Jorma Sipilä

European Social Care Services: Is It Possible To Identify Models ?

The purpose of this article is to bring social care services into the domain of comparative social policy research. The reason why it is important for social care services to be incor porated into the debate is that they represent an expanding component of the welfare state; that they are important for women; and that there are major differences between different countries in social care services. We have defined social care services as a specific way of increasing the autonomy of both care pro viders and care receivers.

Cash versus Child Care Services in Finland

In 1985 the Finnish Parliament passed a law which stipulated that all children under age three were to be guaranteed a day care place as from the beginning of the 1990s. The law was made possible by a political compromise in which the agrarian Centre Party won the backing it needed to push through a system of state subsidies for the home care of children. As an alternative to a day care place, parents were now given the option of taking a child home care allowance and using that allowance either for purposes of looking after their child themselves or for paying for a private place. Measured in terms of the number of users, the child home care allowance was a hugely successful innovation. Most parents of small children have used the allowance for at least some period of time. This was due above all to the size of the allowance compared with other social benefits. However, following cutbacks in allowance expenditure of more than 20 per cent from 1995, the use of home care allowances declined at almost the same rate as the allowances were reduced. This brought significant short-term savings to the Government and to local authorities, but in the longer term other costs have been rising. There has even been a sharp, unexpected decline in the birth rate. The case of Finland goes to show that, even in a country where wage-earning motherhood has become firmly established, income transfers through family policy can have a very significant influence on the numbers opting temporarily for homemaking.

Care Capital, Stress and Satisfaction

Our aim in this chapter is to study the family-related stress and satisfaction that women and men experience in their home lives, using data collected in Finland and Norway for the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP, 2002). The study will focus on families with children under 18, because our aim is to evaluate the usefulness of the concept of care capital in the context of work-life balance research.

Stadilaispojat rikosten ja yhteisöreaktioiden kierteissä: Viisi tapaustutkimusta kuudelta vuosikymmeneltä

In her book, Elina Pekkarinen examines the activities of social work and, more particularly, the institutional child protection of boys who continuously commit crimes. Constructing her approach around the idea of societal reaction, and reflecting the measures of child protection and related societal practices, she aims at revealing how the communities of different times have participated in the construction of deviance. The study not merely focuses on social work, but also on the wider structural context of institutional and societal definitions of deviance. More specifically, Pekkarinen asks what kinds of positions were constructed for the boys in the social dynamics of their everyday lives. She answers the question by analysing five boys’ welfare cases from six different decades. The historical data supports the aim of a more broad illumination of how people have understood childhood and youth, how the relations between the adults and the youth have changed, and to what extent communities have tolerated delinquency in different times.