability of childcare services, complex policy procedures and digital requirements can create barriers to access, particularly among parents with a migrant background. Using representative panel data from the Netherlands, w…
Extending theoretical explanations for gendered divisions of care during the Covid-19 pandemic
ObjectiveThis article extends pre-pandemic theories, empirically testing the salience of pandemic-based absolute and relative resources and time availability mechanisms for understanding gendered divisions of childcare across the COVID-19 pandemic.BackgroundMultiple cross-sectional studies have examined gender differences in pandemic divisions of childcare, yet few longitudinal studies exist, particularly using pandemic-specific theoretical mecha…
Collective Protection for New Social Risks
Issues such as caring and family policy have received increased attention within the sociological literature on the welfare state during the past decades. At the same time, there has been much debate about the protection of social risks. In particular, scholars have questioned the ability of welfare states to respond to so-called new social risks, such as reconciling work and care. The literature on new social risks assumes welfare states will ha…
Unprecedented injustice
The Netherlands recently experienced a crisis in childcare benefits, leading to 'unprecedented injustice' for many parents falsely accused of defrauding the childcare benefit system. This crisis highlights multiple barriers in parents' ability to access childcare already evident prior to the crisis, including the far-reaching digitalisation of social policies and childcare benefits in particular. Digitalisation can make parents feel childcare ser…
Flexible work arrangements for work-life balance
Purpose This paper aims to assess the design of national-level flexible work arrangement (FWA) policies, evaluating their potential to serve as an effective resource for employees to work flexibly depending on how they set the stage for flexibility claims that will be subject to industrial and workplace dynamics. Design/methodology/approach Using a capability approach, the authors conceptualize and operationalize two aspects of FWA policy design,…
Empowerment as Contested Terrain
Sociological analysis has mainly portrayed empowerment as a manipulative, masking discourse. However, various actors in society view it as the opposite of domination and espouse it as a goal. Empowerment can constitute a discursive field shaped by its internal contractions between autonomy and control, between ambition and risk of programmed failure, exacerbated by the emphasis on responsibility, and between focus and stigmatization. The paper pr…
The disconnection between policy practices and women's lived experiences
Combining work and family life is central to women‘s participation in the labour market. Work-life balance has been a key objective of UK and Dutch policy since the 1990s but policies created at the national level do not always connect with the day to day experiences of women juggling caring and domestic responsibilities with paid work. Using qualitative data from a European Social Fund Objective 3 project the paper explores women‘s lived realiti…
Choice or constraint? Women’s weekly working hours in comparative perspective
This article analyses the influence of individualworking preferences onwomen’s labour market behaviour in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, addressingthe question: to what extent do individual preferences have a causal effect onwomen’s averageweeklyworking hours? Using longitudinal panel data from all three countries, a fixed-effects model is applied to measure the effect of individual preferences in year t-1 onwomen’s averageweekl…
Welfare State Change - Towards a Third Way
One welfare state emerging? Convergence versus divergence in 16 western countries
In this article we try to investigate the empirical validity of the convergence thesis, which assumes that welfare states are increasingly similar because more generous universal welfare states are adopting policies of retrenchment and neo-liberalization. Using data on the popularity of neo-liberal ideology, welfare state expenditures and the generosity of this spending for 16 western countries, we find that there is no general trend towards neo-…
Diversity in Work
Employment patterns are gender‐driven, yet analyses of women's employment have yet to explain this diversity across time. This article examines the variation in women's employment patterns across time and across countries. It focuses on the effects of individual differences in educational level, marital status and motherhood in The Netherlands, Germany and the UK across four birth cohorts for the period 1992–2002. The results from a quantitative …
Part-time work in the Dutch welfare state
The Netherlands is often heralded for the success of its ‘part-time model’ of employment. Yet the supposed success of this model raises the question whether the Dutch part-time variant is the ideal gender-neutral policy approach. A comparative, longitudinal analysis of employment transitions in the Netherlands and the UK shows that while the Dutch part-time model may be unique, its outcomes are not. In both cases, gender inequality in employment …
Social risk protection in collective agreements
To what extent can collective bargaining compensate for a decline in or absence of welfare state protection against social risks? In this article, we use a comprehensive collective agreement database to analyse social risk coverage in the Netherlands from 1995 to 2009. We compare two forms of social risk, disability and work—life arrangements, analysing the share of collective agreements that offer these arrangements across time. Our results show…
The disconnection between policy practices and women's lived experiences
Combining work and family life is central to women‘s participation in the labour market. Work-life balance has been a key objective of UK and Dutch policy since the 1990s but policies created at the national level do not always connect with the day to day experiences of women juggling caring and domestic responsibilities with paid work. Using qualitative data from a European Social Fund Objective 3 project the paper explores women‘s lived realiti…
Crisis and Welfare State Change in the Netherlands
The current economic crisis is assumed to create new pressures for the welfare state. In this article we investigate to what extent the crisis leads to changes in Dutch welfare state policies and institutions. Usually these changes are operationalized in terms of retrenchment (cost reduction) or restructuring (institutions). We focus, however, on developments in social rights in the hope of gaining better insight into the content and extent of po…
An Institutional Embeddedness of Welfare Opinions? The Link between Public Opinion and Social Policy in the Netherlands (1970-2004)
A major shortcoming in the existing literature on welfare state legitimacy is that it cannot explain when social policy designs follow public preferences and when public opinion follows existing policy designs and why. Scholars examining the influence of public opinion on welfare policies, as well as scholars investigating institutional influences on individual welfare attitudes, find empirical evidence to support both relationships. While a rela…
The Transformation of Solidarity
This pioneering study investigates the consequences of social indivualization and economic globalization on the welfare state. With a particular focus on solidarity, or the willingness to accept shared risks, the editors look at the dynamics between the aging and the young, the healthy and the sick, and the working and unemployed within welfare states. The Transformation of Solidarity translates recent changes in the global economy into risk mana…
Towards a New Welfare Settlement?
The Transformation of Solidarity
Light Image Imagination
Empowerment as Contested Terrain
Sociological analysis has mainly portrayed empowerment as a manipulative, masking discourse. However, various actors in society view it as the opposite of domination and espouse it as a goal. Empowerment can constitute a discursive field shaped by its internal contractions between autonomy and control, between ambition and risk of programmed failure, exacerbated by the emphasis on responsibility, and between focus and stigmatization. The paper pr…
Mothers and work-life balance
This article presents data from a project exploring women's experiences of work and care. It focuses primarily on work-life balance as a problematic concept. Social and economic transformations across advanced post-industrial economies have resulted in concerns about how individuals manage their lives across the two spheres of work and family and achieve a work-life balance. Governments across the European Union have introduced various measures t…
Collective Protection for New Social Risks
Issues such as caring and family policy have received increased attention within the sociological literature on the welfare state during the past decades. At the same time, there has been much debate about the protection of social risks. In particular, scholars have questioned the ability of welfare states to respond to so-called new social risks, such as reconciling work and care. The literature on new social risks assumes welfare states will ha…
In our hands
Sometimes they just want to cry for their mum’
This study investigates how couples negotiate and rationalise gendered divisions in infant care. We take a social constructivist approach to analysing qualitative data from 11 couples with infants (aged 6 to 8 months). We find that even where fathers are actively involved in infant care there are strong gendered divisions in the types of care that parents provide. These divisions are rationalised by gendered discourses regarding mother's superior…
Capabilities to Combine Work and Family in the Netherlands
In this article, we assess the extent to which national-level work-family policies in the Netherlands enable various groups of working parents (men versus women, low versus highly educated, and dependent employees versus self-employed) to combine work and care. We answer this question by conducting a policy analysis using Sen’s (1992) capability framework. Applying this perspective, we evaluate the availability, accessibility and design of work-f…
An unsettled bargain? Mothers' perceptions of justice and fairness in paid work
Mothers' return to work following childbirth is widely recognized as a key stage in establishing employment arrangements that disadvantage them in the long run. This article investigates why mothers accept these unequal arrangements using data from a qualitative study of 109 Australian mothers. It focuses on mothers' perceptions of the fairness and justice of the flexibility of arrangements they commonly enter into upon return to work. The articl…
Creating capabilities
This article analyses childcare services in six countries, assessing this policy instrument’s potential to facilitate parents’ capabilities for arranging childcare in a way they have reason to value. It draws on Sen’s capability approach to conceptualize and assess childcare policy design across five key aspects of childcare provision (accessibility, availability, affordability, quality and flexibility) in a country-comparative perspective. The c…
Attitudes Toward Parenthood, Partnership, and Social Rights for Diverse Families
Attitudes toward the civil and social citizenship rights of individuals in diverse family forms are underresearched. We use cross-national data from a pilot study among students in Denmark, Spain, Croatia, Italy, and the Netherlands to explore cross-country differences in beliefs about partnership, parenthood, and social rights of same-sex couples vs. heterosexual couples or married vs. cohabiting couples. The results suggest a polarization in st…
Social Policy and the Capability Approach
The capability approach, an increasingly popular conceptual and theoretical framework focused on what individuals are able to do and be, offers a unique evaluative perspective to social policy analysis. This book explores the advantages of this approach and offers a way forward in addressing conceptual and empirical issues as they apply specifically to social policy research and practice. Short conceptual and empirical chapters provide clear exam…
In the best interests of children? The paradox of intensive parenting and children’s health
The family environment and parental guidance are generally considered to be key drivers of children’s health behaviours. Parents, mostly mothers, have become a focal point of policies aimed at preventing children’s health and well-being problems (e.g. childhood obesity). The underlying intensive parenting ideology places significant pressure on parents (notably mothers), requiring them to spend a great deal of time, energy and money on their chil…
The ambiguity of social return policies in the Netherlands
Social procurement policies, which aim to create employment opportunities for vulnerable groups, such as the long‐term unemployed and the disabled, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Despite their growing popularity, empirical research on this topic is limited. Combining insights from the social policy and public administration literatures, we explore the development and implementation of “social return” policies by the Dutch gover…
Political science (42 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Economics (36 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Work-Family Balance Challenges (25 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (24 works) · Demographic economics (19 works) · Work (physics (19 works) · Medicine (18 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (17 works)