Liisa Häikiö

Welfare State, Universalism and Diversity

Contents: 1. Universalism and the Challenge of Diversity Anneli Anttonen, Liisa Haikio, Kolbeinn Stefansson and Jorma Sipila 2. Universalism in the British and Scandinavian Social Policy Debates Anneli Anttonen and Jorma Sipila 3. What is in a Word? Universalism, Ideology and Practice Kolbeinn Stefansson 4. Finding the Way between Universalism and Diversity: A Challenge to the Nordic Model Liisa Haikio and Bjorn Hvinden 5. Brave New World? Anglo-American Challenges to Universalism John Clarke and Janet Newman 6. Reassessing Woman-friendliness and the Gender System: Feminist Theorizing About the Nordic Welfare Model Anette Borchorst 7. A Caring State for all Older People? Mia Vabo and Marta Szebehely 8. The Pension Puzzle: Pension Security for all Without Universal Schemes? Mikko Kautto 9. Universalization and De-universalization of Unemployment Protection in Denmark and Sweden Jorgen Goul Andersen 10. The Future of Welfare State: Rethinking Universalism Anneli Anttonen, Liisa Haikio and Kolbeinn Stefansson

From Innovation to Convention: Legitimate Citizen Participation in Local Governance

Abstract In governance structure legitimacy is required not only of the governing system, local authorities or public organisations but also of other participants, including citizens. The legitimacy cannot be judged either by traditions of representative democracy or by innovative theories of deliberative or participatory democracy. The article analyses scientific publications on citizen participation in local governance. It asks how empirical studies on local sustainable development planning (SDP) and New Public Management (NPM) practices construct legitimate citizen participation. In general, studies on citizen participation have not conceptualised the relations between citizens and power holders as questions of legitimacy. However, the studies approaching citizen participation in the local processes of SDP and NPM include various empirical, theoretical and normative arguments for citizen participation. These arguments recognise, accept and support particular activities, arguments and outcomes of citizen participation, and include and exclude agents and issues. They construct and reflect the definition of legitimacy in the local governance. As constructed by scientific texts, justifications for citizen participation reproduce a discursive structure in which citizen participation becomes marginalised and citizens’ views excluded. The results illustrate that discursive structures of legitimate citizen participation support conventional governing practices and hinder innovative practices in local governance.

Local welfare governance structuring informal carers' dual position

Purpose – Local welfare governance is approached from the vantage point of informal carers caring for older people. A bottom‐up perspective is used to construct a critical view on welfare provision and governance practices at the local level. The paper aims to discuss the issues.Design/methodology/approach – The data consist of 23 in‐depth interviews with informal carers. Universal access to services and equal treatment of citizens is discussed.Findings – The analysis illustrates how informal carers share care responsibilities with the municipality and gain access to services both as service providers and service users. Informal care comprises a complex mixture of public and private responsibilities that poses a challenge to universalism. There are new inequalities emerging among informal carers, while access to public resources is easier for resource‐rich carers positioned as service providers. Resource‐poor carers identify themselves often as service users in relation to municipality.Originality/value –...

Bypassing Publicity for Getting Things Done: Between Informal and Formal Planning Practices in Finland

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the discussion concerning the ways in which network governance and classical-modernist government practices juxtapose and redefine the idea of publicity in planning practices. Through Finnish urban planning cases we ask what kind of publicity is being promoted. We argue that new modes of governing build and employ institutional ambiguity for ‘getting things done’. This provides possibilities to ‘skim the cream’ of the best possible ways of resolving present planning issues. The crucial question is whether the possible positive outcomes give a mandate to the process, even if the process operates in a democratic void.

Flexible work and work–family interaction

The origin of this special issue stems from the International Community Work and Family Conference in Tampere 2011. The theme of the conference was broad: Actors, Structures and Theories. The papers presented covered issues from care to management and from local to global contexts within various theoretical and methodological frameworks. Due to this variation and to a large amount of high quality papers, it was a challenge to select papers for a single special issue. Therefore, we decided to select papers on the basis of a narrower topic, and ended up with the topic of flexible work and work family interaction. The topic is increasingly relevant and timely issue with contradictory findings so far. In addition to this special issue, an edited volume titled Women, men and children in families: new openings will be published in 2012. The editors are Eriikka Oinonen and Katja Repo from the University of Tampere. In this special issue, five selected articles focus on contractual, temporal and spatial forms of flexibility and how they are associated to work family interaction. Contractual forms of flexibility cover here practices of self-employment and temporary work while temporal flexibility covers working time arrangements. Spatial forms of flexibility are studied in relation to telework. The articles are based on empirical analysis using qualitative or quantitative data collected in Australia, Canada, Finland or the Netherlands. In their contribution Anne Annink and Laura den Dulk study how self-employed women with children feel they manage paid work and other life domains. Autonomy appeared to be an important resource, allowing them to combine their work more easily with childcare, household duties and social and personal life. However, the degree and nature of that autonomy and the ability to use it varied among the selfemployed women in this study owing to work-related factors such as sector, work location, employees and years of experience. Karen A. Duncan and Rachael N. Pettigrew examine the effect of different work arrangements (flexible schedules, shift work and self-employment) on perception of work family balance. Results indicate that work arrangements strongly affect work family balance and do so differently for women and men. For women, some control over the work schedule significantly improved the perception of balance. For men, both self-employment and shift work relate negatively to reported work family balance. Hanna Sutela examines the association between temporary employment and first child fertility among young employees in partnership taking into account the moderating effects of employer sector and insecurity of employment situation. The findings confirm a negative association of temporary employment with transition to parenthood in the year following the survey for both men and women. Johanna Närvi examines mothers’ and fathers’ choices concerning care and career in the Finnish context of gender equal family policy and employment Community, Work & Family Vol. 15, No. 4, November 2012, 381 382

The Janus face of social innovation in local welfare initiatives

The aim of this chapter is to understand the relationship between local welfare initiatives and social innovation and how it varies across places. Since welfare policies must tackle increasing needs with scarcer resources, the topic of social innovation has become relevant. Social innovation expresses a shared hope for making things better in the future (Evers, 2015). It is a semantic magnet that attracts many different meanings and is charged with many positive connotations (Bergmark et al., 2011). As Martinelli (Chapter 1, in this volume) suggests, social innovation is an important dimension of the restructuring of social services and must be integrated into the analysis. To explore the role of social innovations in the restructuring of social services, we analyse four local welfare initiatives in health and social services. By ‘local welfare initiatives’, we refer to collective practices that arise at the municipal or neighbourhood level for creating or sustaining the welfare of individuals, groups or communities through the provision of services. The local initiatives under study take place in four municipalities in different European countries and aim to renew social policy practices and services in neighbourhoods or for particular groups of people. Our focus is on the variations in the way social innovation is created and sustained in these local welfare systems, which we define as ‘dynamic arrangements in which the specific local socioeconomic and cultural conditions give rise to different mixes of formal and informal actors, public or not, involved in the provision of welfare resources’ (Andreotti et al., 2012, p. 1925). As a result, new local combinations of social activities emerge in the welfare diamond (Martinelli, Chapter 1, as well as Leibetseder et al., in this volume), i.e. among state and municipal services, social entrepreneurs, third sector organisations, and community and family networks (Evers and Ewert, 2015).