Local childcare policy and the changing gender contract

Sihto, Tiina

doi:10.1108/ijssp-12-2016-0139

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The act delegates the monitoring and guidance of private services to municipal authorities. The neo-liberal trend has challenged the dominance of municipal ECEC services since the 1990s (see Sihto, 2018). For example, the proportion of private ECEC services grew from 2.5% to 16.2% of all ECEC services between 1997 and 2016 (National Institute for Health and Welfare, 2016).…”

Section: The Changing Context Of Finnish Ececmentioning

confidence: 99%

Has something changed? Leaders’, practitioners’ and parents’ interpretations after renewed early childhood education and care legislation in Finnish private centres

Mäntyjärvi

Puroila

2019

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

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This study addresses leadership enactment in the context of early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres in Finland. The study was implemented at a time when the ECEC legislation has changed. The research draws from relational leadership theory to address the following questions: How do leaders, practitioners and parents evaluate ad interpret the impacts of changing ECEC legislation in private Finnish centres? How do these evaluations and interpretations reflect leadership enactment? This study conceptualises leadership as a context-dependent phenomenon constituted by shared meanings and relationships among leaders and other human actors in private centres. To achieve a multi-level picture about leadership enactment in private ECEC centres, this study employed a mixed-method approach. The data was collected through three online surveys and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings revealed that private centres form a heterogeneous context for leadership enactment in Finnish ECEC. Compared with practitioners and parents, the leaders were the most positive in their interpretations of the legislative changes. Especially, the study found a gap between the leaders' and parents' evaluations on how the legislative changes have impacted the daily praxis. The study calls for further research and tools for developing leadership enactment in private ECEC. Keywords:Early childhood education and care, Finland, leadership enactment, private early childhood education and care centre, relational leadership, societal change (2011), for instance, raised the question of how Nordic countries can maintain high-quality ECEC in the midst of societal changes driven by neoliberalism and increased marketisation. Moss (2016) pointed out that the marketisation approach makes quality of services a question of choice. Because marketisation and privatisation have emerged as global considerations in ECEC, it is important to explore the directions taken in various countries.The concept of marketisation has different meanings depending on time and place. In this study, marketisation refers to governmentally driven policies that support, enforce, and authorise market mechanisms and procedures to provide public services, including privatisation, outsourcing, competition, and choice (Brennan et al. 2012;Dýrfjörð and Magnúsdóttir 2016). Privatisation is

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Section: The Changing Context Of Finnish Ececmentioning

confidence: 99%

Has something changed? Leaders’, practitioners’ and parents’ interpretations after renewed early childhood education and care legislation in Finnish private centres

Mäntyjärvi

Puroila

2019

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

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“…This absence of gender is not surprising, as several previous studies (e.g. Ahosola and Henrikson, 2012;Autto, 2016;Sihto, 2018) have revealed the absence of gender from local policy documents, as well as lack of gender impact assessments done in local decision-making in Finland (Elomäki, 2014). Also the wider overall discourse on gender equality in Finland relies on the paradoxical idea that the best way of promoting gender equality is to stay silent on issues related to gender (e.g.…”

Section: Evaluating the Distribution Of Responsibility Among Differenmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…The question of gender was absent from the local care strategies that were analysed here (cf. Ahosola and Henriksson, 2012;Bond-Taylor, 2017;Sihto 2018). Even though both professional and informal care are persistently gendered, the local care strategies never elaborate on exactly who is expected to bear heavier care responsibilities in the future, nor on how or under what circumstances this will be done in practice.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dividing Responsibility for Care: Tracing the Ethics of Care in Local Care Strategies

Sihto¹

2020

Social Policy and Society

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This article analyses local care policies through the lens of the feminist ethics of care. The focus is on the normative understandings regarding care that emerge in local care strategy documents and how these understandings relate with the concept of ‘responsibility’. In this article, strategies published by the municipality of Jyväskylä, Finland, between the years 2008 and 2016, are analysed using Trace analysis. The research questions are: How is the division of responsibility regarding care among different actors constructed in the strategies? How do the roles assigned to these different actors accord with the principles of ethics of care? The findings show that the documents emphasise individual responsibility in managing risks related to old age, as the norms of local societal institutions are largely detached from the principles of ethics of care. The analysis also reveals the absence of gender and human frailty from the care strategy documents. Rethinking the strategies through the lens of the ethic of care would mean reconceptualising responsibility as relational.

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“…In certain Swedish regions, gender contracts changed over time Stenbacka 2013, 2017) and gender contracts vary locally within regions (Forsberg and Lindgren 2015). Sihto (2018) demonstrated that gender contracts may be changed because of local social policies regarding childcare in Finland. This demonstrates that significant metaphysical and institutional change could initiate rapid re-negotiations of established contracts.…”

Section: Previous Studies On Geographical Patterns Of Gender Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographical Variation in Local Gender Contracts in Sweden

Haandrikman

Webster

Duvander

2021

Appl. Spatial Analysis

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Despite Sweden’s national gender-neutral family and social policies, local differences in gender contracts exist and have been related to differences in the structure of the labour market and cultural traditions. Existing studies are outdated and used relatively large administratively defined areas, which may lead to several measurement and interpretation errors. This paper examines geographical variation in gender contracts in present-day Sweden using individualized neighbourhoods on different scales. Gender contracts are operationalized using six indicators on the level of family, politics and labour. We identify five types of local gender contracts: the metropolitan gender contract, the progressive gender contract, the suburban gender contract, the commuter gender contract and the traditional gender contract. The most gender equal patterns are found in metropolitan and other urban areas, with high shares of fathers taking parental leave and the highest shares of women with high education and gainful employment, and low shares of young mothers. The analyses give evidence of considerable local variation instead of a dominant gender contract in each region. The findings may stimulate further research and local policies on gender inequality.

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Local childcare policy and the changing gender contract

Cited by 5 publications

References 22 publications

Has something changed? Leaders’, practitioners’ and parents’ interpretations after renewed early childhood education and care legislation in Finnish private centres

Has something changed? Leaders’, practitioners’ and parents’ interpretations after renewed early childhood education and care legislation in Finnish private centres

Dividing Responsibility for Care: Tracing the Ethics of Care in Local Care Strategies

Geographical Variation in Local Gender Contracts in Sweden

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