Families have become a focal point in debates of 'new risks' and much needed 'new policies' for Western welfare states. Family policy responses to the new challenges and even the goals associated with welfare policies designed to aid families have, however, varied across countries, and there is much uncertainty about the sources of this variation and the future development of the policy field. This special issue takes stock of recent developments in the field of family policy. It brings together a range of countries that, taken together, map the full spectrum of advanced industrial countries' family policy dilemmas, responses, and intervening institutional and ideational variables. Its goal is to take a first step towards explaining the varied degrees and forms of family policy activism in mature welfare states of Western liberal democracies. The introduction to the special issue first sketches the changing nature and social roles of the family, as they evolved along with public law and welfare policies. It then presents family policy regimes which allow for a systematic account of possible intervening factors in the formulation of country-specific responses. Most importantly, the introduction provides a brief outline of plausible causal approaches to the question of family policy change and comments on their strengths and the potential hazards and describes how the papers assembled here may collectively contribute to a better understanding of what drives and shapes family policy development and how these potential causes are interrelated.
The contributions in this issue convey an impression of the diversity of family policy reforms in the mature Western welfare states. Only a few have undertaken wholesale innovations of their policies and family models. In some countries state activism in the family policy field remains hesitant; in others we witness moderate adjustment of long-standing practices and commitments. The change in family norms and modes of state intervention in family affairs is an ongoing process, far from complete, and possibly not even quite settled in its character and scope. In such a situation academic observers are as much participants in the development as they are analysts. Lacking the benefit of hindsight it is difficult to tell apart the permanent transformations from the ephemeral and hard-to-distinguish elite perceptions of emerging new ideals of work and parenthood from those that are also pervasive in society. Moreover, as academic observers we are involved in creating images of that pervasiveness, and necessity, and momentum.Quite recently 'post-industrialism' has become such an image and catchphrase. Most contributors to the issue acknowledge "new post-industrial risks" risks and the need for new 'post-industrial' policies in one way or another. Reference to 'post-industrialism' is sometimes explicit, often latent and also confirmatory; related necessities are taken for granted. Our postscript therefore begins with a portrayal of postindustrialism, as a concept and frame of reference in academic research and public discourse. Changing norms of work and parenting in the post-industrial society define the context in which diagnoses of ongoing family policy reform all stand in one way or another. The post-industrial welfare state provides the yardstick against which the amount of change is being evaluated and details a model for assessing the direction of policy innovation. We then turn to explanatory factors behind policy innovation. While these do not reveal a unified causal model, we can identify a set of shared causal variables to which all papers relate in their particular ways and which represent a common testimony provided collectively by the contributions. Specifically, in all papers the timing of policy innovation, the role of ideas as a factor accelerating or retarding the process of change, and the agents of change as carriers of ideas come to the fore as significant factors in explaining recent shifts in family policy.
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