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Across welfare societies policies and norms for work-life balance have emerged alongside rising expectations among working parents to be able to participate in employment and caregiving, and to have more time for family life and leisure. Yet despite this value placed upon work-life balance working parents face increasing work demands, as well as rising numbers of insecure and precarious jobs, both of which produce a deepening sense of economic uncertainty in everyday life. This volume considers not just what individuals do, but also their scope of alternatives to make other choices.

In Making Men into Fathers, prominent scholars in gender studies and the critical studies of men consider how institutional settings and policy shape the possibilities and constraints for new models of fatherhood. From different historical and societal perspectives, new insights into the studies of men as gendered subjects are provided

This article revisits the recognition and redistribution debates emerging from Nancy Fraser's 1995 agenda article underscoring the dangers in the rise of identity politics and displacement of economic justice in postsocialist age. Júlia Szalai has been a crucial actor in reshaping the research on recognition struggles, and I will focus on the important contribution of her research on the Roma. Looking beyond dichotomy in recognition and redistribution, Szalai's research has highlighted the interplay and overlapping configurations in recognition struggles: their institutional and historical embeddedness and their emphasis on political agency and voice. Her analysis of the multiple and interacting processes of exclusion of the Roma in Central Europe, including the spatial, educational and employment dimensions and the lack of political representation, reflect a near congruence in misrecognition and malredistribution. Her research highlights shifts in the discourse from the cultural wars to the redistributional wars in neo-liberal market economies between those who have lost status and income in the dominant population and the most vulnerable (minority and migrant populations). Finally, Szalai's research and writings have extended the theoretical and empirical borders on recognition struggles, engaging with the frameworks of intersectionalities and capabilities both of which offer lenses for revealing complex inequalities and the tensions within the paradigms for social justice that have inspired my own research.

Looking through the lens of gender, this article engages with the opportunities, dilemmas and challenges posed by Sen's framework to sociological research. Sen's capability approach offers sociological research a dynamic framework through its concept of agency and its multidimensional approach. It also poses dilemmas, revealed in the tensions within agency and choice and the challenges in operationalizing Sen's framework: adapting it to sociological models and applying it to empirically grounded research. Through conversion factors and processes, a central component in the capabilities approach, I reveal the potential of Sen's approach for developing more dynamic frameworks in sociological research, with respect to (1) changes in gendered norms (how new norms are seeded); (2) how entitlements are converted into a sense of entitlement to make claims; and (3) how the capabilities approach can lead toward a more dynamic institutional analysis of welfare states. My contribution to Sen's framework involves elaborating two mechanisms in the conversion of capabilities to agency freedoms and achievements: the sense of entitlement to make claims and the perceived scope of alternatives in exercising rights.

Within the European Union (EU) policy framework, individualisation is cast in terms of self-sufficiency and independence, and coupled to the market activation of all individuals and groups. How will this model be translated into European societies with different histories, policy environments and political actors? I analyse how an individualised system of benefits emerged in Sweden and was anchored in the broader social policy model and discourse of participation parity. Using the Swedish example, I map out the differences between individualisation, participation parity and gender equity, each representing models with different policy goals and outcomes. In the final section of the article, I focus on retrenchment and restructuring in the Swedish welfare state and its impact on the gender participatory model.