Hanne Marlene Dahl

New Public Management, care and struggles about recognition

New Public Management (NPM) is usually perceived as a homogeneous discourse. However, when we examine it by looking at micro-politics in municipalities and understand its consequences drawing on the voices of home helpers, the picture is more complex and ambiguous. NPM is seen as disciplining paid public elderly care by limiting and forming the understandings applied through two combined but different logics: a usually dominant logic of details and a usually minor logic of self-governance. The bottom-up study presented here investigates the translation — the understanding and application — of these two logics in two different Danish municipalities that are strategically chosen to illustrate differences along the continuum of NPM translations. It asks which logic the home helpers feel is most dominant and relates the results to feelings of recognition and misrecognition as well as to strategies of resistance. The analysis applies feminist theories of recognition and care, and its findings are based on focus group interviews and feminist discourse analysis.

A view from the inside: Recognition and redistribution in the Nordic Welfare State from a gender perspective

The Nordic model is often seen as having succeeded in gaining recognition for care-giving work and as embodying a potentially women friendly state model owing to the availability of publicly provided care for the elderly and pre-school children. This simple story neglects one particular group of women - publicly employed home-helpers and the valorization of their care-giving work. Applying Nancy Fraser’s dual theory of justice gives us a normative and analytical tool with which to analyse this group’s situation in relation to recognition and redistribution. Some advances concerning pay and in the professionalization of the home-helper’s work have taken place. These advances hide less flattering developments, such as a general egalitarianism (on pay) insensitive to gendered valorizations, an androcentric perception of work and work-related accidents formerly at play and a New Public Management inspired elite discourse struggling to reduce the home-helper’s work to simple, manual tasks in a discourse of de-professionalization. Overlapping of struggles about redistribution and recognition show that the positive changes identified are merely superficial, since no basic change of the socio-cultural framework has taken place that provides an impetus for future struggles.

Gender and the state: From differences between to differences within

The article argues from a Nordic, feminist and poststructuralist position that feminist state theories need to be developed methodologically. This claim is based on both theoretical arguments as well as empirical arguments arising from a case study on care politics in Denmark. In contrast to answering questions about the essence of the state, the aim of the article is to provide some analytical tools for studying the state. First, it focuses on two paradigms of feminist analyses of the state: differences between states (Nordic feminists), and differences within states (poststructural feminists). The article argues that each of the approaches has its merits and problems in terms of feminist engagements with the state. The second part explores an empirical case study on care politics in Denmark. The study illustrates the inadequacies of feminist approaches to the state to date. State discourses and policies on home-helpers are shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects on the women concerned. T...The article argues from a Nordic, feminist and poststructuralist position that feminist state theories need to be developed methodologically. This claim is based on both theoretical arguments as well as empirical arguments arising from a case study on care politics in Denmark. In contrast to answering questions about the essence of the state, the aim of the article is to provide some analytical tools for studying the state. First, it focuses on two paradigms of feminist analyses of the state: differences between states (Nordic feminists), and differences within states (poststructural feminists). The article argues that each of the approaches has its merits and problems in terms of feminist engagements with the state. The second part explores an empirical case study on care politics in Denmark. The study illustrates the inadequacies of feminist approaches to the state to date. State discourses and policies on home-helpers are shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects on the women concerned. The third part of the article suggests a framework of three concepts believed to be helpful when analysing gender and the state: hegemony, contradictory effects and boundaries. The concepts are generated from the case study. Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, Bvld 25.3, Box 160, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark. Email: hmdahl@ruc.dk University of Helsinki, Department of Political Science, PO Box 54 (Snellmaninkatu 14), FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. Email: Johanna.Kantola@helsinki.fi

Neo-liberalism Meets the Nordic Welfare State—Gaps and Silences

For our series of short position papers, “Taking Turns”, we invite Nordic as well as nonNordic scholars to a conversation on the contemporary challenges for feminist and gender research. The name is, of course, a pun on various “turns” within feminist theory, like the linguistic turn or the material turn, but it also signifies a possibility for feminist scholars and gender researchers to take turns in expressing positions and perspectives on the changes and challenges emerging in our field. In this issue, we are handing the relay over to Hanne Marlene Dahl, Professor at the Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her main research areas are in the governance of care, globalization and Europeanization of care, as well as feminist state theory. Currently she is engaged in the EU research project under the 7th framework “INNOSERV” and has recently co-edited the book Europeanization, Care and Gender—Global Complexities with Anne Kovalainen and Marja Keränen (2011).

Dilemmas of Care in the Nordic Welfare State: Continuity and Change

Admiration for the Nordic welfare model in feminist literature and welfare state studies has heightened scientific and political interest in that model. In this volume, contributors from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, political science and education, examine unpaid social care work within the Nordic welfare states and the d

Trajectories of Change in Danish Long Term Care Policies—Reproduction by Adaptation through Top-Down and Bottom-Up Reforms

The literature often sees universalism and local autonomy as the key tenets of Nordic care regimes (Burau et al. 2007); the former refers to substantive aspects of long term care policies , while the latter refers to procedural aspects. Against this background, the case of Denmark is interesting in two respects. Firstly, among the Nordic countries, long term care policies remain the most universal in terms of coverage, which is reflected in the level of public expenditure. Secondly, Denmark combines institutional change from below (nonlegislative change) with institutional change from above (legislative change).

A Perceptive and Reflective State

A perceptive and reflective state? Such a state might not exist yet, but it refers to an ideal for state-provided care which can protect both the caregiver and recipient of care from emotional overload and indifference. Such an ideal introduces new lines of enquiry to contemporary theories of care and their sociological orientation. It is argued that theories of care need to be combined with insights from political science concerning power and dilemmas within care. Dilemmas within state-provided care which might temporarily be overcome through an application of an interactive universalism such as more generally advocated by the Turkish-American feminist philosopher Seyla Benhabib. Interactive universalism implies a shift of perspective, a kind of hypothetical moral dialogue, which would bring a stronger element of reflection into caring practices in the welfare state. However, interactive universalism presupposes empathy understood as a kind of emotional attention to the other. If implemented this ideal will introduce a new form of authority: more compassionate and bodily oriented.

Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering Practices and Feminist Theory by Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

This book does not provide a manual on how do to gender mainstreaming in practice from A to Z. Instead, it is an invitation to reflect on gender and gender mainstreaming, its relationship to other ...

The Changing Landscape of Elderly Care and the Proliferation of Struggles

When studying and theorizing care, it is seldom seen in a broader context of the changes occurring in society and in the regulation of care. In this chapter I outline seven social and political processes that frame and condition the way care can be performed today: commodifying, professionalizing, late modernizing, de-gendering, globalizing, bureaucratizing and neo-liberalizing. These processes shape the landscape of elderly care but they are not inevitable. The seven processes condition and frame care and enable new, intensified struggles about care to arise as tensions between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ arise, as well as resistance to various forms of processes and discourses are generated.

Regulating Elderly Care And Struggles

The regulation of elderly care is transformed. Three aspects of the changing regulation are identified: its hybrid nature, its multilevel character and its gendered aspects. Regulation has intensified, characterized by new logics and moving toward a multilevel governmentality, including among others, the increasing role of international institutions. More tensions arise in the hybridity of regulation and new logics. Simultaneously we witness the swift traveling of new buzzwords across the globe such as ‘active aging’ and marketization in this form of multilevel regulation. Noticeable also is how the struggles about the regulation of elderly care are still gendered concerning the discourses on work, knowledge and the professional, for example, when struggles about professionalizing and de-professionalizing are played out in relation to different ideals of care.