Acta Sociologica

In spite of an impressive expansion predominant welfare state research suffers from five important weaknesses: a linear conception of welfare state growth, a neglect of welfare state efficiency, an excessive quantification of variables, a Social Democratic bias, and an underdevelopment of theory. While the first four are held to be untenable undercurrent societal cir cumstances, the paper concentrates on theoretical problems Welfare states are conceptualized as social systems of human reproduction, and a theory of market failures and market conflicts is sketched to account for the development of welfare states. A combination of economic and sociological theory is used to lay out a theory of welfare states as providers of public goods and of different kinds of private goods. Economic theory and socio- political theory are used to outline determinants of the supply and demand for state contributions to human reproduction.

This paper studies the debate about the Scandinavian welfare states from a leminist perspective, focusing on the differences between a feminist per spective and the dominant liberal and critical Marxist understanding of the welfare state In particular it focuses on the argument that the Scandinavian welfare state, are the most advanced in relation to women and discusses both the potentialities and dangers in the Scandinavian welfare states in relation to women. Feminists have pointed out that the concept of gender has been disregarded from a theoretical and methodological paint of view in both liberal and Marxist analyses of the welfare state The fundamental concepts have been other the individual or the class, and the determining force, of the development of the welfare state have been found in the political sphere or in the economy or in the Interrelation between the two spheres The paper points to the need to integrate gender relations in the theoretical model for an analysis of the welfare state and emphasizes the need to explore the relationship between the family and the state (and the family and the economy) in the different welfare states The paper emphasizes that the qualitative differences in the organization of care work are important for understanding the institutional differences between the welfare states, and especially the Scandinavian welfare states, where mother hood and care work has today become a part of sucial citizenship The author argues that even though women have in important ways become empowered in the Scandinavian welfare states as mothers, workers and citizens, the) have at the same time become subsumed under a new kind of male domination in the public sphere A further exploration of this new kind of male dommatton must transcend the theoretical framework of both Marxism and liberalism and must begin to rethink such central concepts as citizenship. power and interests.

The recent visit of an ACTU delegation to Sweden to See what might be _ learnt from the experience of that country labour movement is yet another example of the perennial fascination that the Swedish model exercises over the mind,, of Australian democratic socialists Sweden's much vaunted achievement, in the field, of welfare provision, labour market policy to minimise unempluyment and corporatist wage bargaining are frequentlv seen as panaceas for all Australia's woes. The desire to emulate such achievement,, is far from irrational and. ot course, Australian socialists have not been alone in admiring the Swedish model, one only has to remember Tony Cros!and's advice to the British Labour party in the fifties that salvation lay in taking the Swedish path of avoiding nationalisation like the plague and piling on the welfare But admiration notwithstanding any serious proposal that we might try to emulate the Swedish example requires a realistic appraisal of the structural antecedents of that achievement and an evaluation of the extent to which other countries are characterised by similar or equivalent circumstances Earlier I argued agamst the Crosland thesis ' Here, I shall contrast some aspects of the development of political economy in Australia and Sweden with a view to establishing whether there is any more reason to suppose that a social democratic strategy might flourish in Australia than in Britain

The welfare state still enjoys widespread public support, hut it has also drawn widespread criticism This article deals with swings in public sentiments from collectivity to individualism. First, some examples are presented from the Nordic countries that reflect a shift from public to private. criticism of control and social technology, the debate on welfare scroungers, inti-tax movements and the hlack economy. and various forms of privatization Second, it is asked whether history justifies talk of a collecmnty-mdmdualism cvclc or merely of alternations between collectivity and individualism Finally, five causes are identified behind the growth of individualism (1) the failure of the institutions of the welfare state, (2) the new economic situation, (3) the rise of new middle classes, (4) changes in cultural deep structures, and (5) the hegemonic struggle in demarcating the private and public Individualism is gaining ground, but doing so in a very complex way Behind the growth of individualism, it is possible to identify several interwined changes The changes involve serious problems, especially the growth of egoism but on the other hand the new situation also open, new prospects for the develipment of a rich Individuality.

Corporatism has generally been seen as a way of incorporating an unwilling working class into the capitalist system. Searching for possible explanations of corporatism, one has to take into consideration the great variety of the degree of corporatism within Western states This vanety shows a firm relationship between states that have strong corporatist structures and states with a successful reformist labour movement, that is, Austria, Norway and Sweden and to some extent Denmark and the FRG This indicates that there is something wrong with the functionalist thesis that corporatism is a way of taming the working class. The aim of this article is to raise some hypotheses about the reasons why polities dominated by Social Democracy seem especially to foster corporatist structures. It is argued that in order to understand the relationship between the existence of corporatist structures and a successful Social Democracy, we have to scrutinize the logic of the system of bargaining between capitalists and workers that the capitalist relations of production brings forth.

The article has a threefold aim: At first we argue against a generalized, ahistorical and functionalistic welfare state concept which cannot dif ferentiate between different policy arenas and national 'destinies' We then argue for the fact that for more than a decade the Nordic welfare states have been under transformation towards increased decentralized and municipal policy responsibility We try to demonstrate concretely the implications of this for welfare state policies in the employment and industrial policy areas. State interventionism is being overtaken by a municipal interventionism , which operates more market orientated, bargaining organized and inequality making. Politically-administratively this decentralized welfare capitalism develops a permanent coordination and control deficit. It is concluded finally that welfare state objectives must be differentiated according to the national, regional and local will and ability to realize them.

Can trade union, act upon the development of science and technology (S&T) in our types of society? Some major political programmes aiming at the development of a labour-oriented technology are analysed and assessed in terms of their impact on S&T The results of a survey of grass-roots initiatives ('workers' plans') and two questionnaires among experts suggest that no progress has yet been made in the attempts to develop an interface with S&T. This conclusion leads to some reflection on the conditions of a policy which would allow the workforce to take part in the processes of technological innovation

The Socialist Republic of Estonia and Finland, a capitalist market economy, are geographically and culturally close to each other Family life in these societies, representing different social and economic systems, was studied on the basis of official statistics and by interviewing representative samples of both populations. The investigation is part of the official scientific coop eration in sociology between the USSR and Finland which started ten years ago Family life is in some ways more traditional in Estonia than in Finland: there are more extended families, children, formal marriages and divorces, and, until recently, less unmarried cohabitation The division of domestic work in educated families is less even, and children spend more leisure time with their parents. In both countnes almost all adult women are employed outside the home. In some respects, life in Finland is more traditional than in socialist Estonia For example, paid work is more sex-segregated in Finland than in Estonia In Estonia, people believe more in the possibilities of women succeeding in life just as well as men, and the personal efficacy of Estonian women is much higher than that of Finnish women. These aspects of the position of women in society at large have an impact on family life. In young families in Helsinki there is more rapport and less intimacy need satisfaction than in Tallinn Finnish husbands are as happy in their marriage as Estonian husbands, but receive less social support with their wives.

One of the most important developments in Scandinavia within applied sociology has been the accomplishment of several large-scale surveys of living conditions Living conditions research relies on a solid tradition reaching beyond the social indicator movement' of the 1960s back to the social surveys of consumption patterns of working-class households in the days of early capitalism. This review article argues. however, that welfare research has far from exhausted the opportunities in respect to social expla nation offered by this particular field of social inquiry Social structure and social agency have not been sufficiently dealt with Future living conditions research must address itself to the 'syntax' of welfare distribution instead of focusing exclusively on individual attributes