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This book considers the impact of neoliberal policies and ideology on the status of care work in Nordic countries. With new research perspectives and empirical analyses, the book assesses challenges for care work including technologies, management and policy-making. Arguing that there is a care crisis even in the supposedly feminist Nordic ‘nirvana’, the book explores understandings of the care crisis, the serious consequences for gender equality and the hitherto neglected effects on the long-term sustainability of the Nordic welfare states. This astute take on the Nordic welfare model provides insights into what the Nordic experience can tell us about wider international issues in care.

This collection of original essays explores the myriad expressions of austerity since the 2008 financial crisis. Case studies drawn from Canada, Australia and the European Union provide extensive comparative analysis of austerity --fiscal consolidation and structural reforms to labour and the public sector. Contributions examine such themes as privatisation, class mobilization and resistance, the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of the far right. The potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in shaping future austerity and alternatives is signalled. The controversies around the pandemic’s merciless revelation of the status of public health infrastructures after decades of austerity capitalism and the sudden visibility of the fragility of globalized neoliberal capitalism at large at the same time help to anticipate alternative scenarios: a) another return to the status quo ante crisis, b) selective escape from the prerogatives of austerity capitalism mainly in the areas of immediate concern for public health and c) more comprehensive departures from what then could finally be understood as late austerity capitalism and post-neoliberalism. What is needed is a transition to a mode of economic governance that not only opens up scope to overcome austerity and structural reform policies, but which also offers a functional framework for the indispensable social-ecological transformation of the economy. Such an objective calls for democratic economic governance to overcome the austerity regime and combine environmental and social policy objectives. Given the rapidly shifting terrain, this comprehensive handbook provides important insights into a complex and fast changing period of politics and policy.

This book considers the state of the British welfare regime after COVID-19 and the prospects for progressive change. It considers what has happened to the welfare state as a ‘strategy of equality’ in the past twenty-five years and whether and how this aspiration might be rebuilt in the future. It begins with a detailed assessment of the welfare record under recent Conservative governments (2010-2020) and under New Labour (1997-2010). It then traces an alternative (and forgotten) history of thinking about welfare and social change in and around the Labour Party in the period 1920-1980. Chapter Four considers the big challenges that face the welfare order after COVID-19: ageing, a changing world of work, and climate change. The fifth chapter assesses the impact on welfare and the public finances of the first year of COVID-19. The Conclusion outlines what we would need to do now to build a new ‘strategy of equality’ after the pandemic.

The development of social policy in Europe is explored in this accessible intellectual history and analysis of the welfare state. From the Industrial Revolution onwards, the book identifies three important concepts behind efforts to address social concerns in Europe: social democracy, Christian democracy and liberalism. With guides to the political and ideological protagonists and the beliefs and values that lie behind reforms, it traces the progress and legacies of each of the three traditions. For academics and students across social policy and the political economy, this is an illuminating new perspective on the welfare state through the last two centuries.