Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article reviews the development of critical thinking in social policy over four decades. First, it draws out the key insights of the early foundational critiques of the 1970s and 1980s especially around gender and race in their articulation with class. Second, it synthesizes two attempts in the 1990s to provide integrated critical analyses of the destabilization of the Keynesian welfare state and situates them in relation to the movement of mainstream theory at that time. Third, it looks at critical analyses that emerged in the first decade of this century in the wake of global neo‐liberalism and post‐structuralism. These are summarized as four 'turns': the agentic turn; the ethical turn; the global turn; and the (re)turn of intersectionality. The context of the decade since 2008 of financial and humanitarian crises and austerity provides the backcloth to argue, in conclusion, for a more integrated and multi‐dimensional critical approach which encompasses different spaces, claims and social relations in which alternatives can be articulated.

While the employment of migrant women as care workers in European welfare states is increasing, the rate, extent and nature of this increase vary. The article draws on empirical research on migrant care work to develop links between three levels of analysis – micro, meso and macro. The main aim is to progress analysis of the meso level by developing indicators attached to three sets of regimes – care regimes, migration regimes and employment regimes. It is argued that variations emerge in the ways these three regimes intersect within any one country. These intersections allow us to look across different sites, markets and sectors of care work and, in so doing, reveal a degree of growing convergence across Europe in the employment of migrant care labour. This convergence contributes, at the macro level, to a transnational political economy of care.