Ann Shola Orloff

Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: An Unfinished Agenda*

Can feminists count on welfare states—or at least some aspects of these complex systems—as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of “welfare states” investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate models of politics focused on “big” structures and systems, including those focused on “welfare states.” Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, (in) dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including “defamilialization,” the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family “reconciliation,” gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and womens employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself, then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor (including care) and of gendered political power.

Remaking modernity : politics, history, and sociology

I Introduction Social theory, modernity and the three waves of historical sociology Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens & Ann Shola Orloff II Historical sociology and epistemological underpinnings The action turn? Comparative historical inquiry beyond the classical models of conduct Richard Biernacki Overlapping territories and intertwined histories: Historical sociologys global imagination Zine Magubane The epistemological unconscious of American sociology and the transition to post-Fordism: The case of historical sociology George Steinmetz III State formation and historical sociology The return of the repressed: Religion and the political unconscious of historical sociology Philip Gorski Social provision and regulation: Theories of states, social policies and modernity Ann Shola Orloff The bureaucritization of states: Toward an analytical Weberianism Edgar Kiser & Justin Baer IV History and political contention Mars revealed: The entry of ordinary people into war among the states Meyer Kestmbaum Historical sociology and collective action Roger Gould Revolutions as pathways to modernity Nader Sohrabi V Capitalism, modernity and the economic realm Historical sociology and the economy: Actors, networks and context Bruce Carruthers The great debates: Transitions to capitalisms Rebecca Jean Emigh Professions: Prodigal daughters of modernity Ming-Cheng Lo VI Politics, history and collective identities Nations Lynette Spillman & Russell Faeges The trouble with citizenship Margaret Somers Ethnicity within groups Rogers Brubaker VII Afterword Logics of history? Agency, multiplicity and incoherence in the explanation of change Elisabeth Clemens

States, Markets, Families: States, Markets, Families

The defining characteristic of the liberal social policy regime is state intervention which is clearly subordinate to the market and the family. But, to a significant extent, liberal policy works through the market, as in the case of tax credits for the purchase of services such as child care, and regulation of the market, for example through anti-discrimination legislation or the setting of minimum standards for market-based services such as child care. It has a relatively strong emphasis on income and/or means-tested programs and while there may be a commitment to universalism, it is universalism with an equal opportunity focus. The implications of these arrangements for families and households and for gender relations have received little attention in comparative welfare state analysis. There are significant cross-national differences in the balance between market and family in providing benefits and services for individuals and households, and, specifically, there are significant differences in terms of gender and class consequences depending on which of the two forms of private responsibility, market or family, is supported by public policy. Does a liberal political tradition have a congruous set of consequences for gender relations across the three policy areas of income maintenance, labour market participation and reproductive rights in Australia, Canada, the United States and Britain? The concept of policy regime refers to institutionalised patterns of welfare state provision establishing systematic relations between the state, the market and the family. Our analysis of policies relating to labour markets, income maintenance and regulation of reproduction in Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States identified significant similarities in policy orientation but also some noteworthy differences across the four countries.

Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology

Sociology as a discipline is intimately entwined with modernity, both as lived and as theorized. Sociologists have galvanized distinctive mechanisms of social rationalization and technical regulation (not least statistics and surveys) and authored ideas of the modern social space as a realm that we denizens inhabit and control. Sociologists also have helped define modernity’s significant Others, including the categories of tradition and postmodernity. They have applied their intellectual energy to formulating what might be called the ‘‘sociological modern’’: situating actors and institutions in terms of these two categories, understanding the paths by which they develop or change, and communicating these understandings to states, citizens, all manner of organizations, and social movements—as well as vast armies of students. On this basis, sociologists have helped build and manage today’s sprawling, globally extended social edifice while simultaneously trying to diagnose and dismantle its disciplinary aspects and iron cages. The discipline is itself a product of modernity, not simply in its institutions but also, as we will argue, in its theoretical core. The formation of modernity now figures as a place of disorder as well as dynamism—troubled, fissured, perhaps even in civilizational crisis. This is all the more ironic now that capitalism—surely a core constituent of modernity—is thought by some to have arrived at a point of triumphant stasis, the highest stage and culmination of history.∞ In this unsettled time,

Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy

In the social-scientific literature on the welfare state, scholars have long argued that the quality and extent of support available to workers outside the market—the citizens wage —has a direct impact on their standard of living and an indirect effect on the bargaining position of labor within market relationships. In a parallel way, recent feminist scholarship on social policy has pointed out that how—if at all—the state steps in to assist women in their role as mothers when marital relationships break up or never form has a direct impact on the standard of living within motheronly families, and an indirect effect on womens bargaining position within two-parent families by (at least partially) setting the terms on which they will live should they want to exit relationships. Thus, just as analysts have argued that the level of the citizens wage is revealing about the effect of policy on class inequality, a focus on what the state does for single mothers and their children is analytically strategic for assessing the relationship between policy and gender inequality. The situation of mother-only families reveals the inherent social and economic vulnerability of all women that exists due to their childrearing and domestic responsibilities and their low earnings, which is usually masked when women are in households with wage-earning men.

Feminism/s in power: Rethinking gender equality after the second wave

Abstract In recent decades, it is possible to point to a new and evolving debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture, focused on the implications of feminism’s changing relations to institutions of state power and law in the United States. According to these analysts, to whom we refer as the critics of feminism in power, the alliances formed between some feminists and neoliberal and conservative elites, coupled with the installation of feminist ideas in law and state institutions problematize the once commonly held assumption, shared by second-wave feminists, that all women, regardless of differences in social location, face certain kinds of exclusions. With women entering formal positions of power from states to NGOs to corporations, this assumption cannot stand. Critical analysts of feminists in power insist that we consider the implications of advancing a feminist politics not from the margins of society but from within the precincts of power. They shine a light on a change in feminism’s relation to institutions of state power and law as reflected in new political alliances forming between feminists and neoliberal and conservative elites, and the political and discursive uses to which feminist ideas and ideals have been put. Building on work on inequalities and hierarchies among women, these critics take up specifically political questions concerning the kind of feminist politics to be promoted in today’s changed gendered landscape. Perhaps most notably, they make explicit a concern shared by radical political movements more generally: what does it mean when the ideas of those who were once considered political outsiders become institutionalized within core sites of state power and law? At the same time, the very broad-brush narratives concerning the cooptation of feminism by neoliberalism put forth by some of these analysts could be complemented with historical and empirical research on specific instances of feminism’s reciprocal, though still unequal, relationship with neoliberalism and state power.

States, Markets, Families: Gendering Theories and Comparisons of Welfare States

The 1990s will likely be remembered as a period of contentious restructuring of state social provision – one in which issues of gender are quite marked. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, Australia, Great Britain, Canada and the United States of America have experienced a rise in the popularity of ideologies and political forces celebrating market liberalism. Debates about the proper role of the state vis-a-vis the market and the family and about the character of state policies have intensified and broadened out to consider a greater range of policy alternatives; prominently, a range of market or private solutions to social problems for many decades considered properly political concerns. These have led to dramatic changes in social policy, often referred to as ‘restructuring’, including eliminating or scaling back entitlements and increasing work incentives or requirements. Concerns of gender pervade these social policy debates – about employment opportunities and day care, about how (or even whether) to publicly support caregiving work and single parent families, about the scope of womens choices as to whether and when to be mothers. Should states promote greater social equality? Should government modify or strengthen market forces? Should governments or private entities be the instruments of insurance against social risks? Should states respect ‘family privacy’ and the decision-making authority of corporations? Should governments recognise any sorts of group rights, or attempt to accommodate systematic differences among social groups? Decisions about gender roles and relations will be inescapable in the current restructuring of social provision. Contemporary policy shifts are at least partly in response to a perceived need to better harmonise social benefits and labour market policies in the face of economic restructuring and increased international competition.

Once More into the Breach with Modernity: Rejoinder to Inglehart and Norris, and Young

With respect to modernity and womens place in it, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris and Iris Marion Young are sharply at odds. Young sees a rending and tearing of the social fabric, and no determinate relationship between gender equality and modernity, while Inglehart and Norris think modernization and womens rights are seamlessly joined at the hip. We think that neither of these analytical stances will do. Our assessment extends from a concept of modernity that embraces a relational complex of features and tendencies—one that is analytical, not normative, and that must always be historically situated. Modernity is a vulnerable achievement rather than the secure culmination of automatic social processes. When called to its defense, we have argued, feminists and small-d democrats may sometimes have to endorse means and modes of coercion controlled by imperfectly democratic states. For their criticisms and suggestions, we thank Rachel Epstein, Bonnie Honig, David Weakliem, and Linda Zerilli. They bear no responsibility for the substance of our rejoinder, even if their arguments with us did help us think it through.

The multidimensional politics of inequality: taking stock of identity politics in the U.S. Presidential election of 2016

Many Democrats hoped that a particular kind of identity politics - womens - would help Hillary Clinton win the White House. In the aftermath of the election, some commentators bemoaned the fact that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, and called it a kind of betrayal, underlining their expectation that women would naturally, on the basis of their gender identity, support a woman with women-friendly politics. Indeed, this kind of thinking about identity politics has been widespread with reference to a number of demographic groups. Meanwhile, identity politics is lamented from the right and left by those who favour a greater emphasis on class-based inequalities, or a greater national identity, some of whom blame identity politics for spawning or justifying a backlash of right-leaning populism in the US. We argue for a turn to a more robust definition of identity as multidimensional and politically mediated for understanding political alignments over the past several decades. The multidimensionality of inequality - intersectionality or complex inequality - is widely accepted in the study of gender and race across the social science disciplines but has yet to be as successfully integrated into studies of electoral politics. Thinking about womens positioning in systems of complex inequality, and how the political parties have or have not articulated the concerns of different groups of women, helps us to understand the 2016 election, as well as past and potentially future political developments.

Policy, Politics, Gender. Bringing Gender to the Analysis of Welfare States

The transformation of mainstream scholarship by the full integration of gender analysis is necessary to understand the development of welfare states and capitalism as well as gender. Gender has been at the center of transformations of welfare states, families and capitalist economies. Social politics increasingly features issues related to gender: fertility, immigration, labor supply, the supply of care workers and services, taxes and mothers’ employment; gender equality in households, employment and polity. Gendered insights radicalize and transform the comparative study of welfare states, and in the process remake theory, a necessary component of projects to ensure that systems of social provision promote equality and care.