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Sociological analysis has mainly portrayed empowerment as a manipulative masking discourse. However, various actors in society view it as the opposite of domination and espouse it as a goal. Empowerment can constitute a discursive field shaped by its internal contractions between autonomy and control, between ambition and risk of programmed failure – exacerbated by the emphasis on responsibility, and between focus and stigmatization. The paper presents a case study of employability policy in the Netherlands. Employability can be seen as empowerment in matters of career. The study is based on 41 interviews with policy makers, managers, union and employers' leaders and politicians. It shows that actors drawing on the principle of empowerment as a goal in itself can reset or reclaim a drifting empowerment project in its inceptive phase and add their own twist during execution, evaluation and efforts to engineer improvements.

This article presents data from a project exploring women's experiences of work and care. It focuses primarily on work-life balance as a problematic concept. Social and economic transformations across advanced post-industrial economies have resulted in concerns about how individuals manage their lives across the two spheres of work and family and achieve a work-life balance. Governments across the European Union have introduced various measures to address how families effectively combine care with paid work. Research within this area has tended to focus on work-life balance as an objective concept, which implies a static and fixed state fulfilled by particular criteria and measured quantitatively. Qualitative research on women's experiences reveals work-life balance as a fluctuating and intangible process. This article highlights the subjective and variable nature of work-life balance and questions taken-for-granted assumptions, exploring problems of definition and the differential coping strategies which women employ when negotiating the boundaries between work and family.

Abstract A major shortcoming in the existing literature on welfare state legitimacy is that it cannot explain when social policy designs follow public preferences and when public opinion follows existing policy designs and why. Scholars examining the influence of public opinion on welfare policies as well as scholars investigating institutional influences on individual welfare attitudes find empirical evidence to support both relationships. While a relationship in both directions is plausible, scholars have yet to thoroughly investigate the mutual relationship between these two. Consequently, we still do not know under which circumstances welfare institutions invoke public approval of welfare policies and under which circumstances public opinion drives welfare policy. Taking a quantitative approach to public opinion and welfare state policies in the Netherlands, this paper addresses this issue in an attempt to increase our understanding of welfare state legitimacy. The results show that individual opinions influence relatively new policies, policies which are not yet fully established and where policy designs are still evolving and developing. Social policy, on the other hand, is found to influence individual opinions on established and highly institutionalised policies, but does not influence individual opinions in relatively new areas of social policy.