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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Barbara Hobson, Jane Lewis, and Birte Siim, eds., Contested Concepts in Gender and Social Politics (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar 2002).

CONTESTED CONCEPTS in Gender and Social Politics is an international dialogue among twelve influential scholars of gender, social policy, and the welfare state. It is a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of current theoretical and political debates about social policy and the impact of shifts in policies of European welfare states on women. The authors are members of the European Network on Theory and Research on Women, founded in 1991. In the past decade, the network has been engaged in scholarship about gender, citizenship, and the European welfare states. This collection is one of the network's many publications. Their goal in this book is to explore seven key concepts of social policy in the context of the emerging European Union. They are: citizenship, care, social exclusion, contractualization, commodification and de-commodification, representation, and social capital. Each chapter provides an overview of the feminist debates about one of the seven concepts and its application to the current social policies of the European Union and its member states. The essays are written collaboratively by scholars from different national and disciplinary backgrounds. The authors examine social welfare policy from different methodological and cultural frameworks, but share the position that "gender matters, context matters, and politics matters."(17) The importance of feminist scholarship in gendering analysis of inequality and of women's activism in improving women's civil, political, and social rights are unifying themes of the volume.

Raymond Williams' Keywords is the inspiration for the organization of the book. The authors share Williams' argument that societies produce unique interpretations of concepts that are based on different histories and social politics. Following Williams, the editors believed that it was important to take stock of the various meanings of key concepts in gender and social politics. Departing from Williams, the contributors focus on the evolution of social concepts instead of keywords in order to analyze how social and political processes have influenced the genealogies of these concepts rather than how these processes occur within language. The central questions of the book are the extent to which gender has destabilized conceptual vocabularies and the impact of these debates on women's lives. The renegotiation of relationships among the family, market, and the social welfare state in the context of the European Union informs the analysis of the essays. Each chapter provides a critical overview of the development of the literature about one concept and recommends directions for future research that the authors believe will provide a theoretical grounding for the advancement of women's rights. Examinations of the debates on the restructuring of welfare states in their own countries and in the development of social policy in the European Union support the theoretical discussion.

Social citizenship has been a cornerstone of discussions about the development of social welfare states. However, existing frameworks based on Marshall's concept of social citizenship no longer capture the complexities of the rights and obligations of citizenship because their authors did not anticipate the development of supranational policy-making institutions. In the opening essay about citizenship, Barbara Hobson and Ruth Lister submit that the next step for citizenship theorizing is to envision how rights and claims will be made in global and supranational arenas. The feminist project of gendering citizenship by exposing the androcentric bias of social policy remains important, but feminists must consider how global restructuring and the prospect of Eurocitizenship will affect women's citizenship claims. Advancing women's rights in the European Union has produced contradictory results. Women in member states have invoked the European Union's intolerance of gender discrimination to lobby successfully for legislative reform to advance women's political rights. Regardless, social policy has not addressed the structural features of the labour market, such as the sexual division of labour and women's lower wages that hinder women's ability to participate in economic and political life.

Analyzing how women are excluded from social and symbolic domains has been central to feminist theory and political strategies for change. Feminist analysis arguing that women's exclusion was embedded in power relationships was never integrated into mainstream policy discourses about exclusion. Instead policy discourses about groups who are marginalized in society concentrate on individual rather than systemic change. Social exclusion is the current "buzzword" in social policy that aims to integrate marginalized groups into social and economic processes. It entered public discourse in 1974 through French social policy and gained precedence through European Union policy discussions about poverty. While the concept is most closely associated with policies about poverty, it also includes all social inequalities and deprivations. Mary Daly and Chiara Saraceno argue that social exclusion has become a politically strategic discourse that serves political needs better than social needs because it has not been developed adequately as an analytical concept. The most serious implication for advancing women's rights is that social exclusion as it is currently articulated in policy discussions does not consider women's inequality as a central form of exclusion.

Care work is a recurring issue in these essays because social policy will not rectify the structural barriers to women's economic and political participation unless it strikes a balance between care and paid work. Current trends in social policy are moving in the opposite direction. The reconceptualization of the family relationship that posits two equal and independent breadwinners counters feminist solutions integrating care and paid work. Rights are increasingly tied to paid work in discussions about the restructuring of the social welfare states, a trend that has serious implications for women who still assume most of the responsibility for unpaid care work. Ute Gerhard, Trudie Knijn, and Jane Lewis argue that developing policies that recognize the importance of unpaid work requires a conceptual shift in theories on contractualization from independent, competitive individuals to an analysis of the interdependent relationships among individuals. Social policy that assumes that women and men are equally able to enter into the new contractual relationships between the state and citizen do not work for women because the care work is unequally shared and women still earn less than men.

The theorization of an ethics of care based on interpersonal relationships rather than rights is a significant development in feminist analysis of care. Despite the proliferation of care discourses in the past 30 years, Arnlaug Leira and Chiara Saraceno argue, there are important ambiguities in the literature that may thwart feminist efforts to promote women's equality through social policies that accommodate care work. Discussions of the ethics of care that do not consider the rights of care-givers and those who are dependent on care do not address the power relations in caring relationships, and how those relationships differ in familial and public contexts. They caution that the emphasis on the ethics of care that does not adequately address the labour dimensions of care work may make women's unpaid care work invisible. Releasing women from these obligations with public services has been one feminist strategy to facilitate women's continuous participation in paid work. In the chapter about commodification and de-commodification, Trudie Knijn and Ilona Ostner raise important questions about the impact of policies that stress women's paid work over unpaid caring responsibilities and argue that improving women's opportunities in the workforce has not adequately addressed men's responsibility for care work. Subsidizing paid care work has helped women pursue careers and has created jobs for women, but it has also produced inequalities among women. The recruitment of domestic workers from poorer nations, who are excluded from welfare benefits, best illustrates how the emphasis on the adult worker model in social policy depends on global inequalities. Knijn and Oster recognize that policies that promote men's caring responsibilities are problematic because they rely on "nice fathers," but conclude that they provide a more equitable solution than basing caring strategies on exploited women.

The last two essays examine how women contribute to political life in government and in civil society. Berengere Marques-Pereira and Birte Siim examine how feminist scholarship has emphasized "the connection between representation and empowerment with women's agency as the link."(170) They explore different strategies to improve women's political representation in European states to demonstrate the link between national political traditions and how feminists frame their strategies to improve women's participation. Greater representation for women in governments has empowered women politicians, but has not significantly changed women's collective power within states. Hence, much of the feminist scholarship about representation, agency, and empowerment has concentrated on civil society. The book closes with a discussion by Dietland Stolle and Jane Lewis of the potential of the increasingly important concept of social capital to assess women's roles in civil society. They believe that social capital is an important concept because it helps us assess how citizens take care of each other. However, the literature's focus on voluntary organizations fails to assess how women accumulate social capital because women no longer have the time to participate in organized politics and volunteer work. They recommend more research about women's informal support networks to understand how women build cooperative and trusting relationships in their communities. This research program entails moving the theoretical discussions of social capital beyond civil society to analysis of the relationship between the state, the family, and civil society.

The essays in Contested Concepts confirm that gender, context, and politics matter. The influence of feminist scholarship on the development of social policy has been contradictory and uneven, but it has had an impact on how women articulate their politics at local, national, and international levels. The discussion of trends in social policy in the various member states of the European Union demonstrates that although policy-making is increasingly bound to international agreements, the nation-state still matters. Comparative research enriches the exploration of how social, historical, and political processes shape the vocabularies used in theory and social policy, and to what degree gender analysis has influenced these vocabularies. The questions raised in these essays will no doubt inspire future thinking about the gendered implications of the current restructuring of social welfare policy.


Nancy Janovicek University of New Brunswick

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