Incorporating Class into Work-Family Arrangements: Insights from and for Three Worlds

• In Event: 581 - Regular Session. Cross-National Sociology

Abstract

In response to critics, Esping-Andersen (1999) added family to the state-market nexus by examining the degree of familialism across regimes. His typology, however, continues to be critiqued on the lack of fit between regimes and levels of women’s employment. I argue that in absence of the state de-familializing care it is difficult to predict work-family arrangements without reference to the overall level of inequality in a country and a family’s social location within it. We must attend to the interaction between levels of familialism and economic inequality. I build on Lewis, Campbell, and Huerta’s (2008) categorization of how two-parent families combine work and care in EU-15 countries by adding an explicit consideration of how these patterns vary within countries by class. I utilize hierarchical clustering with data for 16 countries (2004-2010) from the Luxembourg Income Study and the European Social Survey. In some respects, refining country averages by class lends greater support to Three Worlds, but it also reveals a Southern European pattern distinguished by class inequality in work-family arrangements more characteristic of the liberal regime. Findings also shed light on Lewis and colleagues’ categorization; countries that polarize between dual-full time and male breadwinner families largely polarize by class.

Author

• Jennifer L. Hook, University of Southern California