Marcel Hoogenboom

From Iron Cage to Pigeon House: The Birth of Reflexive Authority:

In recent years, Weber’s image of the ‘iron cage’ has been challenged by the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. They claim that this image no longer applies to the late modern world we are entering. In the late modern era, individuals, institutions and organizations have become or will become reflexive, and as a consequence the iron cage of rationalization is opening. In this article, the authors largely subscribe to the theories of Beck and Giddens though formulate two objections. First, they demonstrate that the theories each illuminate only one level of social life in late modernity and should be combined. Second, they claim that in the theories of Beck and Giddens a search for a possible integrating phenomenon is largely missing. By combining the theories they disentangle a new form of integration, which may emerge in late modernity. This new form of integration they dub ‘reflexive authority’.

Hidden change: disaggregation of welfare state regimes for greater insight into welfare state change

In this article, we propose a method for the disaggregation of welfare state regimes that enhances our insight into innovative welfare state change; that is, change beyond the borders of regime logic. Welfare states, we argue, are composed of different approaches to various social risks, and the approach to each social risk is often ‘hybrid’: it consists of various types of arrangements. It is no coincidence that risk approaches, and consequently welfare states, are often hybrid entities. We argue that a singular approach to a social risk creates a social residue that may evoke social pressure which can in turn be diminished by hybridizing the arrangement; that is, changing allocation rules to include new social groups or to cover previously uncovered needs. In itself, however, a hybrid arrangement is unstable. This is why hybridization may be followed by either a return to a singular risk approach so that social pressure re-emerges, or by the establishment of a new, additional arrangement so that a hybrid risk approach emerges. This is innovative change. We do not argue that innovative change inevitably occurs. Change requires that groups facing residues are able to employ sufficient power resources. However, some level of autonomous institutional welfare state change is to be expected as an outcome of the continuous creation of residues.

From local to grobal, and back

This is a case study of Vlisco, a Dutch textile printing company since 1846 that produces batik cloth for the West African consumer market. We focus on the changing status of batik cloth in West Africa and related shifts in the relations of Vlisco with its consumers and local trade partners over a period of almost two centuries. We conclude that in the long run, globalisation does not necessarily result in the transformation of authentic and locally conceived products into empty mass products, and even if it does, in time the process can change direction.

The Gender Informal Care Gap: A fuzzy-set analysis of cross-country variations

ABSTRACT This article investigates the relationship between the ‘gender informal care gap’ – the relative contributions of women to informal care for non-co-resident relatives and other members of social networks, compared to men – and public care policies, level of care needs, labour market position and gendered care attitudes. Since the literature suggests that none of these factors alone can explain the gender informal care gap, we develop a model based on fuzzy-set/qualitative comparative analysis in order to identify patterns in the relationship between the factors. The analysis conducted at the macro-national level in 13 European countries, suggests that at the macro-level, the availability of public care services is crucial to understanding the gender informal care gap, while womens labour market position, the presence or absence of gendered care attitudes and the level of care needs play no or a relatively minor role.

Continuity and Change Comparative Case Study of Hospital and Home Care Governance in The Netherlands

This article aims to understand the evolution of health care governance in the Dutch hospital and home care sector. We pay particular attention to how institutionalized governance structures shape policy reform. Professionally-dominated governance structures are likely to continue to exist to some degree, even when new policy measures seek to introduce hierarchical control or market mechanisms in order to restrict professional autonomy. In contrast to the home care profession, the dominance of the medical profession with its high corporate power has been institutionalized into the governance structure, constraining actors’ choices in ways that only permit incremental changes in hospital care.

Transnational Unemployment Insurance: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Foreign Workers in Labour Unions’ Unemployment Insurance Funds in the Netherlands (c.1900–1940)

In the early twentieth century, like many of their European counterparts, labour unions in the Netherlands established mutual unemployment insurance funds for their members. Various funds made agreements with labour unions in a number of European countries to recognize each others insurance schemes, enabling union members to work in the Netherlands without losing their entitlement to benefits accumulated in their home countries, and vice versa. Whereas up until the 1930s some of the alliances between Dutch and foreign funds had flourished, in the 1930s the number of non-Dutch workers in the Netherlands making use of such agreements decreased drastically. This article analyses those transnational alliances and explores various causes for their demise, concluding that in the 1930s formal regulation of foreign labour by the Dutch government substantially reduced the number of potential foreign members of insurance funds while government interference in unemployment insurance abroad, and especially in Germany, made the transnational agreements effectively void.

Elasticity of care networks and the gendered division of care

ABSTRACT The gender gap in family care-giving is an established research finding: men dedicate less time to care-giving and provide specific gendered types of help. This article argues that in order to grasp mens contribution to care arrangements one should recognise the multifaceted nature of care and examine care networks beyond the ‘care receiver–primary care-giver’ dyad with a dynamic perspective. A qualitative analysis of the care networks of three large Dutch families with an older parent in need of care confirms the greater involvement of women in care-giving and mens tendency to provide specific types of care. However, men also contribute to the elasticity and stability of the care arrangement by filling temporary gaps and supporting the female care-givers. This article puts forward the idea that mens contribution is in turn a factor in the perpetuation of the gendered structure of care-giving.

Socio-demographic Correlates of Fathers' and Mothers’ Parenting Behaviors

In the present study, we investigated whether fathers’ and mothers’ parenting behavior is differentially related to parental factors (such as age and employment), child factors (age and gender) as well as social support. Parents reported on their use of a broad range of parenting behaviors, including affection, responsivity, explaining, autonomy, support, rewarding, and punishing. We used survey data from the Netherlands for 1197 mothers and 903 fathers of children aged 2 to 17. Seemingly unrelated regression analyses were conducted to combine the regression results on the separate subsamples (fathers and mothers) and to test for differences in the coefficients between those subsamples. Our expectation that the parenting behavior of fathers is more dependent on parents’ characteristics, children’s characteristics, and social support than that of mothers was only partly confirmed by the results of our analysis. In general, our results suggest that fathers’ parenting behaviors seem to be associated with parental and child characteristics and contextual factors in ways that are similar to how these factors are associated with mothers’ parenting behaviors. Results are discussed in relation to the roles and expectations associated with motherhood and fatherhood.

Ritzer malgré lui: Reply to ‘Still enamoured of the glocal: A comment on “From local to grobal, and back”’

Professor Ritzer’s (Ritzer & Richer, 2012) critical comment on our article ‘From local to grobal, and back’ (Hoogenboom, Bannink, & Trommel, 2010) somewhat surprises us. In our article we employ his theory to analyse and describe the changing status of Vlisco products over almost two centuries, and by doing so we believe we demonstrate the great value of Ritzer’s theoretical contribution to the academic globalisation debate. Admittedly, in the article we also formulate some critical comments on his work, but these comments predominantly (with one exception concerning the usefulness of the concept ‘local’, see below) concern the empirical evidence Ritzer presents in his book The globalization of nothing (2007) to back up his new theory. Despite our ultimately positive evaluation of Ritzer’s theory in our article, in his comment he formulates roughly five critical points. Firstly, he claims that we erroneously equate his theory in The globalization of nothing with the earlier theoretical insights he presented in The McDonaldization of society (first published in 1993). Secondly, and in addition to the first point of criticism, he argues that we wrongly claim that globalisation is the central theme of The McDonaldization of society. Thirdly, he denies that, as we claim in our article, in The globalization of nothing he suggests that in the end the ‘grobalisation of nothing’ is the dominant trait of the globalisation process. Fourthly, Ritzer criticises what he sees as our support for the idea developed by, amongst others, Robertson (1992, 1995, 2001) and Appadurai (1996) that ‘glocalisation’ is the dominant trait of the process of globalisation. Finally, Ritzer argues that we are wrong in saying that a service or product in our time can still be conceived of as ‘local’. Before we examine these five points, we would first like to say something about the tone professor Ritzer adopts in his comment on our article. Though he praises our article for standing ‘as something of a model of how to bridge the gap between abstract theory and empirical research’ (p. 798), the criticism he expresses on some of our claims in the article is very strongly worded. He claims, for example, that we employ ‘a strategy to tarnish a theory [Ritzer’s] that they [we] intend to criticise (even though they use it in their research) by making it seem dated, old-fashioned and simplistic’ (p. 799), and that we ‘chose to do violence to Ritzer’s original model’ (p. 802). Subsequently, he