This study develops a conceptual framework with a capabilities and agency approach for analyzing work–life balance (WLB) applied in two societies (Hungary and Sweden), which have different working time regimes, levels of precarious employment, and gender equality discourses and norms. Inspired by Amartya Sen, we present a model illustrating how agency freedom for WLB depends on multiple resources at the individual, work organizational, institutional, and normative/societal levels. Using a unique qualitative survey conducted in two cities, Budapest and Stockholm, we analyze how mothers and fathers subjectively experience the tensions between family and work demands, and their possibilities for alternative choices (agency freedom). We find similarities in these tensions involving time pressure and time poverty, cutting across gender and education. Our Hungarian parents, nevertheless, experience greater agency inequalities for WLB, which reflect weaker institutional resources (conversion factors) as well as cultural/societal norms that act as constraints for WLB claims in the workplace and household. Our study reveals that Swedish parents, both men and women, express a strong sense of entitlement to exercise rights to care.

European policy and discourse create crosscurrents for fathers: the promotion of work-family balance (WFB) and more involved fathering versus work-focused competitiveness and productivity goals in globalized economies. Using Amartya Sen's capabilities and agency paradigm, the authors provide a theoretical framework for analyzing agency inequalities in WFB: the disjuncture between norms/values and practices and between policies and fathers' capabilities to exercise them. The authors apply the capability framework to comparative European data considering working times and desired working times, flexibility and autonomy in employment, as well as perceptions of economic security and job security. The authors find differences in fathers' capabilities and agency for WFB across countries representing different welfare regime configurations, most strikingly between old and new EU member states. The majority of the European fathers wanted to reduce working hours substantially despite possible reductions in pay, underscoring the value of the capabilities framework for understanding potential freedoms for achieving WFB.

Research on the welfare state has been particularly concerned with variations in inequality between societies. These studies tend to view the family as a unit of shared interests where incomes are pooled and distributed equally This study makes a theoretical and empirical case for why it is important to look at economic dependency within the family in comparative welfare state research. Hirschman's theoretical framework of exit and voice is applied to the power relations in the family Using comparative data from several Western societies, this study shows empirically that the relationship between overall inequality and women's economic dependency is rather weak. Some guidelines and directions for incorporating women's economic dependency into future comparative welfare state research are suggested.

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This article is about the transnational movement of policy discourses on childcare. It considers whether the spread of neoliberal ideas with their emphasis on marketisation, on the one hand, and a social investment discourse on the other, are leading to convergence in childcare arrangements in Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden) and liberal Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia and Canada). We find points of convergence around both themes at the level of policy discourse and continued diversity in the way these ideas are translated into actual policies. In other words, convergence is mediated by institutions and political realignments.