CARE: ACTORS, RELATIONSHIPS, CONTEXTS Arnlaug Leira and Chiara Saraceno1 1. The multidimensional caring puzzle Until the 1970s, ‘care’ apparently represented few if any theoretical challenges for social research, neither as a concept nor a social activity. Since then the academic debate about the meaning and contents of terms like ‘care’ and ‘caring’ has flourished. With feminist scholarship as the main driving force, the many threads which make up the relational, symbolic, political and practical tapestry of care and caring relationships have been progressively unravelled. In this process different actors have emerged, both on the side of caregivers and of care receivers. Not only have needs, interests and conflicts of interest been acknowledged, named, and contrasted, but locations of care giving and care receiving have been identified. As the ‘caring deficit’ (Hochschild 1997), that is, the shortage of resources available for providing care, becomes more widely acknowledged, there is increasing debate about the rights and responsibilities of the care dependent and care providers.

The analysis of care, and the actors, relationships and contexts involved, is not a linear or additive process. Rather, it is a reflective process shifting in focus of attention, as well as changing in perspective and in levels of analysis. This implies the need to re-adjust previous insights and acquired knowledge. In doing so, the concept and the vocabulary of care – to paraphrase Ungerson’s (1990) insightful expression - have been expanded, even risking to become either too generic, or too partial.

From this point of view, it is interesting that in recent years we have witnessed attempts to develop general social theories based on an all-encompassing ethic of care, starting from interpersonal relations rather than rights (Tronto 1993, Sevenhuijsen 1998, see also Lister and Hobson in this volume). At the same time, there have been self-critical calls for greater clarity and specificity in the use of the concept, as witnessed in the efforts to limit, contextualise and diversify the forms of care being studied and /or tracing the empirical roots of the concept itself (e.g. Wærness 1987, Graham 1991,Ungerson 1990, Leira 1992, Thomas 1993, Daly and Lewis 1998).

Whether the concept of care is under-theorised (Leira 1994, Daly and Lewis 1998) or whether it is a descriptive rather than a theoretical category (Thomas 1993) remains an open question. What is increasingly clear, however, is that care as a concept and activity covers a number of different relations, actors, and institutional settings, and crosses conventional boundaries. Care is a public and a private responsibility; it is done for pay as well as unpaid, and is formally and informally provided; it is performed in non-profit as well as for-profit arrangements. As testified in several chapters in this book, this renders it somewhat ubiquitous as a concept and field of analysis. It can pertain to family analysis, but also to labour market and welfare state analysis, to concepts and practices of work and citizenship, to issues of social inclusion and exclusion, and so forth. The historiography presented in the following is necessarily a selective one. Focusing on research and debate on caring in one North European and one South European welfare state it draws mainly upon sociological and social policy discourses as developed in Western Europe and particularly the feminist literature. The authors are well aware that in welfare states where care is differently defined and arranged, the themes and sequence of debates might have been different, and the influence of other disciplines more strongly felt.

In this chapter, we do not intend to summarise the now vast body of literature (see especially Knijn and Kremer 1997, Bettio and Prechal 1998, Lewis ed. 1998). Nor do we propose a new theory or classification of care, although one of the authors did develop a typology of care-giving modes of provision (Leira 1992). Rather, we intend to review some of the crucial, but often overlooked, passages in the development of ‘care thinking’, viewing them not only as steps in a theoretical process, but as the outcome of shifts in context. These shifts may be seen in cultural terms, depending either on the cultural, social and political traditions, or on the interests/actors represented, or, in historical terms, generated by the expansion or retrenchment of the welfare state, or as an interplay of all these.

In the following, second paragraph we will thus review the ways in which different caring relationships – in the family and in social services, paid and unpaid – have been unravelled and conceptualised within different cultural and national contexts. The third paragraph addresses the process by which the ‘work’ dimension of caring has been reclaimed, irrespective of the relationships in which it is performed; while the fourth retraces aspects of the debate about the caring professions. In the fifth and sixth paragraphs focus is on the reconceptualisation of care as entitlement, or as social right, -- partly contested and certainly incomplete. The concluding paragraph highlights some of the theoretical and relational dilemmas involved both in caring relationships and in caring discourses. 2. Care is public and private The Italian and Nordic cases are particularly interesting in that feminist research in caring from the late 1970s onwards illuminates theoretical, cultural and political traditions that in different ways have transcended the public/private divide in family and social policy analysis. Although it represents one of the most interesting cross-cultural intellectual endeavours, the research and theoretical debate about care, in fact, has developed within national and culture-specific understandings of what care is about (Finch 1993, Leira 1994). The need for ‘translation’ between studies set in different cultural and political contexts adds to the difficulties of transforming everyday concepts into tools for social

1 The authors wish to thank Rossana Trifiletti for her careful reading of a draft version and for helping with the literature.

analysis. For instance, a recent OECD publication outlining the new social policy agenda is entitled A Caring World in the English version, while in French it is Pour Un Monde Solidaire (OECD 2000). The term ‘care’ in English, the Scandinavian ‘omsorg’ and the Italian ‘cura’, which are the most common translations, all have connotations of labour and love, caring for and caring about, public care and private, and the care for one person as well as the overall provision of care in society. However, the use of the terms is not identical - in Anglo-American studies ‘care’ covers a wider range of meanings and relationships. The term ‘social care’, as used for example by Daly and Lewis (1998), represents an attempt to circumscribe a more specific meaning within this wide range – and at the same time to overcome the public/private divide within which the concept of care was originally developed within the Anglo-American care discourse (Finch 1993) - in order to make it a useful concept in social policy and welfare state analysis. As such it is more similar to the approach we are using in this chapter.

The awareness of political and cultural differences is all the more important since the responsibility for some forms of care, and particularly the care of highly dependent persons, is central to the boundaries drawn between state and family, as seen in the formal definitions of family obligations (see e.g. Millar and Warman eds. 1995). In the Nordic countries, for example, since the 1970s social reproduction has been “going public,” and terms such as the ‘public family’ and the ‘caring state’ have been used to highlight the changing relationship between the welfare state and the family. Thus, it is important, particularly in comparative studies, to consider the diverse ‘caring regimes’ (to use the terminology of Anttonen and Sipilä, 1996). In the Western welfare states, the striking differences in the public-private and state-family mixes of care responsibilities necessitate the study not only of the set of public provisions, but ‘caring packages’ or ways of packaging paid and unpaid, family and non family, public and private, and formal and informal modes of providing care, as well as ‘caring cultures’. If this context specificity is not ignored, cross-cultural and cross national studies of caring regimes may add significantly to our understanding of how welfare states operate and of the diverse ways in which care is integrated as a social right of citizens.

From this point of view, the very important debates around the ‘commodification of care’ (see Ostner and Knijn this volume) may have different emphasis and meanings depending both on how the provision of care is organised between the family, the state, and the market, and on how analyses of care have been developed within the various national contexts. “Commodification”, in fact, may mean both that the provision of care is to a smaller or larger degree allocated to market relations, and that it is allocated to public services, through the paid work of care professionals. In the former case both care and care providers have become a commodity, in the latter case only the labour of providing care is commodified, but care itself is a public good. The dividing line is subtle, and not always well traced in analyses of commodification of care. Rather, these stress one or the other meaning depending on the specific historic process which spurs them to begin with. Thus concern over the ‘commodification of care’ may be voiced differently if care has been previously conceptualised and analysed as a mainly private activity developed within the household and/or kinship network (Graham 1983, Ungerson 1983, 1987, Finch and Groves 1983, Finch 1993), or if issues of paid and unpaid, informal and informal, private and public care have been at the core of analyses of caring activities and their gender dimensions – as in the Scandinavian and Italian feminist debate since the 1970s (e.g. Balbo and Bianchi 1981, Wærness, 1984, Leira 1992, 2001, Simonen 1991).

Interestingly, both in Scandinavia and in Italy feminist sociological analysis of care has from the very beginning been concerned with welfare state development. In Scandinavia, the preoccupation with the state was due to the fact that social reproduction was going public to a degree unknown elsewhere in the West. Feminist research from the very beginning started from the public-private mix in care, and outlined the institutional differentiation in care provision encompassing not only family and kin, but also the state and local authorities, local networks, voluntary organisations, formal and informal labour markets. Empirical surveys and studies of everyday life demonstrated how the responsibility for care provision was gradually shifting towards increasing public involvement. As mentioned above, this was also before the term ‘social care’ entered into academic discourse to describe the complex set of relationships and settings in which care may occur (Daly and Lewis 1998). In Scandinavian feminist studies of the welfare state, care and the gender presumptions involved were analysed in terms of social citizenship well before it became a standing theme in feminist social policy and political science discourse in other countries (Hernes 1984, 1987, Siim 1987, Borchorst and Siim 1987, Leira 1992). In fact, the importance of social reproduction going public was a central element in Helga Hernes’ (1987) conceptualisation of the ’woman-friendly’ potentialities of the Nordic social democracies.

The feminist discourse in Italy about the division of labour within the family and the role of caring work developed in the mid-seventies, in a period when the rudimentary Italian welfare state (mostly based on income transferrals) started to develop its caring services, particularly in the area of child care. Debates on the virtues of community care and ‘de-institutionalisation’ began to develop at the same time, as in the UK (Finch 1993), particularly with regard to the mentally ill and handicapped. Thus, theoretical reflections on care and gender had to deal right from the start with the shifting boundaries of places where care occurred and with issues of crossing and interfacing, more than just separation and distinction (e.g. Balbo 1977, 1978, 1982, 1987, Balbo and Bianchi 1981, Saraceno 1984a, 1984b). Italian feminists in their arguments in favour of a more developed welfare state looked more at the Scandinavian model than at the British or German one. They were thus involved in the emerging Scandinavian debates about the “caring state” and the problems that demographic, family, gender and labour market changes were posing for caring needs and obligations. It is worth mentioning that the report of the Swedish Secretariat for Future Studies (1984) Time to Care, was presented in Italy and a summary translated into Italian by Laura Balbo in 1987, together with part of

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the debate which developed around it involving Italian feminist and non feminist scholars. In Italy and Scandinavia, as in several other welfare states, concern over the professionalisation of care and carers added to the concern with the persistent gender division of labour in caring work beyond the formal/informal, public/private divisions.

It is worth mentioning that the conceptualisation of caring, as developed in Scandinavia and Italy, allowed the inclusion of care for all kinds of highly dependent persons, including one’s own children. By contrast in the UK, at least according to Finch (1993) and also Daly and Lewis (1998), care for young children long remained outside the scope of this concept. At the same time, the different family and gender cultures in Scandinavia and Italy probably account for the early attempts in the former to distinguish between care, servicing and care-giving work; reserving the latter for the care of very dependent persons (Wærness 1987).

We do not interpret this ‘unfinished’ and context-linked character of the concept of care and its accompanying vocabulary as a shortcoming. Rather, we see it as an indicator of the potential of a concept that has helped to open up for analysis empirical fields that were previously largely undertheorised, such as ‘housework’ and ‘social reproduction’, and further served to deconstruct and engender concepts such as ‘family obligations’, ‘social citizenship’, ‘welfare state’. At the same time, it has made our view of the world more complex. 3. Reclaiming unpaid care as ‘work’ Among the highly important early contributions of feminist scholarship to social analysis was the reclaiming of unpaid activities, such as housework or domestic work, as ‘work’. This was a re-conceptualisation that included unpaid care not only as ‘work’, but as an activity of great value and significance to society. While acknowledging the social and cultural associations of femininity and care, feminist scholarship questioned the assumption that caring capabilities were ‘natural’ or inherent in women. The over-representation of women in all forms of caring work was interpreted as a consequence of patriarchal power structures. Some even questioned the biological underpinning of motherly care and of Parsons’ interpretation of sex role differentiation in families. Zillah Eisenstein (1981) coined the term ‘political motherhood’ to underline the political and social underpinnings of the non-biological aspects of motherhood. On these points, however, opinions among feminist scholars were, and still are widely different.

The identification of unpaid caring as ‘work’ emerged from at least four partially interrelated processes: the feminist re-appraisal of domestic work, the changing context and content of domestic work, the community care and de-institutionalisation debate, and in some countries the expansion of the welfare state as a ‘caring’ state, or ‘social reproduction going public’. A labour of love? The first process is particularly well represented by the critique of the presumptions implicit in the powerful ‘labour of love’ metaphor (Finch and Groves 1983). Articulating carework as work, this position did not deny the emotional, relational, and caring dimensions of unpaid work performed for family members by wives, mothers and daughters. It did however, underscore that the work aspects of caring for dependent persons were hidden from view when care was interpreted as inherent in femininity and unpaid work and care taken as a natural expression of ‘love’ (see also Ungerson 1990, Leira 1992, Saraceno 1971, 1980).

This feminist re-appraisal of domestic work as social reproduction had several facets. It was inspired by the Marxist production/reproduction debate, and also by the work of psychoanalytically oriented scholars such as Juliet Mitchell (1971) and Nancy Chodorow (1978). It involved a deconstruction and reformulation of well-known concepts such as domestic work, social reproduction, work and welfare. The activities usually covered by terms such as housework or social reproduction were seen as activities having economic value (and this is a different part of the story), besides often being hard physical work and involving not only the performance of tasks, but the development of and attendance to relationships and identities (e.g. Mitchell 1971, Saraceno 1980, Bimbi 1985, 1991).

Influenced by, but also going beyond the ‘political economy of domestic labour debate’ initiated by Seccombe’s (1974) seminal analysis, the conceptualisation of care as a specific dimension of unpaid work within the family helped to develop a more complex view of the work itself. Thus, for instance, Balbo (1978) proposed a broader concept than simply domestic work - namely ‘family work’ - to encompass all unpaid work performed by a family member for the family as a whole or for individual members. She distinguished analytically between housework proper (doing chores), relational work with/for family members and kin, and relational/interfacing work with services and institutions outside the family. Balbo (1987) also introduced the often-quoted metaphor of ’patchwork quilting’ to denote the complexities of women’s caring and servicing work for their families. Caring relations/ power relations Research and policy interest in care was also influenced by comprehensive changes in the division of caring labour within households mainly due to a substantial reduction, if not disappearance in the seventies of paid domestic help and nannies, even in the better educated middle classes. It should not be forgotten that in the 1970s several countries saw the first generation of well educated/ middle-class women to experience en masse the increasing demands of emotional labour as well as those of domestic labour without having a convenient supply of cheap domestic servants. Often facing demands for the care of both children and the frail elderly, their lived experience demonstrated that ‘caring for’ and ‘caring about’ were more easily distinguished at the analytical than at the practical level. When care for family or kin was involved, there were normatively and emotionally strong expectations that both dimensions should be present.

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Arlie Hochschild captured this duality in defining care as “an emotional bond, usually mutual, between the caregiver and the cared for, a bond in which the caregiver feels responsible for the others’ well-being and does mental, emotional and physical work in the course of fulfilling the responsibility/ies. Thus care of a person implies care about him or her” (Hochschild 1997, p. 333; see also Wærness 1987).2

From early on, studies of caring relationships recognised the power relations between carers and cared for, particularly in the marriage relationship (e.g. Land and Rose 1985). This power asymmetry is one aspect of Wærness’ (1987) influential distinction, mentioned above, between caring and servicing, and between these two kinds of relationships and ‘care’ as the special feeling of loving concern (as well as pleasure, see e.g. Sevenhuijsen 1998) which may be present in both. According to Wærness, caring for an able-bodied husband out of a concern for his wellbeing and happiness is ‘servicing’, while caring for a young child, a frail elderly, an invalid person out of the same concern is ‘caring work’. This ‘caring work’ provided for those who, according to commonly accepted societal norms, are not able to care for themselves, identifies according to Wærness what is necessary care and what is not.3 Seen in this way, the definition of both necessary and unnecessary care/caring remains an interpersonal, loving relationship. Many other feminist analysts, however, on the basis of empirical research, question the theoretical cogency of this assumption. Land and Rose (1985) had pointed to compulsory altruism as a very real problem in women’s family-orientated care. Developing their analysis, Finch (1989) pointed out that care-giving work (for instance for an elderly parent) may occur without feelings of love or emotional closeness, of ‘caring about’. Research on family and kin obligations (e.g. Lewis and Meredith 1988, Finch and Mason 1993, Millar and Warman eds. 1995) exposed the very presumption on which they were and are based: obligations to perform caring work may be fulfilled without any feeling of loving concern, but on the basis of a feeling of duty, even within estranged ‘personal’ relationships. “When caring is needed, relations of blood and marriage in particular are expected to be activated into a caring relationship, even if love is missing or lost” (Leira 1994, p.189), even in advanced welfare states. Research on obligations to family and kin has thus revealed the complexities of the range of activities and feelings included in the broad term care/caring.

Analytically, the distinction between caring for dependent persons who are not able to care for themselves and caring for those who can manage well on their own remains important; caring for and caring about should not be conflated. In redistributive terms, only the former is an issue for policy intervention. Only the care for very dependent persons raises the issue of renegotiating the boundaries between the state and family with respect to responsibilities for the provision and costs of care. And possibly because of this explicit or implicit reference to the actual or possible sphere of intervention by the welfare state, much care analysis focuses on the dependent status of those needing care. Professionalisation and de-institutionalisation This brings us to the third process, which drew attention to caring as unpaid work performed mostly by women, i.e. the debate in the 1970s about de-institutionalisation and, more generally, the emerging concern over the professionalisation of care. The debate had different focuses in different countries, but was perhaps most strongly articulated in the UK-discussion about ‘community care’. This centred mainly on extolling the virtues of unpaid care provided in non-institutional (mostly family) settings, insofar as unpaid was taken to mean also more loving, more attentive. According to Finch’s reconstruction (1993), the shift in policy discourse from concern with the shortcomings of large bureaucratic institutions to a reassessment and praise of the healing virtues of communities themselves4 lies at the root of the caring discourse as much as feminist analyses of domestic labour – in the UK at least. In this policy discourse, as aptly pointed out by authors such as Twigg (1990) and Ungerson (1990), the existence of unpaid carers was taken for granted. To put it somewhat simplistically, the policy debate in the UK on de-institutionalisation considered that women as unpaid caregivers were ‘already there’ and needed only to be symbolically acknowledged as the best providers of care. Social reproduction going public In Scandinavia, we can see a fourth process, which draws attention to unpaid care as work: that is the large-scale development of social and welfare services and an increasing demand for professional, high-quality and state-sponsored care. There the de-institutionalisation debate was also important, as witnessed for example in the reform of institutions for the mentally retarded. However, in Scandinavia the supply of unpaid caring work by women could not be taken for granted, since many women, including mothers of young children, had been heading for the labour market since the

2 From a different starting point, recent studies seem to conflate care with housework, caring about with caring for, since shopping or doing the dishes and laundry for a dependent person (a frail elderly, an handicapped person) per se implies doing caring work (e.g. Lingsom 1997, Silva 1999), reviving once again the question of what counts as caring work (Leira 1999). 3 In parallel with the rediscovery of unpaid care work within the family and the community, early feminist analyses also exposed the existence of unpaid servicing work in some traditional, ‘non caring’ female professions, e.g. the personal secretary. More generally, it is expected as normal behaviour by women workers to a far greater degree than by men workers. This strand of analysis was not pursued for long, but split in different directions: in part studying the caring professions, and in part the greater relational competence developed by women, who tend to privilege this dimension over personal ambition in the professional world. 5 In Finch’s words (1993, p. 6), from caring in the community to caring by the community.

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1960s. Rapidly increasing their economic activity, women often took up public sector employment, and frequently performed on a paid basis tasks similar to those they did at home unpaid. In this process of social reproduction going public, unpaid care was transformed into paid work, serving at the same time to make visible as ‘work’, the unpaid care performed informally or within the family. Although rudimentary, time-budget studies offered the possibility of demonstrating the amount of unpaid work and care still performed for the family in the household, mainly by women, despite the increasing labour market participation rates.

The focus on the changing contents of patterns of social reproduction in the contemporary, technologically-advanced welfare state and service society, not only resulted in analyses of how families and their gender division of labour were affected by social change. It also revealed that family obligations in general, and unpaid caring in particular, were an overlooked but crucial part of the welfare provision in society. At the same time, the combination of concern over the risks of over-bureaucratisation in large scale uniform services and rising costs of high quality professional services, prompted the attempt to redefine (for both men and women) the balance between time devoted to paid work and time devoted to unpaid necessary care. This meant redefining a life-course policy where the combination – now we would say conciliation – between the different obligations and “times” were supported as normal and valuable (Swedish Secretariat for Future Studies 1984; see also Balbo and Nowotny 1986).

Although feminist analysts both in the UK and Scandinavia set themselves the task of exposing the gender dimension of unpaid care and its costs for women, effort in the UK was more focused on denouncing the taken-for-granted attitude of mainstream social policy discourse that presumed women’s unpaid work and care. In Scandinavia feminist analyses stimulated debate about the boundaries between public and private provision of care, between paid and unpaid care, as well as the gender effects of a redistribution of care between actors and institutional settings. Helga Hernes (1987) introduced the concept of the ‘woman-friendly welfare state’, a notable contrast to the dominant trends in the Anglo-American feminist literature that underscored the patriarchal character of the welfare state relationship to women. The concept is still highly controversial, because of its implications of a non-repressive state, as well as for the empirical reference to Scandinavia only(e.g. Langan and Ostner 1991, see also Lewis 1992). In any case, the gendered division between paid and unpaid caring added to the debate on gender differences in access to social citizenship.

Given the lack of social services for the frail elderly as well as for very young children, together with the pronounced and wide extension of normative obligations to care for family and kin, unpaid informal care in Italy is probably a larger part of the overall care provided than in the UK or Scandinavia. Still, it is worthwhile noting that in Italy the feminist debate had to face the additional charge made against women who were cast as the ‘villains’ of the welfare state. This was firstly because their growing participation in the labour market (still among the lowest in the developed world) increased the demand for social services and hence added to public expenditure. And secondly, by demanding increasing professionalisation of typically female paid caring jobs (e.g. in childcare services, in nursing homes and in home help for the frail elderly), women were accused of undermining what should have been a ‘labour of love’.

4. The caring professions and the relationship between caregivers as paid and unpaid workers The recognition of the large amount of unpaid caring work performed mostly by women also led to a new look being given to paid caring work and the so called ‘caring professions and occupations’. We are not referring here primarily to the expansion of welfare state social services, but to the analysis of professions, which deal with relationships, as well as with bodies.

There were two distinct strands of research, but these touched only at the margins. One was concerned with those professions whose specific aim are, or should be attending to the personal needs of others: nursing and child-minding first of all, but also social work and different kind of therapeutic work. The second strand of research dealt with the relationship and shifting boundaries between paid and unpaid carers, between care provided in the family by family members and care provided by professional care givers in public or private social services.

We will not deal at length with the first strand of thinking, but would like to mention just a few aspects that are of some importance for our line of reasoning. The idea that some public, i.e. non-family and non-privatised means of social re-integration is needed in a world where traditional community ties and forms of social integration are breaking down, predates the modern welfare state. Moreover, at the core of much social feminist/social reformers work and of the social services and professions they created (see for instance Jane Adams’ work in the slums in the US, and Maria Montessori’s work with poor children in Italy) is the principle that some form of public caring should be developed.

The early feminist analyses of the caring professions were caught in the midst of at least three contrasting discourses. One focussed on the de-humanising risks of over-professionalisation, a second argued the need to distinguish and valorise the professional dimensions of many women’s jobs, which are typically caring jobs, 5 and a third was concerned with the implications of care-related policy reforms on women’s position in society. Feminists

6 The gender dimension of the caring professions was first pointed out not by feminists, but by Talcott Parsons, who saw it as fitting in the division of labour and spheres/subsystems which kept complex societies going: women were finely tuned to attend to interpersonal relationships as unpaid activity in the family and as paid activity in society (see Parsons and Bales 1954 )

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were involved in all three. We shall briefly touch upon some of these debates before turning to the relationship between paid and unpaid caregivers. The rationality of caring In the preceding section, we have already touched upon some aspects of the discourses raised about the professionalisation of care. Here we turn to the discussion over competing models for care provision, and particularly to the rationality of caring. Concern with professionalisation and bureaucratisation of caring prompted for instance Kari Wærness to contrast what she termed the ‘rationality of caring’ and ‘ scientific rationality’. The rationality of care, she argues, is ”…of fundamental importance for the welfare of care dependants, and at the same time different from and to some degree contradictory to the scientific rationality on which professional authority and control in the field of reproduction is legitimated”( 1987, p. 217). Wærness illustrates the rationality of care taking motherly care as a main example. Motherly care is individualised, based on personal knowledge of the individual child. Put differently, the rationality of care implies connectedness, ’local’ knowledge and interpersonal relationships. Scientific rationality on the other hand strives for predictability and control. Wærness is highly sceptical when it comes to making scientific rationality a guideline for care provision and caring relationships, and goes on to argue that different forms of reasoning is needed when it comes to solve scientific and caring challenges respectively.

The idea of a specific rationality of care has had a mixed reception, i.a. because of its claim that care represents a special form of rationality, and also for the reference to mother’s care representing this rationality. Returning a decade later to comment upon the debate, Wærness (1996) points to its being a ’sensitising concept’ that has served to highlight some of the policy, professional and moral problems entailed when the restructuring of social care is at issue.

To some extent Wærness’ discussion of a rationality of caring as different from scientific rationality is reminiscent of Gilligan’s (1982) thinking about the importance of relationships in moral reasoning, and the distinction she makes between moral reasoning based on rights and responsibilities respectively. In both cases the question of gender-specific moral reasoning arises, an issue also present in the concept of ‘maternal thinking’ (Ruddick 1980).7

In any case, the development of the caring professions and occupations has implied a redefinition of boundaries and responsibilities between private and public, and between the family, the market and the welfare state. It also entailed a shift in the normative setting for the caring relationship: from the moral and individual obligations of family and kinship to the ethical codes of professional work, and the need for negotiation of rights and responsibilities between care recipients and care givers. This is a theme to which we shall return later, see sections 5 and 6.

Caring as skilled work A main feminist contribution to the discussion of caring and the professionalisation of caring was in its emphasis on care for dependent persons being skilled work that presumed learning. Accordingly, the argument was that this specific skill, implicitly expected in many services jobs, should be acknowledged and rewarded as such (e.g. Cockburn 1983, Stacey 1988). For instance, adequate caring presumes the ability to cater not only for material needs, but also the identity and relational needs of recipients of care – although to what degree and whether this should also imply some personal concern and involvement is a matter of empirical investigation and practical negotiations.

The ‘mainstream’ welfare state debate in many countries left the analysis of the caring professions as professions somewhat at the margins, focusing instead on patterns of provision, or on the virtues and risks, especially for women, of a “caring state” ( Borchorst and Siim 1987, Hernes 1987). In some respects, the study of the occupations and professions of the welfare state developed into a specialist area at the interface of the sociology of professions and welfare state analysis. The relationship between paid and unpaid care workers The early analyses of the diversification of care and the development of the caring occupations were more concerned with the changing meaning of care in the passage from unpaid to paid work and with the implications for relationships between women, than with the issues of ‘commodification’ and social care. This may have been due to the fact that the term commodification, albeit old, was not much in use in feminist welfare state analysis until revived by Gøsta Esping Andersen (1990, 1999), some years after these first studies were conducted. But it was also a question of research interests. Italian and Scandinavian analyses, for instance, were concerned with the institutional differentiation of care provision, which de facto also entailed commodification. In earlier studies, the issue was not that care had to be paid for (as in later analyses, which focussed on welfare state restructuring), but that part of the care was being performed by paid workers, who were often professionals. In the feminist debate, an important aspect was that women were found in all capacities within caring work: as service providers, and as clients, consumers or recipients of care services. Further, paid and unpaid care giving may easily be two activities of the same woman not only over her life course, but over her day, within changing settings and power relations.

This highlighted the fact that the expansion of publicly sponsored, paid caring services was not simply a substitution for, but also entailed a redefinition of family work. The feminist exposition also showed how the

6 For further reflections on gendered moral rationalities see Duncan and Edwards (1999) 7 For further reflections on gendered moral rationalities see Duncan and Edwards (1999)

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relationship between the welfare state and women was changing. Within this framework, a new component was the need to deal with caring services and adjust to their symbolic, normative and timing rules (Balbo 1982, Bianchi 1981, Leira 1983).

The transformation from unpaid to paid care has also involved a renegotiation of duties between the carers themselves. For example, whenever childcare is shared or delegated, there are negotiations of meaning and power, and conflicts over the child’s affection emerge, even within the private boundaries of the home. The process is not totally new. In fact, the history of the family shows how the present concept of motherhood, as a social and personal identity, has emerged over a long period of change. Both in the higher and working classes, there has been a gradual unification in one person of activities and responsibilities which in the past were divided among a number of different figures: In the higher classes e.g., the wet nurse, the nanny, the tutor/governess; in the lower classes a grandmother, an aunt, a sibling. In this respect, the novelty entailed in the professionalisation of care is that care sharing and delegation occur not only within private, interpersonal, and strongly hierarchical contracts, but between institutions and involving professionals who are not in a hierarchical relationship between themselves. Professional nurses and teachers in day care centres or kindergartens are not personal servants. On the contrary, in dealing with children they have the power to define the qualities of a ‘good parent’ or a ‘good mother’, and whether a specific mother is a good mother (Giacomini 1981, Saraceno 1984a, Bimbi 1990). At the same time, while mothers expect their children to be lovingly taken care of, they do not want their children to love their minder too much – in other words, they expect them to keep their emotional loyalties in the family. Care-related policy reforms: reconceptualising actors, relationships and contexts In more recent studies, a major issue is again the relationship between public and private - where private has come to refer more to the market than the family. The meaning of commodification has also shifted. It now addresses less and less the issue of paying (or being paid) for care and increasingly, if not exclusively, the "marketisation" of social services. This shift in focus tends to conflate the commodification of care with the marketisation of care provision, neglecting the fact that in state, community or third sector social services, carers are paid and therefore their work is necessarily commodified.

Thus the question of what happens to caring when it becomes paid work was reformulated. The debate was often influenced by analyses in the UK, where this issue featured in discussions of the marketisation and commodification of care resulting from the restructuring of the welfare state. Secondly, the extension of paid care became part of the conceptualisation of “social care”, including consideration of the public/private, paid/unpaid, formal/informal dichotomies of caring. Mary Daly and Jane Lewis (1998:6) have defined social care as “ …the activities involved in meeting the physical and emotional requirements of dependent adults and children, and the normative, cost and social frameworks within which this work is assigned and carried out”. There are several parallels between the concept of ‘social care’ as used by Daly and Lewis (1998), and the concept of ‘care-giving work’ proposed by Wærness (1987), (see also Anttonen and Sipilä (1996) for a discussion of ‘social care services’).

Attention has shifted in comparative studies of care to ‘caring regimes’ and ‘caring packages’. This has made an important contribution not only to comparative analyses of the welfare state, going beyond the ‘male breadwinner regime’ approach (see also Sainsbury 1996) but also to our understanding of the complex ways in which care is provided and received. In addition, it has contributed to understanding of how changes in the public provision of care can affect the working conditions of informal and formal carers, causing possible conflicts of interest and tensions over forms of provision.

At the same time, interest has moved away from the question of how carers negotiate meanings and identities among themselves. We may perhaps be witnessing the emergence of a ‘division of labour’ in care research (Leira 1999). While some studies deal more exclusively with the ‘caring about’ aspects, the characteristics and qualities of caring relationships, and the kind of ethic these represent, other studies are addressing the various practices and provisions of ‘caring for’, leaving unexamined the crucial link between the two.

However, in debates and policies concerning payment for care the conceptualisation of caring as a labour of love tends to re-emerge, although often veiled. It also appears in discussion about the virtues of third sector services in contrast to the over-bureaucratic and impersonal public services, and about the need to recruit and integrate family, neighbours and kin to provide an integrated package of care in connection with ‘ageing in place’ and similar policies.

The relationship between unpaid family caregivers and paid ones is an issue once again coming to the fore in the analysis of the hierarchical chain of care. In reviving and transforming traditional forms of commodification (and of housework in general), the care chain is now becoming increasingly global (e.g. Hochschild 2000, and before her Graham 1991). It is more and more common for children and frail elderly in the first world to be taken care of by women from the third world, who in turn pay another woman in their country to take care of their own children or elderly parents. Or, as it is happening in Italy, two immigrant sisters can alternate between working for the same family in Italy and for their own two families at home. For example, one of them would work in Italy for six months, while the other cares for both their families in their home countries; then they switch places. This resurgence of domestic caring work, its higher visibility, and the fact that it is often performed by women who are too far away from their own children to care for them themselves, is prompting new questions. What, for example, happens when you undertake paid care for others and hence cannot perform unpaid care for your own relations? And conversely, what does it mean when you know that the person you pay to care for your child or your frail elderly parent will not be able to see her own

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child grow up, or to tend an ailing parent? The fact that it is still perceived as a women’s issue, primarily involving the responsibilities of and relationships between women, indicates the persistence of a gendered vision of caring work, little affected by the changing circumstances. 5. Caring as a responsibility and social right Care (later formulated as motherhood) was first presented as an autonomous foundation for entitlement to citizenship rights in Olimpia DeGouge’s Social Contract in 1791, and constituted the core of Wollstonecraft’s dilemma. Nancy Fraser’s (1994) blueprint for a woman-friendly society, or rather for gender equity in the welfare state is a modern elaboration of this dilemma, now formulated as binary access to citizenship. Fraser examines two models of citizenship emerging from the debate on the shortcomings of the gender division of labour: one based on the universal breadwinner model to which she contrasts the caregiver parity model. The first argues the expansion of women’s employment, while the second advocates providing care allowances and entitlement to social rights to carers as such. The aim of the caregiver parity model is not to make women’s lives similar to those of men, but to make the difference with respect to breadwinning and caring responsibilities ‘costless’ (p. 606). Apparently, the original dichotomy has not been overcome, but the breadwinner and the carer are made more similar with respect to entitlements. Fraser goes on to outline a third possibility, taking women’s life patterns as the norm, and inducing men to do their share of caring, strategies that have been discussed for many years e.g. in Scandinavia. Interestingly, Fraser’s intimation of the possibility of a third model is inspired by statements from the Swedish Ministry of Labour on the changes needed among men and in the organisation of working life to promote gender equality. Similar suggestions may be found in recent documents both by the Swedish presidency and the EU itself on the need to conciliate family and work responsibilities.

From perspectives different from those of Fraser, attempts have been made to construct an idea of what constitutes a citizen, and hence what citizenship rights and responsibilities may include. The expression ‘citizen the carer’ (Leira 1992, Knijn and Kremer 1997) formulates the idea that citizens are both wage workers and unpaid carers, and that policies and social rights should therefore address both dimensions.

An important part of welfare state analysis (particularly in Scandinavia, but also in Italy and the US) has been concerned with how and to what extent social rights have accrued to women as carers (mostly as mothers), as well as how and to what degree care provision has become a public responsibility. One may not totally agree with Skockpol’s (1992) thesis concerning the maternalist origin of the US welfare state, but certainly the point that women as mothers should have some entitlement to protection and resources was not only a feminist demand. It also led to specific policies regarding access to citizenship (see e.g. Saraceno 1997 and forthcoming, Leira 1992), although often of a second order (Zincone 1990, Hernes 1987). Variations in these policies cut across mainstream welfare state typologies, including that based on the male breadwinner category (e.g. Lewis 1992, Lewis and Ostner 1995), precisely because they show the degree to which entitlements and resources accrue to women, not as the mothers of their husbands’ children, or as wives of ailing husbands, or as widows, but as mothers and/or family caregivers (Sainsbury 1996).

Employed mothers and solo mothers have been and still are the two main social figures to whom some kind of entitlement is acknowledged as carers. Entitlements for solo mothers, in particular, have rightly been pointed out as challenging both the practice and the ideology of the male breadwinner model, while at the same time constituting an important variation among otherwise strong male breadwinner states, such as Germany, the Netherlands and the UK (Hobson 1990, 1994, see also Orloff 1993). Both examples, however, indicate that most entitlements accruing to mothers as carers are conditional on some other circumstance: either being in work, or being without income and/or without a provider. In many countries maternity (or parental) benefits and paid leave are not unconditionally available, being granted only to women in employment (Sainsbury 1996). (A notable exception here is the Nordic countries, where insurance benefits provide a basic allowance even for non-working mothers).8 However, in most if not all countries the question of what qualifies as a job giving entitlement to maternity benefits and paid leave has been strongly contested for decades. Considerable differentiation exists between the various categories of working women: employees and the self employed, tenured and untenured, part time and full time, temporary or permanent and so forth. There is considerable cross country variation within Europe in social security rules in terms of entitlements, coverage and duration (see also the comparative overview by Gornick et al. 1997, Moss and Deven eds. 2000). The EU Directive on Parental Leave of 1996 instituted the right of both parents to take unpaid leave, although in the majority of member states some wage replacement is offered.

However, the most important changes occurring recently in this field are not the extension of benefits to cover a wider range of working mothers, but the extension of entitlement to fathers (see e.g. EC Network on Childcare 1994, Moss and Deven eds., 2000, Leira 2001, Hobson 2001). State sponsoring of father care via paid parental leave schemes is a novelty, and represents a radical re-definition of caring obligations and rights. The first to offer this entitlement, from the 1970s onwards, were the Scandinavian countries. As gender-neutral parental leave produced a highly gendered take-up, later, special periods of the leave were reserved for fathers, as ‘daddy quota’ or ‘daddy leave’. Stimulating

8 In Italy such an allowance was introduced in 1997, but it is means-tested on the basis of the household (thus de facto the husband’s) income.

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father care by gentle force, legislation stipulates that if the fathers do not make use of the quota, this leave period is lost to the family (Leira 1998). Italy, which already had one of the most generous systems for employed mothers, passed a law in March 2000 closely resembling the Scandinavian one, lengthening the leave of absence if part of it is taken by the father. The adoption of parental leave schemes signals a turning point in policies concerning the gendered conceptualisation of care and caring, even though at present mostly only at the symbolic level.

Solo mothers (or fathers) in most countries usually have access to additional benefits or have priority in receiving services, although often this is conditional on need. But the threshold at which this is set, the level of income support provided, the additional requirements (e.g. availability for work), the age of the youngest child - all of these differ considerably in different countries. The different policies represent quite different patterns of acknowledgement of need and also ‘worthiness’ per se of being a full time mother, as well as providing different packages of resources within different forms of entitlement (Hobson 1994, Sainsbury 1996).

Motherhood was the first care-giving role to be granted some kind of entitlement. In recent years, a flourishing literature on men and masculinities indicates that the concept of the ’caring father’ is supplementing the much debated concept of the ’working mother’ (for an overview see Leira 1998, Hobson 2001). Fathers’ right to care for a newborn child has been expanded, and in some countries the rights of fathers to care is an important consideration when parents split up or divorce. Besides the partial inclusion of fatherhood, some social rights have also been provided for those caring for the handicapped and the frail elderly in many countries, and in some cases for those who care for terminally ill relatives. This sometimes takes the form of an allowance, as in the invalid care allowance in the UK, or credits towards supplementary pension benefits, as in Norway, or paid leave as in Italy, or a combination of these various options (Evers, Pijl and Ungerson 1994, Ungerson 1997, Lewis ed. 1998). This may be seen as a widening of options, or as an acknowledgement of informal work and care as work, or also in negative terms as a shift from the provision of services to the provision of cash for informal work. As indicated in the comparative studies by Ungerson (1997) and the study co-ordinated by Lewis (1998), there is no single authentic interpretation. It depends on the starting point, on the overall social citizenship pattern in each country, and on the whole package of social care available (see also Leira 1998, Saraceno 1997).

If we look at how the rights of carers have been acknowledged, it would seem useful to clarify the commodification/ decommodification dichotomy. In the case of paid leave for working parents, we could say that the employed parent is ‘decommodified’ and that the responsibility for caring is given priority over the demands of the job. In the case of cash benefits being paid to non employed parents caring for their children, or of spouses or daughters taking care of an invalid husband, elderly parent or handicapped child, the labour of the carer is ‘commodified’ (Leira 2001, see the chapter on commodification/ decommodification in this volume). 6. The right to be cared for – an incomplete social right? The right of dependent persons to receive care implies that care provision is the responsibility (or right) of somebody else. Whether or when it makes sense to speak about a right not to care depends first of all on what forms of care are being involved. When it comes to very dependent people, the moral norms of society demands that their needs be met. In this sense, care is an obligation, or a moral responsibility of all members of society. Sometimes a rank order of those responsible for care provision is specified. This involves both a division of responsibilities between families and society and the allocation of responsibilities within families. Whether formally specified or not, family obligations to care are often constructed as the responsibility of women, more than of men. Men have collectively opted out of childcare, Robert Connell once observed, which means that the greater responsibility will rest with women. There still remains a strong risk of taking for granted that carers will always care and that some people will never have responsibility for caring.

As Knijn and Kremer (1997) have suggested, the right to care is not only about the right to give care or prioritising care over other activities, but also the right to receive care when in need. Both aspects should be encompassed in what they term ‘inclusive citizenship’. In Western welfare states, the boundaries of responsibility for care provision between family and state or public and private sectors are drawn very differently (see Millar and Warman eds. 1995, Trifiletti 2000) and the social rights of the care dependent and carers differ accordingly. It should be noted that some degree of collective responsibility for the caring needs of dependent persons, particularly the frail elderly and the handicapped, as well as orphaned children, was acknowledged long before the development of the welfare state (either under the Poor Law or within the framework of charity). But even in developed welfare states, the public obligation to provide care seems to be more readily acknowledged for the frail elderly and the handicapped than for very young children. Denmark, Finland and Sweden are the only countries in which publicly funded services old are generously provided for children under three years as well as for the elderly (Anttonen and Sipilä 1996, Saraceno 1997, Bettio and Préchal 1998).

A contemporary explanation might point to the fact that the right to have a caring family is one of a child’s basic rights, as spelled out in the UN declaration of children’s rights. Thus childcare services may only be subsidiary to family care. The right of employed parents to paid parental leave to care for a child, already mentioned above, may be seen as an attempt to tackle this issue. Yet, things are not quite so simple. Childcare services are not only for the benefit of mothers or parents, but also advantageous for children. This dimension is clearer when the policy focuses on child development. When it centres on the needs of working mothers, it can seem to imply that mothers urgently need care

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for their children, but not necessarily good quality care. But providing a low quality service to children means fostering inequality.

Many recent developments in childcare attempt to meet the threefold aim of encouraging mothers (particularly lone mothers) to enter paid work, to cut social expenditure, and to curb unemployment, particularly among the unskilled. This suggests that children’s rights and child development risk being sacrificed to low quality services.9 More generally, since publicly sponsored childcare is far from universally available, resulting in queues and forms of rationing and prioritisation, it cannot be claimed that the right to be cared for is a complete social right for children. The degree to which it is attained often varies according to age as well as by country. Only the Nordic countries have recently explicitly established as a policy goal the provision of care resources for all children (in the form of services or of cash benefits for childcare).

Even when it comes to the frail elderly and the handicapped, the right to be cared for is frequently not established as a complete social right. Queuing for access to services, rationing, as well as calls for additional or substitute provision by kin or charity is not uncommon across Western Europe. In this area, differences between welfare states are greater than in the field of childcare. In Southern Europe, the obligations of family and kin to provide care for the frail elderly and the handicapped are framed in legislation and policy and are publicly supported (see e.g. Trifiletti 199810). This leaves public bodies responsibility only for extreme cases, either due to lack of kin or very severe illness.

It should be noted however that in countries where there is still a legal obligation for adult children to provide income support, including Italy, recent attempts by the state to oblige children to contribute to the cost of care for their parents in old age homes has been strongly contested (see Saraceno 2000). In other countries, however, even where provisions are not always sufficient or of high quality, there is public consensus about the existence of collective responsibility for care for the elderly. The introduction of the care insurance for the elderly in countries such as Germany or Austria represents a trend towards the universalisation – in a social insurance state - of the elderly's right to be cared for. The institution of cash for care instruments may be seen in two ways: as a means of increasing the consumer choice of the care recipient, or of decreasing the quality of services provided and hence devaluing the skills of professional carers. It has been suggested by Ostner (1998) that the latter interpretation possibly applies to Germany, by Martin et al (1998) that it applies to France, by Wærness (1998) to Norway, and by Land and Lewis (1998) to the UK, but not Finland (Simonen and Kovalainen 1998).

Writing from the vantage point of the Scandinavian countries, Leira (1999) observes that, “ the right to be cared for is incomplete. It does perhaps illustrate what is sometimes termed ‘supply-conditioned rights’, expressing the intention of government, but not necessarily establishing an entitlement to be claimed here and now. To a considerable extent, the needs of the care dependent remain to be met outside public budgets, by non public bodies or private individuals, who by necessity or choice accept the responsibility for care provision”.

Although the needs of the care recipients have always served as a basis to argue for or contest caring obligations, their ‘voice’ has been heard only recently, following the emergence of organisations among the handicapped and the elderly. From this development, a number of common, but also sometimes divergent needs and interests have emerged more explicitly than before within the complex tangle of caring relationships: between carers, between care recipients (e.g. children and frail elderly, between a handicapped family member and other family members); between carers and cared for (e.g. conflicts about who should receive the payment for care: the carer or the cared for; conflicts on respite care, and so forth). Further, the contested nature of needs (see also Fraser 1989) may extend the possible conflicts to the various actors involved in the caring relationship, reducing rather than increasing provisions and options, mainly due to narrower targeting. In their sombre appraisal of the actual outcomes of the UK policy shift from a service-led to a need-led approach in services for the elderly and the handicapped, Land and Lewis (1998, p.61) conclude that “the personal social services were never provided on a universal social rights model, but they had aspirations to universality. They are fast becoming residual”. 7. Caring as a feminine dilemma Commenting on Graham’s (1983) view that care is part of the way in which women construct their identities as women, Finch (1993, p.16) observes: “to say that ‘caring’ is a gendered concept is to say much more than that ‘women do most of the caring’. It means that caring is bound up with the construction of women’s social identities in a way that simply is not true for men” (Finch 1993, p.16, see also Bimbi 1995). This thesis – which Finch herself and the authors of this chapter think is open to empirical testing – has motivated the kind of critical research mentioned in section 2 above, as well as the discussion of how the change from unpaid to paid care implies a shift in the normative standards or terms within which the caring relationship is set. Even if women remain the predominant caregivers, the change from unpaid to paid care implies a shift in the normative standards or terms within which the caring relationship is set: From being guided by individual morals and family obligations, care is being made an issue for professional codes of ethics. The

9 This is, for instance, Ostner’s (1998) intimation with regard to Germany’s development, and Wærness’ (1998) fear with regard to possible developments in Norway. 10 In terms of entitlement to maintenance the rights of the elderly in Southern European countries are better acknowledged than those of the children.

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discussion of caring as a gendered concept has also involved speculation on the existence of a specific feminine morality More recently, the discussion is raised about the ethic and moral philosophy of care as a moral basis for social change ( e.g. Sevenhuijsen 1997, Tronto 1998 ).

We do not intend to review the debate about the existence of a specific feminine morality, the ontological foundations of which goes back quite a bit in the history of feminist thought, and, when coupled with care often crossing with the nature-culture debate, and with those feminist theories which argue that women and men are ontologically different and that women by nature are more inclined to nurturing and caring. We are interested here in the efforts made to introduce care as a critical concept and dimension in general theories of society and of social development. This strand of thought also has a long history. Over time we can trace a few rhetorical figures who have tried to integrate care into the core of classical (Western) theoretical categories: citizenship, justice, rationality. There is what Carole Pateman (1988) identified as ‘Wollstonecraft’s dilemma’ with its request for a dual foundation of citizenship. This is what Jean Ehlstain has sought to do with her metaphor of Antigone’s dilemma: the conflict between the impersonality of law and the requirements of compassion and the duty of love (Ehlstain 1983, see also Gilligan 1982). To this we can add ‘the rationality of caring ‘ (Wærness 1987 ) as something different, if not opposed, to a reason which affirms itself because of its freedom from connection, its independence. Recent theories on care as an essential human activity which should be positively developed beyond the boundaries of private relationships and even beyond its gender connotations may be seen as deriving from this long genealogy, while still grappling with some of its dilemmas.

The importance of rethinking ‘care’ as a moral and social responsibility and as a basis for entitlements has been given a new impetus in recent past decades in the revival of the feminist movement and its influence in feminist scholarship, and is taken up and reinforced in social policy and welfare state analysis following the ongoing restructuring of welfare state caring policies. In the 1990s care and its gender connotations have been high up on the political agenda as the welfare states of Western Europe are experiencing a rapidly increasing shortage of caring resources, a widening of the gap between the need for care and the supply available. During the past decade, the ‘caring deficit’ has been widely acknowledged as a major challenge for policy reform, and necessitating a reconsideration of who is to care for whom, and who is to shoulder the costs. The need for a profound restructuring of care provision raises anew questions concerning the subsidiarity of the state to the family, or about care going public, to the market or to the third sector institutions. No single blueprint for policy reform has been developed to meet the need for care of very dependent people, or provide for those who provide the care. However, in countries reluctant to immigration, where fertility rates have for long remained low and the population is greying, the caring deficit cannot be shelved. As care provision can no longer take for granted the informal unpaid caring reserves among women, the actors, contexts and relationships of caring are changing. Neither the responsibility nor the capability for care is gender-specific, but the over-representation of women in all forms of caring work means that policy reforms in care are likely to effect women and men in different ways. As discussed in this chapter, the responsibility to provide for those in need of care is a collective responsibility of society and a moral responsibility of individuals. However, the restructuring of social care is taking several forms, and may serve to cement as well as to challenge the traditional gender division of care labour. In this perspective, proposals to develop an ethic of care may be seen as a way of fully acknowledging the value of many of women’s paid and unpaid activities, but also risking to draw attention and energies away from individual citizenship rights, particularly for women (see also the chapter on contract in this book). The acceptance of this ‘superior ethic of care’, in its critique of excessive individualism, bureaucracy, lack of connectedness and so forth, by widely diverse perspectives, such as some Green parties and the Catholic Pope, indicates how powerful the care ethic discourse can be. But it can also be potentially ambiguous, if it does not also deal with issues of individual freedom and rights, power relations and choice. There is also a strong risk of having the labour dimension of caring disappear once again in ‘love’, now reformulated as ‘ethic’. References Anttonen A., and Sipilä J., “European social care services: Is it possible to identify models?”, Journal of European Social Policy, V, 2, 1996, pp. 87-100 Balbo L., “Un caso di capitalismo assistenziale. La società italiana”, Inchiesta, 7, 1977 Balbo L., “La doppia presenza”, in Inchiesta, 32, 1978, pp. 3-6 Balbo L., “The Servicing Work of Women and the Capitalist State”, in Political Power and Social Theory, 3, 1982, pp. 251-70 Balbo L., “Crazy Quilts”, in Sassoon A. (ed.), Women and the state, London, Hutchinson, 1987, pp. 45-71 Balbo L., Bianchi M., Ricomposizioni, Milano, F. Angeli, 1981 Balbo L. and Nowotny H., Time to Care in Tomorrow’s Welfare Systems, Vienna, European Centre for Social Welfare, 1986 Bettio F. and Préchal S., Care in Europe, Bruxelles, European Commission, Directorate-General V, 1998. Bianchi M., I servizi sociali, Bari, De Donato, 1981 Bimbi F. “La doppia presenza: diffusione di un modello e trasformazioni dell’identità”, in F. Bimbi e F. Pristinger, Profili sovrapposti, Milano, Angeli, 1985. Bimbi F., Padri e madri, Milano, Angeli 1990 Bimbi F., "Doppia presenza", in Balbo L. (ed.) Tempi di vita. Studi e proposte per cambiarli, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1991

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Lewis J and Ostner I., “Gender and the evolution of European social policy”, in S. Leibfried and P. Pierson (eds.), European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and Integration, Washington D.C., Brookings Institution, 1995 Lingsom S., The Substitution Issue: Care Politics and Their Consequences for Family Care, Oslo, NOVA, 1997 Martin C., Math C., Renaudat E., “Caring for very young children and dependent elderly people in France: Towards a commodification of social care”?, in Lewis ed., 1998, pp. 139-174 Millar J. and Warman A. (eds.), Defining Family Obligations in Europe, Bath, University of Bath Social Policy Papers, no. 23, 1995 Mitchell J., Women’s Estate, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971 Moss P. and Deven F., (eds.), Parental Leave in Europe. Progress or Pitfall? Brussels, CBGS/NIDI Publications, 2000 OECD, A Caring World / Pour Un Monde Solidaire, Paris, OECD, 2000 Orloff, A., “Gender and the social rights of citizenship: state policies and gender relations in comparative research”, American Sociological Review, 58 (3), 1993, pp. 303-28 Ostner I. “The Politics of Care Policies in Germany”, In Lewis ed. 1998, pp. 111-138 Parental Leave and Leave for Family Reasons. EU Directive 96/34/EC: 03.06.1998 Parsons T. and Bales R, Family, socialization and interaction process, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1954 Pateman C., The Sexual Contract, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1988 Ruddick S., ”Maternal thinking”, Feminist Studies 6 (3), 1980, pp. 343-367 Sainsbury D., Gender, Equality and Welfare States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Sainsbury D. (ed.) Gendering Welfare States, Sage, London, 1994 Saraceno C. “Changing gender and family models: Their impact on the social contract in European welfare states”, in O. Zunz and L. Shop (eds.), Postwar Social Contracts under Stress, forthcoming Saraceno C. “Gendered social policies”, in Boje T. and Leira A., (eds.), Gender. Welfare State and the Market, London and New York, Routledge, 2000, pp. 135-156 Saraceno C., “Family change, family policies and the restructuring of welfare”, in Family, Market and Community, Social Policy Studies, no. 21, OECD, Paris, 1997, pp.81-100 Saraceno C. “Shifts in Public and Private Boundaries: Women as Mothers and Service Workers in Italian Day Care”, Feminist Studies, X, 1, 1984a, pp. 7-30 Saraceno C., “The Social Construction of Childhood: Child Care and Education Policies in Italy and the United States”, in Social problems, XXXI, 3, 1984b, pp. 351-63 Saraceno C. (ed.) Il lavoro mal diviso, Bari, De Donato, 1980 Saraceno C., Dalla parte della donna, Bari, De Donato, 1971 Skockpol T., Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992 Seccombe W, “The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism”, New Left Review, no. 83, 1974, pp. 3-24 Sevenhuijsen S., Citizenship and the Ethics of Care. Feminist Considerations on Justice, London, Routledge, 1998 Silva E. B. “Transforming Housewifery: Dispositions, Practices and Technologies”, in Silva, E. B., and Smart, C. (eds.), The new family, London, Sage, 1999, pp. 46-65 Simonen L, Feminist Social Policy in Finland, Avebury, Aldershot, 1991 Simonen L. and Kovalainen A., “Paradoxes of Social Care Restructuring: The Finnish Case”, in Lewis (ed) 1998, pp. 229-56 Stacey M., The Sociology of Health and Healing. A textbook, London, Unwin Lyman, 1988 Swedish Secretariat for Future Studies, Time to Care, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1984 Thomas C. “Deconstructing concepts of care”, Sociology, 27, 1993, 4, pp. 649-69 Trifiletti R. “Restructuring social care in Italy”, in Lewis (ed.) 1998, pp. 175-206 Trifiletti R.,”Obblighi di famiglia. Dipendenze preferite e messa in visibilità del lavoro di cura: un confronto Italia-Gran Bretagna in termini di servizi sociali di care per anziani”, Inchiesta, aprile-giugno 2000 Tronto J. C., Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, New York, 1993 Tronto, J. C., “Can the Welfare State Really Care? Reflections on Care and Citizenship”. Paper presented at the conference Gender, Citizenship and the Work of Caring. University of Illinois at Urbana, November 1997 Twigg J., “Models of carers: how do social care agencies conceptualise their relationship with informal carers”, Journal of Social Policy, 18, 1, pp- 53-66 Ungerson C., “Why do Women Care?» In Finch and Groves (eds.) 1983 Ungerson C., Policy is Personal. Sex, Gender and Informal Care, London, Tavistock, 1987 Ungerson C. (ed.) Gender and caring: work and welfare in Britain and Scandinavia, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990 Ungerson, C “The Language of Care: Crossing the Boundaries”, In C. Ungerson (ed.) 1990, pp. 8-33 Ungerson C., “Social politics and the commodification of care”, Social Politics, 4, 3, 1997, pp. 362-82 Wærness K., “Caring as Women’s Work in the Welfare State, in H. Holter (ed.) Patriarchy in a Welfare Society, Oslo, Universitetsforlaget, 1984 Wærness K., “On the rationality of caring ”, in A. S. Sassoon (ed.), Women and the State, London, Hutchinson 1987, pp. 207-34. Wærness K., ”Omsorgsrationalitet”, in R. Eliasson (ed.), Omsorgens skiftningar, Lund. Studentlitteratur, 1996

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Wærness K., “The changing “welfare mix” in childcare and care for the frail elderly in Norway”, in J. Lewis (ed.) 1998, pp. 207-28 Zincone G., Da sudditi a cittadini, Bologna, il Mulino, 1990

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Social Exclusion and Gender Relations

Mary Daly and Chiara Saraceno

Feminists were among the original users of the concept of exclusion. For them the concept served as a way of understanding women’s social situation and as a basis for political mobilisation. Feminists employed the concept in a broad way, to refer not just to the absence, marginalisation or subordination of women in different social spheres but to women’s position vis-a-vis power relations in the public and private domains, as well as in the symbolic realm. Thus, exclusion as part of a feminist critique served to radically expose the contradictions and tacit assumptions governing the polity and its self-representations (see also the chapters on citizenship and contract in this volume). This understanding of exclusion never fully informed mainstream discourse. It utilised social exclusion to define individuals and groups living on the margins of society due to some personal or biographical deficit, for example, the mentally ill, the handicapped, and so forth. In this latter understanding exclusion did not invoke power relations and rather than questioning the core of the polity directed attention to its side effects if at all. Recent years have seen a change. Exclusion, now with the word ‘social’ attached, has developed as a concept that speaks also to the polity. Social exclusion in this new version evokes those who are outside/different, not partaking of mainstream resources and values because of processes within the polity itself. Such processes include redundancy due to restructuring in the labour market, diffusion of conditions of vulnerability and of exposure to risks across the life course, displacement due to globalisation and technological development, re-definition of centre and periphery, migratory processes and the crystallisation of new national and international boundaries with their rules of inclusion and exclusion. In this newer usage, the problem of the exclusion of women is not central.11 Yet, the debate still rings old chimes. Many of the issues first addressed when debating women’s exclusion, especially those involving power relations in the social, political and symbolic realms, have re-emerged. This chapter puts these and other perspectives on exclusion side by side for the purpose of identifying the potential of the concept to problematise gendered processes and to bring new insights to our understanding of gender relations. Social exclusion has some powerful advantages for a gender analysis: it is dynamic and process-oriented, it has the capacity to turn the spotlight on the ex/includers and the ex/included, and it facilitates the type of multi-layered analysis which is necessary for a fuller understanding of gender and other complex social relations. However it is also the case that social exclusion has been more developed as a discursive than as an analytic concept. The centrepiece of this chapter, then, is to identify the more sociological dimensions of the concept of social exclusion and to ascertain how they can contribute to the analysis of women’s situation and gender inequality. The chapter is organised as follows. The first section outlines the origins and development of the concept and elaborates its essential characteristics. Because it is so frequently used interchangeably with poverty, some attention is devoted in this section to disentangling the two concepts. The second section moves on to focus on different strands of scholarship on social exclusion. It sets forth a number of different discourses of social exclusion, in particular the characteristically, French, British/American and EU discourses. The discussion here underlines both the multi-dimensionality of social exclusion and the fact that it is better developed as discourse than as concept. The final section engages in a critical discussion of the

11 Although specific groups of women may appear particularly vulnerable to social exclusion and even, in some cases, be taken to epitomise the risks and conditions of social exclusion, e.g. lone mothers, migrant women, frail elderly women and so forth.

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extent to which the concept of social exclusion (in its different versions) is helpful in developing a better understanding of women’s situation and gender inequalities. 1. The Concept of Social Exclusion Introduced 1.1 A Brief Overview of the Development of the Concept While it has affinities with some European sociological traditions (e.g. Durkheimian), social exclusion is not sociological in origin. Certain tenets of social Catholic and social democratic thinking provide its intellectual fundament. The term was first used formally in French social policy in 1974.12 As it established itself in that discourse, social exclusion was used to encompass a number of social groups which were becoming more socially visible but were not (yet) covered in the segmented French social protection system. These included, among others, lone mothers, the handicapped, frail elderly, abused children, drug addicts and multi-problem households. It was exclusion from the social protection system which was seen to render these groups socially excluded, although certain of their characteristics pointed to other features and risks as well. Some of these groups – such as the handicapped and lone mothers – disappeared from the social exclusion discourse once they became the target of specific social policies, However, others, such as drug addicts or abused children, still feature in the rhetoric even though ad hoc policies directed at them have been put in place. By the mid-1980s the young unemployed and the long term unemployed joined the list of the potentially, or de facto, excluded. Their inclusion heralded an ideological change: failure to participate in the labour market came to be perceived as a failure to fully participate in the larger society as well as a risk of being cut off from relevant and meaningful informal social networks (Paugam, 1993, 1996, 1997).

From France the concept entered both the European Community and the European Union policy discourse in a period when the European Commission was trying to strengthen its role in social policy after three anti-poverty programmes. In effect the European Union was to become a strong promoter of the concept and to put it to wide use. For example the 1989 Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers stated “… in a spirit of solidarity it is important to combat social exclusion” and the European Observatory for Combating Social Exclusion was set up in 1990. The EU also served to promote the use of the concept by funding research on social exclusion within its Targeted Social and Economic Research programme. By 1994 social exclusion was so important that it was to replace poverty in the nomenclature of the EU programme targeted at the most disadvantaged.13 Social exclusion gradually became the key word not only in what was previously named poverty research but in relation to all kinds of deprivation and inequalities. There was one exception though - gender. In the emerging understanding of social exclusion, with its dramatisation of a variety of very specific circumstances and its focus on ‘visible’ deprivation and lack of an acknowledged status in society, women’s position in regard to power relations disappeared from the discourse. Gender was shifted to a different discourse - that on power relations in decision making and the absence of women from official decision making bodies in the economy and politics. 1.2 Key Features of the Concept of Social Exclusion in Comparison to Poverty Like all concepts social exclusion has a particular subject matter and helps to frame issues in certain ways. The concept connotes an idea of a ‘normal’ even ‘good’ society as one in which people have strong bonds with others and are able to participate in a broad range of social spheres. With its implied opposite of social inclusion, it has a standard of what constitutes full participation. It shares with social Catholicism the view of individuals as being socially embedded (Daly 1999). The

12 A book authored by Rene Lenoir was given the title by the publisher of Les Exclus. 13 The proposed fourth anti-poverty programme was to be named a programme against social exclusion. However, this program was never approved by the EU governments, notwithstanding the increasing place which social exclusion had in policy discourses at national and EU level.

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degree to which one is integrated in a set of social networks is a critical indicator of lack of participation. At root, then, the structure of social relationships and social ties forms the analytic core of social exclusion (Spicker 1997: 135). Notions of dichotomies and fissure are also integral to the concept though. Indeed Goodin (1996) claims that the concept is fixated on boundaries given that it concerns itself mainly with those who are on the margins (of inclusion or exclusion). Looked at in another way, the inherently comparative nature of social exclusion comes to the fore in that it problematises people’s situations/conditions vis-a-vis the rest of society (Rustin and Rix 1997: 12). By way of overview one can say that, sensitive to agency, process and social relations, social exclusion actively searches for connections.

When juxtaposed with poverty – which is the term it mostly aims to replace, at least in EU discourse – the differences are striking. Social exclusion emphasises participation, involvement and the customary way of life as against consumption, average income and well-being as primarily financial. Unlike poverty, social exclusion is not easily regarded as a status. Focusing on relations makes it better able than poverty to reveal the mechanisms causing marginalisation and the processes associated with it. Furthermore, its orientation towards human agency distances it from the tendency in much poverty research to treat people as passive objects of social and economic policies. In a further contrast with poverty, or rather the approach adopted in poverty research, social exclusion explicitly demands a diversified methodology. The need to ascertain actors’ points of view as well as their strategies militates against a fixation on empirical measurement and foreclosure of methodological diversity which have characterised much research on poverty. In these and other respects, social exclusion emerges as more dynamic, actor-oriented, multi-faceted and methodologically plural than poverty. It is in this light that the attractiveness of the concept to the European Commission should be seen. As a substitute for poverty social exclusion is regarded as better able to grasp both the relational and the cumulative dimensions of deprivation. The socially excluded are not only financially poor; they are also relegated to the margins, socially isolated, suffering from multiple deprivation, often cumulating over time. Furthermore, in the Commission’s understanding the concept turned the spotlight not only on a status or condition but on actors and processes (Commission of the European Communities 1993a, 1993b; Robbins 1993).

The relation between the two concepts is not by any means unproblematic. To the extent that they tend to be used inter-changeably not only by policy makers but also by researchers, both concepts have become somewhat blurred and lack clarity in their content and mutual distinction. Furthermore, recent research has begun to question the empirical and theoretical validity of the relation between the two concepts. Empirical data suggests that there is no self-evident link between unemployment and poverty or between poverty and social isolation and/or psychological ill-being. Not only do these vary among social groups and on the basis of duration of the experience (of economic distress or unemployment) but they also differ across countries according, inter alia, to the social security system, family arrangements and culture (Gallie 1999; Gallie and Paugam 2000).

There is another set of reasons also for why a very close relationship between social exclusion and poverty is problematic. While restricting the concept of social exclusion to phenomena and processes associated with material deprivation and poverty may enrich the conception of the latter, it acts to conceal the fact that the theoretical and cultural roots of social exclusion lie elsewhere - in concepts (and fears) of social disintegration, marginality, un-belonging, up-rootedness. The sources of social exclusion may therefore be found at the macro level in the consequences of mass unemployment, mass migration or de-industrialisation. Or they may be traced at the micro level in the particular experience of (sometimes self-) exclusion of individuals and groups which lack feelings of membership in and loyalty to their community. This, what commentators often call ‘lack of values’, is due not to scarcity of material resources or deprivation of social and legal rights, but rather to the fact that the contexts people live in and/or their personal biographies have not given them any motivation or chance to belong (Castel 1995). From this point of view, social exclusion could be understood as ‘post-modern’. This is not because post-modern subjects have more sophisticated needs than modern ones (as Abrahmson (1997) seems to suggest)

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but because in contemporary societies it is more difficult to find the reasons for social integration. The explosion of ‘differences’, formerly hidden or repressed in the pseudo-universalistic ideal of a Euro-core worker-centred citizenship, has not yet been met by theories and practices capable of integrating them. In addition, economic growth without employment, technological change and alterations in family patterns and behaviours systematically render a part of the population redundant, useless, even when socially assisted.

While the concept of social exclusion was, as Murard (1997: 26) points out, given to the social sciences (rather than developing within them), its recent career has seen it taken up by prominent European sociologists, such as Bourdieu (1993) and Luhmann (1994). The continental European location of this scholarship is unlikely to be accidental for social exclusion resonates better with a characteristically French concern with solidarity or a German interest in system integration than, say, with the liberal individualist orientation of British social science. However it must be said that even as utilised by sociologists and other academics, social exclusion has more resonance as a constituent of political discourse than as a way of understanding complex social reality. The following section demonstrates that. 2. Different Discourses of Social Exclusion Who are the socially excluded, why are they excluded and from what? Judged on the basis of national policy as well as theoretical debates, the list of the potentially socially excluded varies not only over time but also place. Depending on national debates, advocacy groups or a specific piece of research, the list may include the long term unemployed, the very poor, the homeless, lone mothers, low skilled youth, the frail elderly, those receiving social assistance, those not receiving social assistance but in need of it, all immigrants. The mechanisms and actors involved in social exclusion may be seen in the workings of the welfare state (either in its over-generosity or its meagreness), in the deviant behaviour of individuals and groups, in ‘globalization’ and so forth. Of course there may be a perfectly good and ‘objective’ rationale for such variation. Societies may define differently their internal and external boundaries as well as what constitutes acceptable standards of living and behaviour. They may also vary in their demographic composition and in the kinds of populations at risk of vulnerability and exclusion. Yet, this diversity in defining the potentially or de facto excluded and in identifying the excluding mechanisms is so deeply intertwined with institutional arrangements (such as welfare state provisions, laws concerning the acquisition of citizenship and immigration), gender, age patterns and family arrangements that where and when one may speak of exclusion becomes quite vague.

Chamberlayne (1997) regards the theoretical and methodological underdevelopment of the concept of social exclusion as an opportunity. For her it stimulates fresh thinking, calls into question assumptions and, in the European context, challenges national traditions in thinking about inequality, poverty and difference. While this may be true, the lack of a clear set of references for the concept also means that the analyst wishing to utilise social exclusion must first excavate it in and through existing usages and applications. For this purpose we believe that it is instructive to consider the different discourses which have developed around social exclusion.

Silver (1994) identifies three different theoretical and political perspectives within which the concept (or metaphor) of social exclusion is developed. She calls these paradigms, in Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of the term,14 and tracks differences in what they regard as the causes of exclusion and the political philosophy in which they are grounded. The three paradigms are the solidarity, specialization and monopoly paradigms. They dovetail in some respects with national discourses for they may respectively be traced to French republican notions of solidarity, Anglo-American liberal individualism and the European social democratic notion of conflict based on

14 According to Kuhn a paradigm is “a constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community” (Kuhn 1970, p.175)

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hierarchical power relations.15 While Silver’s reasoning and distinctions are not always clear, her thesis is insightful not least in pointing out how different visions of the polity embody different conceptions of social exclusion.

Within the contemporary French discourse on social exclusion, the emphasis is on ‘social’ and collective ties. With roots in the Durkheimian notion of social bond and the relevance of normative integration, the risk of socially anomic behaviours and the need to offset the mechanisms which produce these are the core concerns of the French discourse on social exclusion. In other words, social cohesion in the sense of dominant consensual values, mores and social bonds is to the fore. Social exclusion in this view points also to a set of actors with their respective obligations and relationships. The socially excluded, defined as those who for some reason or another are outside the polity, suffer from some kind of inability in social relations and are rootless. The typical ‘socially excluded’ in the French discourse (and the ideal type of RMI recipient) is a family-less single person, often a man, experiencing various kinds of personal and social handicap, who needs to be ‘socially re-inserted’ or ‘re-integrated’. Reinsertion is to be achieved by various kinds of enabling activities which may be perceived as empowering but also involve attempts at control and place the subjects under surveillance (e.g. Belorgey 1996; Barbier 1998).16 At the same time, there is a duty of society, the state in general and social workers in particular to actively seek out the socially excluded, to try to reweave their social bonds and to offer them chances for ‘integration’. In principle the entire society is called upon to re-integrate itself by offering individuals the possibility of being inserted in solidarity networks and meaningful social contacts (e.g. Rosanvallon 1995). In this perspective, the widely used if contested term ‘contract’ as in ‘insertion contract’, which is the keyword in the French discourse, is nearer to the concept of social contract as the founding relationship of the society than it is to that of the individual business contract. A conception of reciprocity, which stresses the community’s (and social workers’) responsibility as much as the recipient’s agency, is central. Although in practice this conception of reciprocity too results in an asymmetrical relationship, it seeks to keep in check the strong asymmetry of the traditional social assistance relationship. Thus social exclusion was not oriented principally to emphasise recipients’ obligations, as in the US and the UK, but rather their agency and negotiating power. And it extends beyond either income support or job insertion, encompassing also measures aimed at combating processes of disaffiliation and un-rootedness (Milano 1995; Barbier 1996, 1998).

In the liberal tradition, particularly in its Anglo-American variant, social exclusion is not an endogenous concept. Here ‘the culture of poverty’ has loomed large. In the 1960s it offered a mirror in which the society could view itself, giving a rich account of the plight and experiences of those living at the margins and connecting material deprivation with self perception, identity and way of living. It also offered a theoretical rationale to blame the poor for their situation. In shifting the focus from the deprivation itself to its symbolic and behavioural consequences, it turned away from the excluding process (and actors) to self-exclusion. Concepts achieving prominence more recently in Britain and the US are the underclass (Dahrendorf 1984; Wilson 1987; Smith 1992) and ‘two tier society’.17 In the liberal tradition the focus is as much on institutional barriers and forms of discrimination as on social differentiation as the outcome of individual agency. Exclusion is associated with specialisation in social and economic structures, occasioned by social differentiation in general, the economic division of labour and the separation of spheres. In this perspective exclusion arises because of an inadequate separation of social spheres, the application of rules inappropriate to a given sphere or barriers to free movement between spheres (Silver 1994: 15 See Levitas (1998) for an alternative set of discourses on social exclusion. In the context of the British case, she identifies the following three discourses: a redistributionist discourse the prime concern of which is poverty; a moral underclass discourse which centres on moral and behavioural inadequacies of excluded people; and a social integrationist discourse which focuses on paid work. 16 It is interesting that in France, where both the notion of social exclusion and its policy counterpart ‘insertion’ were first and most thoroughly developed, the latter remains a very contested and indefinite term and practice, as many observers keep pointing out. See Belorgey (1996) and Barbier (1998). 17 Although this was first developed in Germany by Glotz (1984).

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542-3). If society’s duty is to remove barriers, that of the individual is to make the best of the options offered. Adopting the metaphor of social exclusion within this framework affords, on the one hand, the opportunity to recapture the richness of the culture of poverty approach. Social exclusion’s focus on the multiple dimensions of deprivation, on the relevance of social networks and self perception, together with its focus on actors are some of its noteworthy advantages in this regard. On the other hand social exclusion draws attention to the social as against individual mechanisms producing unbelonging – for instance discrimination in the labor market or in access to social security benefits or housing. From this dual view comes both a shared concern for the mechanisms which produce the phenomenon of the working poor18 – which is a particularly pressing concern in the US and UK – and dependency as produced by welfare state supports themselves, particularly among lone mothers. 19 Although in both countries there is a shared understanding of inclusion as occurring mainly through paid work so that it is necessary ‘to make work pay’, the British tradition informed by Marshall’s theory of citizenship recognises that social exclusion also involves access to social rights. This locates the British position closer to the social democratic one - or ‘monopoly paradigm’ in Silver’s terminology.

In this third paradigm, power relations, group monopolies and the domination and exclusion of outsiders are to the fore. Powerful class and status groups, which have distinct social and cultural identities as well as institutions, use social closure to restrict the access of outsiders to valued resources (such as good jobs, good benefits, education, urban locations, valued patterns of consumption) (Silver 1994: 562). While the liberal paradigm points to the risks of welfare dependency for the poor, the monopoly paradigm points to the material and cultural/symbolic privileges of the insiders as the cause of the exclusion of the outsiders. Inequality and economic exploitation lead to exclusion in this view. Inclusion occurs mainly through the extension to outsiders of equal membership in society through access to citizenship rights, which in turn must be checked for their exclusionary potential. This discourse may apply to any kind of social closure, including that between nation states as well as that between the EU and other countries. The discourse on ‘fortress Europe’ has its roots here, connoting the external and internal boundaries and barriers which keep some groups from becoming insiders, from fully participating in the status of citizens. While in the liberal paradigm the social rights which are under scrutiny for their tendency to create exclusion through dependency are social assistance rights (e.g. income support for the poor), in the monopoly paradigm standard social rights – unemployment protection, pension benefits and forth – are the main source of concern. These social rights of the insiders have to be scrutinised to ascertain if their generosity and strenuous protection create barriers to entry for other groups. There are echoes here of the critique leveled against the continental European welfare states - that they protect strongly the adult male, core workers (i.e. the insiders) to the detriment of the outsiders. In this perspective social inclusion implies not only extending access to but also transforming the social security and social protection system to render it more inclusive and more attuned to the social and individual risks emerging over the life course as well as to varieties of life circumstances (see e.g. Leisering and Leibfried 1999).20

What this discussion shows is that social exclusion is a politically flexible concept. Indeed, there are good grounds for claiming that social exclusion has been more developed as discourse than as concept. That is, the idea has been most used and articulated in the service of the language

18 The phenomenon of the working poor is a specific paradox within the liberal paradigm, since those in paid work by definition are performing their duty but are none the better off for it. They represent the recurrent problem of the ‘deserving poor’. It is possibly no accident that it is within this paradigm – starting with OECD economists – that proposals and practices for subsidising low paid/low skilled jobs are most developed, often as an alternative to minimum income provisions. 19 Rustin and Rix (1997: 16) are interesting in their characterisation of the regime of the New Right in British social policy. They point out that the New Right regarded dependency on welfare as leading to a perverse form of ‘inclusion’. They sought to dissolve this and to replace it with a universally shared concept of individual responsibility. 20 Leisering and Leibfried (1999) suggest that the concept of risk society developed by Beck (1992) is a better basis for social policies which prevent poverty and social exclusion than those of the underclass or the two-thirds society.

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of politics. Hence it constitutes a relatively loose set of ideas to represent the world in particular settings rather than a concept with theoretical substance and coherence which transcends national and political contexts. One should not be naive about why social exclusion is so popular in certain quarters. According to Levitas (1998: 27) social exclusion operates as a shifter between discourses, moving with seeming ease among views of the world which are in fact very different. The EU discourse on social exclusion demonstrates this and other ‘political’ advantages of social exclusion very nicely. It does not clearly choose among these different paradigms but mixes them. On the one hand it stresses the social rights dimension, which was the perspective which informed the work of the European Observatory on Social Exclusion (Room et al. 1992). This emphasis was repeated in a recent Commission’s document (2000), which declared: “The extent of social exclusion calls on the responsibility of society to ensure equal opportunities for all. This includes equal access to the labour market, to education, to health care, to the judicial system, to rights and to decision-making and participation”. On the other hand these social rights seem to be interpreted in a very traditional way and both exclusion and inclusion seem to refer almost exclusively to labor market participation. Hence, that same document argues: “Employment is the key route to integration and social inclusion; unemployment is the major factor of exclusion, particularly long-term unemployment and the increasing concentration of unemployment in households with no one in work.”

We would venture to argue that social exclusion remains a concept on which conceptual consensus is lacking to a degree which is proportionally inverse to the popularity of its usage. Further, this shared usage is possible precisely because it remains an ‘open’, unrigorously defined concept, pointing to different dimensions and in different directions. Social exclusion is in fact more an indicator of dissatisfaction with a distributional (and static one-dimensional) approach than a conceptual and methodological solution to the multiple problems it alludes to. It is also an indicator of a shifting political concern within the European Union and its member countries: from the degree of inequality that is permissible without risking disruptive social conflicts to the degree of detachment and un-belonging which may be allowed without risking the disintegration of the polity itself.

A number of key questions about social exclusion remain open at this stage. One question is the form of social change, and even policy change, that is invoked or implied by the concept and what kind of general social outcome is envisaged. What is the solution to social exclusion - is it recognition as in identity politics or is it redistribution as in the older type of class/economic egalitarian politics? (Phillips 1999: 13). There is a related problem in all of the uses of social exclusion just discussed which is that the concept is rarely utilised together with social inclusion. Indeed it is by no means certain that social inclusion is the counter concept of social exclusion. In the French discourse, for example, it is social cohesion which predominates; in the Anglo-American literature it is integration (understood increasingly as integration into the labour market); and in the social democratic discourse it is equality. While the concept may be beneficial in encouraging a certain openness and pluralism in its use, the level of variation in this and other regards is problematic.

3. Social Exclusion and Gender Relations It is now time to apply a gender lens to social exclusion. This section sets out to elaborate how the different discourses on and usages of social exclusion fare in relation to women and gender relations. It begins by focusing on the analyses provided by the feminist literature, considering how it has developed issues about women and gender inequalities. Juxtaposing this with some of the interpretations of the social exclusion concept helps to clarify further the particularities of social exclusion and to give us an idea of its strengths and weaknesses in comparison with other frequently used concepts for gender analysis.

What is the problem of women? This (deliberately provocative) question is best answered by a brief consideration of some of the insights from feminist analysis. One could chart the

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development of feminist scholarship in terms of the elaboration of the understanding of gender as a set of complex social relations. Unlike earlier work which had strong macro-theoretical aspirations, gender is a product of a more middle-range scholarship which has quietly pieced together the concrete processes in particular sociological and historical settings whereby differentiation and inequalities between women and men are generated, reproduced and institutionalised. This literature leans towards the concrete rather than the abstract and is, of late anyway, especially interested in variation. Sharp dichotomies are no longer in vogue and the relational nature of gender is emphasised. Inequalities between women and men are problematised rather than assumed.

We find this body of work insightful in a number of respects. For a start, the ‘social’ is broadened beyond the formal economy to encompass the domestic sphere. Social reproduction, which embraces not only the process of bearing children but the physical, emotional, ideological and material exchanges involved in caring for and sustaining others (Williams, 1989: 41-2), is drawn to the centre of analysis. Linking the public and domestic spheres in this way also illuminates the dualism characterising much of the classical analyses which separate social from economic policy, reproduction from production and private from public. Secondly, this work draws attention to other divisions apart from those based on class and in this regard it has helped to expand existing understanding. Concepts which act as central planks in mainstream theories have been seen to necessitate clarification and refinement. Thirdly, one of the greatest insights of the women-centered scholarship has been its consideration of the individual-state-society relation. The state has been set in its social context, brought to life as a presence and an actor structuring the everyday lives and choices of women and men. These deliberations help us to be more precise about the criteria which render a concept useful for analysing the situation of women and the existence and nature of gender inequality. One such criterion is the capacity of a concept to take a comprehensive perspective. Critical here is the extent to which a concept/approach can recognise and valorise different spheres of life apart from the economic arena narrowly defined. In other words, care cannot be marginalised. Among the different spheres those usually referred to and constituted as ‘private’ are especially important for any analysis with a gender focus. One could be even more explicit here and state that, at the minimum, a concept or approach must have the capacity to subject the family and what happens within it to scrutiny. A further step on from this is to say that a concept must also offer, or contain within it the potential for, a critical perspective on society. Equality is the concept that has loomed largest in feminist and other thinking on gender. It locates male-female relations within a power structure. They are therefore viewed as hierarchical in nature. Stratification has been one of the key ways of understanding gender inequalities – women’s access to and control over resources and networks being regarded as inferior to those of men. In feminist hands, inequality is broader than just access to monetary or financial resources though. This broader view has generally served the feminist purpose well and has usefully drawn attention away from the pre-occupation in conventional analysis with inequality as deriving solely from relations to and in the production process. However feminist reference to processes of social stratification are under-developed. In addition, while feminist analysis has demonstrated that inequalities between women and men derive ultimately from inequalities in power, it has been relatively slow in constructing a theoretical edifice around this.21 Patriarchy is the old reliable here, leading to a tendency to theorise gender inequality in isolation from and as somehow different to other forms of structured social inequality. Analysis of within-gender stratification is quite underdeveloped. However this varies: while class differences among women are rarely considered, differences among women due to race, ethnicity and age are rather more so. Undoubtedly we have today moved beyond a sameness notion of equality to a situation where an understanding of equality under conditions of difference predominates (Scott 1988; Walzer 1983). Contemporary politics around equality reflect this and are best characterised as a politics of 21 Mention should be made here of the debate initiated in the British Journal of Sociology and later published in Crompton and Mann (1986)

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difference and/or recognition where governments are increasingly exercised by the need to recognise minority groups and indeed the group affiliations of individuals. The hegemony of a politics of recognition is in fact closely associated with political developments around gender, race and other lines of inequality (but not those based on class) (Fraser 1997; Phillips 1999). While these have served to question whether the taken for granted political equality had been achieved, they have also underlined that inequality is inherently political. As these kinds of views have seeped into popular understanding, one can identify a shift over time from a predominantly class understanding of inequality to a position which regards equality as being a matter of politics or culture as much as if not more than one of distribution of economic resources (Philips 1999: 20). Among other consequences this has meant a relative marginalisation of economic inequalities. To some degree, then, feminist thinking has moved in the same direction as the discourse on social exclusion which Silver (1994) classifies as the monopoly paradigm. This has served to shift attention from the workings of the economy to the symbolic and cultural sphere in power relations. Social exclusion as a relational and multidimensional concept and as a differentiated discourse has a number of strengths for the analysis of gender relations. This is despite the fact that none of the social exclusion discourses has ever oriented itself to the situation of women. First of all social exclusion points to the interdependence of processes and relations across spheres. It therefore resonates well with certain tenets of feminist work, which emphasised the interdependence of women and men rather than the dependence of women (Offen 1992; Moeller 1993). In addition, social exclusion has the potential to ascribe the family an important role, recognising it as one of the most important solidaristic social networks. To the extent that social exclusion is concerned with those who are not integrated into such networks, family involvement where it exists should, in principle at least, be viewed positively (Spicker 1997: 135). Another of the attractions of social exclusion from a gender perspective we believe is that it does not necessarily think in conventional stratification terms, i.e. in terms of hierarchical social formations (typical of class and status based perspectives for example). Horizontal relations rather than conventional vertical relations are to the fore – exclusion being countenanced as a state or condition of being cut-off from the mainstream rather than in relation to a set of positions in a hierarchy. This allows the concept of social exclusion to weave in notions of relative social and economic circumstance and lends it a preference for ascertaining distance from the axes and relations determining the distribution of power and other resources in society. In regard to women and gender this capacity for analysing relations horizontally renders social exclusion useful and offers a welcome counter to vertical thinking. The latter, with its roots in class analysis, has never fully acquitted itself in the analysis of relations between the sexes. Arguably what matters is not just whether one is at the top, middle or bottom of a hierarchy but in addition, and on some occasions even more so, one’s location in relation to the centre and the periphery. This is to recognise the qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions of gender relations. To put this more prosaically, gender relations, and the position of women in particular, are determined not just by the level of resources one has relative to others but also by how far one is situated from power (and other) centres in society. This is one of the key points that we wish to make in this chapter – to be properly understood gender relations need to be analysed in a horizontal as well as a vertical fashion. This allows one to better see how power is not only a matter of degree, but one of location in a structure of relationships and how differences - in behavior, personal attributes, life styles and so forth – crystallise and can be turned into inequalities. Thus social exclusion allows one to see interdependence, rather than merely separation of actors and spheres in the processes of exclusion and inclusion. Interdependence, of spheres but also of people, is a stalwart of feminist thinking being at the core of women’s experience as caregivers and as family members.

These strengths notwithstanding, social exclusion also has marked shortcomings. For all its broad conception of social spheres one has to question whether it in the end operates to a hierarchical view of the relations between spheres, especially as used in the liberal tradition. To be involved only or even mainly in the family is not perceived as a means of achieving full social

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participation. In contrast, it is sole or main involvement in paid work which is perceived as sufficient. This kind of differentiation can be seen especially clearly in the treatment of lone mothers. In an increasing number of countries, especially the UK, the US and the Netherlands, lone mothers are perceived as not fully socially integrated if they are not in the paid labour market. Men who are in paid employment and do not require social assistance are not perceived as needing social integration measures, even if they do not have family ties or do not fulfil their family obligations. To put it more trenchantly: social exclusion discourses are gendered in that within them family ties and obligations are applied differently to women and men. Women’s family obligations are perceived to pose a problem when the lack of a supporting man exposes the tension between caring and paid work obligations. Being a good, caring mother is no longer perceived as sufficient to qualify as a good, integrated citizen, and possibly even a good mother, if one is also poor and dependent upon social assistance. And it is this kind of ‘public’ dependence, rather than that of a ‘private’ nature on one’s own husband or family, which is perceived as risky and potentially damaging for one’s capabilities and social integration. Thus, lone mothers are exposed to the questioning of their possible ‘self-exclusion’ from labour market participation. As a consequence of this shift in the grounds for their being citizens - from being good mothers to being good providers – lone mothers in some countries (e.g. the UK and the US.) have even become the negative symbol of welfare dependency, if not of welfare scrounging. Women living with a financially supporting husband or companion are not subjected to such scrutiny (and therefore their possible vulnerability to poverty and social exclusion because of lack of labour market attachment or of male irresponsibility escapes attention22). For men it is the lack of family ties and obligations which is seen as an item of social exclusion, but only when they are financially vulnerable and not in the labour market. In such instances the lack of the “rooting” effect of family attachments and obligations (as a provider) are regarded as a liability. If a man is fully integrated in the labour market, he is not perceived as at risk of social exclusion, even if he has no family attachments and even if he does not properly fulfil his family obligations. Thus in the different social exclusion discourses, the gender division of labour in the family and in care, the differential meaning of support received and offered by women and men in intimate and family relationships23 is taken as given.

THIS PRACTICAL, IF NOT CONCEPTUAL, AMBIGUITY WHICH DERIVES FROM A KIND OF IMPLICIT HIERARCHY BETWEEN SPHERES MAY BE DETECTED IN ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION AS WELL. THIS IS ITS VIEW OF HOW EXCLUSION OCCURS. SOCIAL EXCLUSION RARELY RECOGNISES THE POSSIBILITY THAT SOCIAL INCLUSION CAN TAKE PLACE IN CONDITIONS OF EXCLUSION. EXCLUSION FROM THE LABOUR MARKET AND/OR FROM ACTIVE POLITICAL PARTICIPATION BECAUSE OF STRONG INTEGRATION IN THE FAMILY IS AN EXAMPLE. ANOTHER IS, OR MIGHT BE IN CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES, PART-TIME WORK AS A MEANS OF INTEGRATING WOMEN INTO THE LABOUR FORCE BUT IN SUCH A MANNER AS TO KEEP THEM EXCLUDED FROM THE CENTRE. THE UNDERLYING POINT IS ABOUT LINKAGES ACROSS SPHERES. ONE CAN BE MORE SPECIFIC ABOUT THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE DIFFERENT DISCOURSES ON SOCIAL EXCLUSION DISCUSSED ABOVE IN THE SECOND SECTION OF THIS CHAPTER: IN NONE ARE THE SITUATION OF WOMEN AND THE SPHERE, ACTIVITY AND RELATIONS OF CARE EASILY ACCOMMODATED OR GIVEN A CENTRAL ROLE. IF IN THE FRENCH UNDERSTANDING EXCLUSION MEANS THAT PEOPLE ARE NOT PART OF A PATTERN OF RELATIONSHIPS IN WHICH THEY FEEL OBLIGATED (SPICKER 1997: 135), IT CANNOT APPLY TO WOMEN’S SITUATION. THE EXCLUSION OF WOMEN, ONE COULD ARGUE, IS CAUSED NOT BY THEIR LACK OF EMBEDDEDNESS OR 22 On the specific vulnerability to poverty of married women see Ruspini and Saraceno (1999). 23 Typically within marriage women are seen as receiving financial support, men emotional support.

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EVEN THEIR LACK OF OBLIGATION BUT RATHER BY A SURFEIT OF BOTH. THE PROBLEM WITH THE ANGLO-AMERICAN POSITION ON EXCLUSION FROM A GENDER PERSPECTIVE IS THAT IT HAS FEW TERMS TO DEAL WITH THE INCLUSIONARY AND EXCLUSIONARY EFFECTS OF CARE. THE INSISTENCE THAT DIFFERENT DOMAINS OF SOCIAL LIFE BE GOVERNED BY DIFFERENT PRINCIPLES HAS THE POTENTIAL TO RECOGNISE CARE. HOWEVER, THIS, OR RATHER THE POTENTIAL BENEFITS FOR CARERS, IS UNDERMINED BY THE SEPARATION OF SPHERES, THEIR HIERARCHICALISATION AND THE CHARACTERISATION OF MUCH SOCIAL ACTION AS VOLUNTARY. FURTHERMORE, IN NARROWING INCLUSION DOWN TO PARTICIPATION IN THE LABOUR MARKET, THIS DISCOURSE NOT ONLY UNDER-VALUES UNPAID WORK AND CARE BUT MARGINALISES IT. CARE HAS NO SPECIFIC PLACE IN THE MONOPOLY PARADIGM EITHER, SINCE THIS DEALS ONLY WITH THE MONOPOLY OVER (MOSTLY ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL) RESOURCES AND IS UNABLE TO SEE THE PARALLEL MONOPOLY OVER OBLIGATIONS. THUS, ALTHOUGH IT DEALS WITH POWER RELATIONS, IT FRAMES THEM AS AN INSIDER/OUTSIDER ISSUE, NOT ALSO AS AN ISSUE OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, OF DIFFERENTIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF WHAT ARE RELEVANT ACTIVITIES AND CAPABILITIES, WHAT ARE THE RELEVANT INTERDEPENDENCIES, AS WELL AS OF THE DIFFERENTIAL STRENGTH OF THE BASES FOR PARTICIPATION AND ENTITLEMENT.24 INTERDEPENDENCE OF ACTORS AND ACTIVITIES IS LOST ONCE AGAIN AS A CRUCIAL ISSUE IN THE PROCESSES OF EXCLUSION/INCLUSION.

Further, the political engagement around social exclusion gives cause for caution. The tendency in contemporary European politics is to adopt a narrow view of social exclusion (limiting it either to insertion or more broadly to integration). In this regard the normative subtext to the concept becomes somewhat problematic: inclusion is beneficial and exclusion has negative connotations (Levitas 1996: 18). A further narrowing tendency of social exclusion is that it views society as consisting of insiders and outsiders. The danger with this is, as Levitas (1998: 7) points out, that the excluded are placed outside of society and even risk being labelled as responsible for their exclusion. This risk is particularly evident in the discourse accompanying the recent development of so called ‘activating’ and ‘social integration policies’, in so far as they point to something lacking in the socially excluded which causes their social exclusion (see also Geldof 1999; Hanesch 1999; Negri and Saraceno 2000). This approach appears particularly out of focus in the case alluded to above: where women are excluded because of their ‘excess’ of integration within their family network and ‘excess’ of activity in caring and domestic work.25 These views of social exclusion, therefore, ignore the important point that exclusion may be not only a consequence but itself a form of integration, as feminist political scientists have long pointed out (e.g. Pateman 1988). This may also have the effect of conceiving of social exclusion as an essentially peripheral problem, existing at the boundaries of society rather than as a feature of society which characteristically delivers massive inequalities. In Castel’s (1995) view the danger of the concept is that it locates in the margins what is in fact happening at the centre of society. This is particularly crucial for women, since so much of the specifically gendered causes of social exclusion are dependent on the gendered division of labour and gendered allocation of places and meanings which structure society and its institutions. This is an issue which is becoming dramatically evident also in the negotiations and conflict occurring over control of symbolic and normative power among ethnic groups, in so far as the subservience of women (and the young) within the community and family may be advocated in defence of group identity (Okin 1989; Sahgal and Yuval Davis 24 See also Sainsbury (1996). 25 Atkinson (1998) has pointed out a similar paradox for some groups of working poor, whose jobs are so dequalified that they are an active factor in producing social exclusion.

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1992; Yuval Davis 1996). Finally, privileging an idea of contract and social contract which focuses at best on the interdependency between state and (individual) citizens, between rights and obligations in the public space, but forgets or underplays interdependencies between the public and the private spheres as well as within the private sphere of the family itself, the concept of integration or insertion counterpoised to that of social exclusion undervalues women’s needs, experiences, and responsibilities, while still expecting that they fulfil them. This may account for the unease with which many feminists, mainly in the UK but also elsewhere, react to the idea of contract, or new social contract, to welfare-to-work policies and to the move from ‘welfare of security’ to ‘welfare of opportunities’. 4. Concluding remarks

Throughout this chapter we have allowed social exclusion to take the lead. By way of conclusion it is appropriate to turn the spotlight on the gender and feminist discourse and pose the question of what it has to say to the scholarship on social exclusion. We would suggest the following. The first thing it indicates is that the paths and practices of social exclusion are themselves gendered. Feminist discourse has always offered a denunciation of society’s exclusionary mechanisms. Indeed feminism was originally the most radical discourse of exclusion, seeing people as excluded not just because they lack resources but rather because some resources are valued over others. A second, and related, insight from feminist work draws attention to the complex set of linkages between social inclusion and exclusion. This is a view that emphasises not only that all spheres are closely related, but the interdependence of the position held by various actors in the exclusion/social exclusion relationship. Thirdly, feminist insights suggest a series of causal linkages between inclusion and exclusion in that the latter can be precipitated by the former. To the extent that this is the case, the concept of social exclusion, especially as it has been used in recent policy discourses, has a bias towards the more public forms of integration.

The original feminist analyses of exclusion (without the adjective ‘social’) are therefore the more radical, in so far as they perceive the roots of exclusionary mechanisms as residing in the public/private divide and in the identity and meaning-producing mechanisms which are mostly hidden and preserved from scrutiny and from policy action. Yet, both the development of social exclusion discourses in research and politics and the development of feminist discourses on differences and inequalities among women, as well as between men and women, cast a shadow on the utility of the concept of exclusion to pinpoint the grounds of gender inequality and of women’s specific experiences and locations within the polity. While a critical gendered perspective enriches the social exclusion discourse in so far it refers to specific gender based risks and vulnerabilities, it does not easily translate it into a discourse on women as such. Too many qualifications and differentiations are needed to render it as a useful concept to explain the position of women and gender relations, at least in contemporary societies, and their different degree of vulnerability to social exclusion, in the narrow sense, across societies. As feminist comparative research has demonstrated, different countries (not only welfare states) define and grant citizenship rights – that is inclusion - to women through varying combinations of sources and forms of entitlement which in turn render various group of women more or less vulnerable to social exclusion across as well as within countries (e.g. Sainsbury 1996, Daly 2000). At the same time, comparative analyses of discrimination and exclusionary mechanisms in the labour market and in the political arena indicate that there may be interdependence and overlapping, but also distinction and separation between what goes on in these two crucial arenas (e.g. Fornengo and Guadagnini 1999). Thus, we might conclude that social exclusion is certainly gendered but whether it is also a constituent feature of women’s experience is at best a debatable thesis. REFERENCES

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