Capitalism, Corporate Liberalism and Social Policy: The Origins of the Social Security Act of 1935
This paper looks at the involvement and influence of capitalists on the Social Security Act of 1935. Instead of positing direct corporate control, the research shows how social security was formulated with in a corporate liberal ideological framework which defined problems and their solutions in terms of putting the maintenance of capitalism above the needs of individual workers. This framework set the limits of the social insurance debates long before the act itself was written. The thesis is that the Social Security Act came about as a result of an interplay between the environment and an ideology advanced by corporate leaders and reform-minded academicians.
Social policy and everyday life in nursing homes: a critical ethnography.
This is an ethnographic account of nursing homes in the United States. I draw connections between social policies and specific consequences for everyday life in this environment. This paper focuses on nursing assistants' wages, the economic impact of long term care on patients, the passification process of patient life, the invisibility of caring work, and the framing of everyday life into the concepts of capitalist industry. The primary data in the research are comments and conversations of nursing assistants and patients. Their standpoint, I conclude, is often opposed to the organizational logic of business that increasingly encases nursing home life.
Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies
Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.