Maternal Employment and the State: Varieties of Familialism in Post-Socialist Countries

State socialism has undeniably shaped institutional legacies of post-socialist EU member states; not only had it produced extraordinary leap in terms of female employment, it also heralded significant change in the role of the state in the family. Therefore, post-socialist countries are often homogenised - not only historically (“former Soviet Bloc”, “post-socialist”/”Eastern” group), but also on the ground of gender politics (“neo-/re-familialistic”). This paper challenges such overly simplistic characterizations and offers a more nuanced assessment via analysis of their socialist past. It explores the specificity of socialist experiences and explains how this period heralded change in the role of the state in the family, in social organisation of care, and how gender roles were inscribed in different institutional settings and practices within societies. It demonstrates that similar history notwithstanding, countries adopted different models of socialism, with different roles and influence of organised politics, as well as interventions via public policies. They endorsed and legitimized different “ethos” of gendered norms and practices, which broadly followed three trajectories: that of familialism in the Eastern Bloc, where states relied on families to produce childcare; that of liberal state in Poland, where parents were left with no public support; and that of defamilialism in Slovenia, committed to female continuous employment. This paper demonstrates that countries departed state socialism with mixed legacies and collective experiences about social organisation of care and female employment, and thus invites perspectives for further academic debate about the “common socialist legacy” and distinct “Eastern welfare regime type”

Slovenia

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Gender Inequality in the Eastern European Labour Market on 26.10.16, available online: http://www.routledge.com/978113899985

Rethinking comparative childcare policy analysis: Example of Central and Eastern Europe

Comparative research routinely employ s a small number of indicators to compare family polic ies across countries. In these studies, government expenditure, participation of children in public childcare or length of parental leave are internationally recognised policy indicators . However, the y have been subject of academic controversy and are less adequate predictors of gendered policy incentives . This paper , therefore, theoretically and empirically explores and discusse s how varieties of state de - familialism could be more fully captured in a cross - country perspective. It proposes a composite indic ator for use in gendered analysis of policy incentives , one that comprises the most salient features of national policies on leave and childcare services versus some combination of policy delivery and use . Thereby, it pays explicit attention to the methodo logical challenges and decisions that concern case selection, concept formation, the role of counterfactuals, establishing of measurement validity, and multi - method design. Finally, the paper discusses the opportunities for future research that such approa ch opens up. It empirically explores its applicability on Ce ntral and Eastern EU member states – an attempt which has gained little methodologically substantiated attention so far . Going beyond the Western welfare states it demonstrate s its functionality a nd shows how the se countries could be integrated in the corpus of comparative welfare state research

Maternal Employment in Post-Socialist Countries: Understanding the Implications of Childcare Policies

Post-socialist countries, especially those from the EU-2004 enlargement, have been distinguished by high employment rates of women in full-time jobs since the late 1950s. In the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia from Central Europe, and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from the Baltic States, these ranged between 85 and 90 per cent, with practically no cross-country variation and narrow gender gaps in the late 1980s, just before the severe labour market disruptions in the 1990s (see, for example, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 1999)

L’adieu au modèle de « l’homme soutien de famille ». Le présent postsocialiste à la lumière du passé socialiste

Abstract Farewell to Male Breadwinning. A post-socialist present seen in the light of a socialist past State socialism fashioned the institutional legacy of the European Union’s post-socialist member states. Not only did it take female employment a major step forward, it also did much to develop the role of the State in the family. Research on welfare-state policies therefore tends to look at post-socialist countries as a single, uniform whole. This article intends to bring a more nuanced view by analysing these countries’ socialist past. It shows that the various countries adopted distinct models of socialism that confirmed and legitimised different family policies and gender roles. Not all of them emerged from the era of state socialism with the same legacy, nor with the same collective experience of the social organisation of childcare facilities and female employment. This contribution therefore offers to pursue the debate on a “ shared socialist legacy” and a distinct post-socialist social welfare system. Résumé Le socialisme d’État a façonné l’héritage institutionnel des États membres de l’Union européenne postsocialistes. Il a non seulement permis à l’emploi des femmes de faire un bond important, mais aussi fait largement évoluer le rôle de l’État dans la famille. La recherche sur les régimes d’Étatprovidence a donc tendance à traiter les pays postsocialistes comme un ensemble, unique et homogène. Cet article s’efforce de proposer une vision plus nuancée en analysant le passé socialiste de ces pays. Il montre que ces pays avaient adopté des modèles de socialisme distincts, entérinant et légitimant des politiques familiales et une répartition des rôles entre les genres différentes. Tous ne sont pas sortis de l’ère du socialisme d’État avec le même héritage ni avec la même expérience collective de l’organisation sociale de l’accueil des enfants et de l’emploi des femmes. Cette contribution invite par conséquent à poursuivre le débat sur « l’héritage socialiste commun » et sur le régime de protection sociale postsocialiste distinct

OLAP for health statistics: how to turn a simple spreadsheet into a powerful analytical tool

Over the last ten years, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become a very popular tool for interactive analysis of multidimensional information. Providing online operation and flexible summarising, tabulating and charting options, it has become an essential part of the decision support process in corporate setting. Our aim is to demonstrate how easily applicable and useful OLAP can be in the public sector. To achieve that, we used data compiled from different sources for the purpose of exploring the relations between causes of death (according to ICD-10) and socio-economic characteristics (educational level, marital status, profession, etc.) for selected years 1992, 1995 and 1998 in Slovenia. Using a standard personal computer and the Windows® platform, the application was implemented in Microsoft® Excel 2000, without any programming. After data cleansing (elimination of incorrect entries, duplicates and inconsistencies based on exploratory statistical methods), the case-based spreadsheet data was instantly converted into an OLAP application with the user-friendly pivot table technology. A bonus of this approach is that the results can be made directly accessible over the WWW by publishing the workbook to a web server. Provided that the user has Microsoft® Internet Explorer and Microsoft® Office 2000 installed, all the drill-in, drill-out and dimension-swapping capabilities are accessible within the browser, while the data source remains fully protected. Privacy constraints are respected since all the information is only provided at the aggregate level. Even though our dataset provides exhaustive coverage of mortality at the national level, storage and processing capabilities did not prove to be an issue. Hence, we argue that OLAP methodology should find a place in health statistics. With proper data collection and/or transformations, informative comparisons within the study population and with international databases become readily accessible. The key advantage of OLAP over relational database management systems and ordinary tables is interactive browsing of multidimensional and hierarchical data, while OLAP can also aid data integrity checking and reporting

Where’s the Community in Community, Work and Family? A Community-based Capabilities Approach

Community is a key dimension in the work–family interface as highlighted by the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Yet it is critically understudied by much work–family scholarship. We highlight and address crucial barriers preventing the integration of the community concept, developing an interdisciplinary community-based capabilities approach. This approach conceptualizes three components of community: local relationships, local policies and locality (place, space and scale). Local relationships include formal and informal relationships, networks, and a sense of belonging. Dependent on the broader socio-economic context, local policies and services can provide important resources for managing these relationships and work–life situations more generally. These relationships and policies are embedded in specific geographical localities, shaping and being shaped by social action. This interdisciplinary conceptualization of community allows relational, spatial, structural and temporal aspects of community to be integrated into a more broadly applicable conceptual approach. We base this approach on the capability approach, which allows for a pluralistic work–life framework of what individuals value and do. We further argue for a conceptualization of family as community, moving towards a work–community interface. The resulting conceptual approach is useful for explaining work–life processes for individuals with and without care responsibilities, and offers a new framework for studying the social trends intensely and rapidly highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic

Creating capabilities: Childcare policies in comparative perspective

This article analyses childcare services in six countries, assessing this policy instrument’s potential to facilitate parents’ capabilities for arranging childcare in a way they have reason to value. It draws on Sen’s capability approach to conceptualize and assess childcare policy design across five key aspects of childcare provision (accessibility, availability, affordability, quality and flexibility) in a country-comparative perspective. The conceptualization of the multifaceted nature of childcare provides compelling insights into the complexity of comparing childcare services across countries. The ensuing analysis and comprehensive overview of national policies challenges the idea of a defamilialization policy cluster, which masks key distinctions between public and market service provision. The more nuanced conceptualization and operationalization of childcare policy design through the capability approach reveals parents’ real opportunities for arranging childcare and the varying effects of policy design across gender and class. In addition, it goes beyond implicit commodification assumptions and opens up space for parents’ potential desire for multiple care arrangement possibilities

Highly variable AFLP and S-SAP markers for the identification of ‘Malbec’ and ‘Syrah’ clones

The retrotransposon-based sequence-specific amplification polymorphism (S-SAP) and the amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) marker systems were used to assess the clonal variation of 14 ‘Syrah’ and 22 ‘Malbec’ (Vitis vinifera L.) clones. The utility of S-SAP markers was compared to that of AFLP markers. On the basis of our results, S-SAP is more informative marker system and showed higher average number of polymorphic bands per cultivar group than AFLP. Relationships among clones were analyzed by cluster analysis using unweighted pair-groups using arithmetic averages and in both cases revealed well defined groups of clones, in which ‘Malbec’ clones were separated from ‘Syrah’ clones. High variability of some clones could also be seen within these clusters. The different levels of polymorphism for ‘Malbec’ and ‘Syrah’ obtained in this study suggest that ‘Malbec’ exhibits a higher mutation frequency than ‘Syrah’. Our results indicate that higher proportion of polymorphic bands in S-SAP makes it a less labour-intensive and more efficient approach for developing markers for clonal identification.

Highly variable AFLP and S-SAP markers for the identification of "Malbec" and "Syrah" clones

The retrotransposon-based sequence-specific amplification polymorphism (S-SAP) and the amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) marker systems were used to assess the clonal variation of 14 ‘Syrah’ and 22 ‘Malbec’ (Vitis vinifera L.) clones. The utility of S-SAP markers was compared to that of AFLP markers. On the basis of our results, S-SAP is more informative marker system and showed higher average number of polymorphic bands per cultivar group than AFLP. Relationships among clones were analyzed by cluster analysis using unweighted pair-groups using arithmetic averages and in both cases revealed well defined groups of clones, in which ‘Malbec’ clones were separated from ‘Syrah’ clones. High variability of some clones could also be seen within these clusters. The different levels of polymorphism for ‘Malbec’ and ‘Syrah’ obtained in this study suggest that ‘Malbec’ exhibits a higher mutation frequency than ‘Syrah’. Our results indicate that higher proportion of polymorphic bands in S-SAP makes it a less labour-intensive and more efficient approach for developing markers for clonal identification.Fil: Stajner, N.. University of Ljubljana; EsloveniaFil: Jakse, J.. University of Ljubljana; EsloveniaFil: Javornik, B.. University of Ljubljana; EsloveniaFil: Masuelli, Ricardo Williams. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro Regional Mendoza-san Juan. Estación Experimental Agropecuaria la Consulta. Agencia de Extensión Rural la Consulta; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias; ArgentinaFil: Martínez, Liliana Estela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Biología Agrícola de Mendoza. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias. Instituto de Biología Agrícola de Mendoza; Argentin