Åsa Lundqvist

Parenting Support in Sweden: New Policies in Old Settings

This article sets out to investigate the political development and implementation of parenting support services in Sweden. The object of analysis is on how parenting support has been organised and how it has been articulated in policy debates, and also key elements of parenting support in practice. The analysis shows that parenting support builds upon a century-long tradition of for example pre-emptive health care check-ups and services to parents, counselling and parenting education. There are, however, elements in parenting support policy which mark a clear deviation from this policy legacy. These include the introduction of structured parenting programmes, the growth of the idea of parents as autonomous beings and the partial relocation of parenting support into new public health goals. (Less)

Family Policy Paradoxes. Gender Equality and Labour Market regulation in Sweden, 1930-2010

Introduction: Understanding the family and gender equality in the Swedish model The creation of the modern family: Mapping, evaluating and formulating everyday life Ambivalent family ideals Family regulation, gender equality the institutionalisation of the Swedish model Gender-neutral ideals and labour market shortages Working mothers and the birth of the caring father Swedish family policy between science, politics and labour market regulation.

Construction(s) of Swedish Family Policy, 1930-2000

Family politics has been important in the development of the Swedish “women-friendly” and weak-breadwinner welfare state. This article analyzes the development of Swedish family politics during the past century by taking as its point of departure the amalgamation of political ambitions, social reforms, and ideas put forward by experts in government commissions. Results suggest that the social sciences played an important role in the making and shaping of Swedish family policy (i.e., that they functioned as “bridge discourses” mediating between the welfare state and social movements that challenged established boundaries between the private and the public sphere).

Conceptualising Gender in a Swedish Context

This article tries to illuminate the political conceptualisation of gender in twentieth-century Sweden. It is argued that the notion of gender is partly shaped through a conceptual similarity between an older societal structure with patriarchal principles, marked by a strong gender division of labour, called brukssamhallen (rural industrial communities) and the Swedish welfare state. The local ‘spirit of compromise’ of rural industrial community life survived the industrialisation as an idea, especially the ideas of inclusiveness and the importance of welfare for social cohesion, based on gainful employment. These ideas have also affected the conceptualisation of gender during the twentieth century. This development is brought to light in analyses made by feminist historians, specifically concerning the development of gender relations within the labour movement as well in the general debate.

Invisible, Burdensome and Threatening. The location of Migrant Women in the Swedish welfare state.

The causes of and solutions to juvenile delinquency and social unrest amongthe youth in so-called Swedish multi-ethnic urban areas are frequently represented inpublic-institutional discourse as rel ...

Children's rights and gender equality in Swedish parenting support: policy and practice

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to explore how ‘childrens rights’ and ‘gender equality’ are articulated in parenting support policies in Sweden, and how these policies are enacted in practice with respect to the two perspectives mentioned. The analysis builds on key policy documents and interviews with civil servants working on parenting support on local, regional and national levels. The results show that despite national ambitions to enhance and achieve gender equality among parents, gender equality are downplayed in local settings. Important reasons are to be found in a lack of concrete strategies and instructions how to work with gender equality perspectives in cooperation with childrens rights perspectives, but also the different interpretations of gender equality and ‘good parenting’ made by the civil servants.

Globalization and Inequalities. Complexity and Contested Modernities

In her new thought-provoking book, Sylvia Walby tackles a large number of topical questions: What is progress and what is modernity? Is progress only about wealth or should it also take into account human rights and reduced inequalities? How and under what circumstances do global processes change economies, polities and social relations? And how do complex inequalities such as gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality shape the world we are living in? In the wake of the recent global financial and economic crisis, these questions have become increasingly crucial and constitute some of the most important social and political issues of today. Walby’s book deals with how progress and varieties of modernity are shaping the world as we know it today. Drawing on classical sociology as well as contemporary social theory, Walby rethinks the core concepts and theories of social change by challenging sociological notions such as ‘progress’, ‘modernity’, ‘multiple inequalities’ and ‘globalization’. Her focus is on the highincome countries in Europe and North America, which she uses to incorporate intersecting regimes of complex inequalities within the core of social theory. By framing and rethinking the meanings and understandings of the concept of progress as a global phenomenon, Walby contrasts what she sees as the two major competing political projects in our time – neo-liberalism and social democracy. Through the lens of these political projects she is able to locate how human rights, well-being, equality and personal income are valued but also contested. Both of these projects are also analysed through the concept of modernity, or rather as illustrations of the varieties of modernity (but also through what she defines as pre-modern social relations such as domestic labour or violence against women and minorities). Walby intertwines the notion of multiple complex inequalities in her analysis of progress and varieties of modernity (and pre-modernities). Her ambition is to analyse intersecting social inequalities, in addition to class. By examining different inequality regimes within the main institutional domains outlined in the book – economy, polity, violence and civil society – such complex inequalities are uncovered and brought into the core of theorizing the social: class becomes important in shaping the culture, and gender or ethnicity regimes contribute to a reformulation of the economy and polity. Walby adds a global dimension to the analysis of intersecting inequalities. For her, globalization is a conceptual umbrella for several uneven, competing and at the same time historically shaped and co-evolutionary processes. In effect, she identifies the mutual adaptation of complex social systems, like the institutional domains mentioned above, and between intersecting complex inequality regimes. To simplify her intriguing but somewhat complicated analytical model, Walby’s theoretical attempt is to explain and understand the ‘nature of systems and their changes’ (p. 47). It is, however, not in the classical sense that Walby uses the concept of a system. Thus, in order to succeed with her ambitious aim to introduce a new paradigm in social theory via complexity theory, it is necessary to revise the concept and view systems as dynamic processes where diversity in social relations, between individuals and the system as well as non-linear social change, can be included. It is, moreover, important to distinguish between types of systems, on the one hand institutional systems (economies, polities, violence and civil society), and on the other relational systems, including for example gender, class and ethnicity – ‘each set of social relations is present in each of the institutional domains’ (p. 66). By doing so, complex social inequality patterns and social relations are exposed to sociological theorizing. Acta Sociologica 53(4)