This themed section focuses on parenting support as a social policy phenomenon within and across the five Nordic Countries of Europe: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. As in other parts of Europe, parenting support has received increased attention in social policy making in the Nordic region. In reviewing developments in the Nordic countries, the themed section seeks to identify and discuss similarities and differences between parenting support policies in the North versus other parts of Europe. It considers whether the aims and the provision of parenting support in the Nordic countries differ significantly from those identified in studies of parenting support policies in other European countries.

This introductory article offers an analytical framework to understand the limits of approaches that stress the diffusion and transfers of international norms within the field of disability policy over the last three decades. It also aims to provide alternative ways to frame some of the important changes that have occurred through the concept of layering, in order to better account for the intricate processes of national translation but also for the contradictions, conflicts, and obstacles that the promotion of disability rights have faced in different countries. Finally, this article serves to introduce the contributions that make up the themed section in this issue of Social Policy and Society.

The United Kingdom has a long history of a fraught relationship with the European Union, a discomfort demonstrated in the 23 June 2016 referendum on the membership of the EU, in which the UK voted to leave with nearly 52 per cent majority vote. Among the key concerns underlying UK's unease with EU are the interrelated areas of the economy, polity, and society. However, public debate surrounding the event focused on a relatively narrow range of issues. The two official campaigns representing the choice in the referendum, ‘Vote Leave, take control’ and ‘Britain Stronger in Europe’, were marshalled either to support Eurosceptic feelings or to emphasise the benefits of access to the Single Market. Commonplace convictions that the EU is responsible for that which is negative, inconvenient, or difficult to explain circulated alongside (though less frequently than) the recognition of the economic privileges and opportunities that come from EU membership. The political, economic and social concerns were encapsulated in themes of taking power back from Brussels, redirecting resources from the UK's contributions to the EU budget towards nationally determined projects (most famously allocating £350 million a week for the National Health Service), and effective border control to significantly curb migration. Contradictory claims about the EU and the UK's affiliation with it were further complicated by the fact that divisions over the support for or opposition to Britain's withdrawal spanned the whole political spectrum.

This themed section brings together the disciplines of sociology, social work and social policy in order to examine the ways in which contemporary familial diversity is recognised in comparative welfare state regimes. Contributors interrogate the ways in which such diversity is supported in national legislation, policy developments and acknowledged in everyday social work practice. In doing so, the section examines if and how these demographic trends and sociological conceptualisations are reflected in comparative welfare state systems and/or policy related to family. Selected articles will also consider if and how social workers, as ‘street level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980), incorporate these changes in familial structures, and related policy, into their decision making processes and everyday practice.

Although contemporary sociological thought reports a diversification of family forms in society, ‘the family’ continues to influence national and international political agendas. Social workers, as ‘street level bureaucrats’, are social agents that both work with citizens and implement policies made by senior officials. Despite this, the extent to which conceptual and policy developments in family diversity manifest in family-based social work practice remains under explored. This article brings together the findings of two comparative studies, and explores the transfer of conceptual understandings of family, and policy, in England, through two examples: gendered caring expectations and culturally located familial norms. Significantly, we show that, when prompted, social workers recognise family complexity and diversity, but myriad constraints complicate the application of these understandings, and related policies. Bringing together literature from sociology, social policy and social work, this article, thereby, offers a unique lens and highlights a lag between conceptual developments, policy and implementation.

Parenting support in the Nordic countries builds upon a century-long tradition of controls and services run by municipalities and county councils (Hagelund, 2008; Danielsen and Mühleisen, 2009; Lundqvist, 2015). However, with the introduction of structured parental guidance programmes from the 1990s onward (mainly based on research insights and experiences from the US and UK), new elements have been added to the former policy legacy (Lundqvist, 2015).

The United States has been a leader in the creation of disability rights law, providing a policy template for other nations. Yet the social model, the animating philosophy behind the disability rights movement, has had little effect on the wide range of welfare programs that serve people with disabilities. These programs, whose creation preceded the modern disability rights movement, reflect a medical model of disability that is at odds with the social model. Analysing the Americans with Disabilities Act (which embodies the social model) and Social Security Disability Insurance (the largest welfare program for people with disabilities), we explore how and why this layering of contradictory disability rights and welfare programs developed and how it has been maintained. We argue that the tension between these policies engendered a series of patches, or ‘kludges’, that allow the policies to coexist without meaningful synthesis. We contend that the United States is particularly prone to this layering of ‘tense policies’, but that it is likely characteristic of disability policy in many nations. Finally we argue that accurate benchmarking of disability rights regimes across nations requires analysts to dig through all the layers of disability policy.

This article examines both the place of the social dimension in past and on-going debates about the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union and the reciprocal influence of EU and UK institutions on developments in the social policy field. It explores fluctuations in the relationship between economic and social policy, the divisiveness within, between and across political parties, the role of key policy actors in shaping the social agenda, and the failure of attempts to harmonise social welfare systems as enlargement intensified their diversity. We argue that, although difficult to predict, the implications of Brexit for future social policy in the UK and EU may not be so far-reaching as in some other policy areas, due largely to the maintenance of unanimous voting and the subsidiarity principle in many social domains, combined with the shift towards soft law and the widespread resistance of member states to tighter social integration.

In France, public policies in the field of disability was transformed by the law in 11 February 2005 on ‘Equal Rights and Opportunities, Participation, and Citizenship of People with Disabilities’. The law was framed as the introduction in France of the international ‘social model of disability’, in order to combat discrimination. Yet international references in parliamentary debates leading to the adoption of this law were all but absent. How do we explain this paradox? This article aims to answer this question by showing how the newly introduced measures reflected the needs of different stakeholders involved in this public policy to maintain their positions and reform their mutual agreements. This transfer was not characterised by a thorough rethinking of the public policy subsystem, but rather resulted in layering of new rights on top of old frameworks. How then did the organisations promoting these measures manage to implement public policies despite clear contradictions between old and new goals? This article suggests that the organisational regulation of political conflict (conflict avoidance and circumvention of obstacles) and the safeguarding of embedded interests (by limiting possibilities for compromise and administrative obstruction of legal disputes) played a decisive role in this process.

In Finland, parenting-related anxiety increased in the 1990s during a deep economic recession and subsequent widespread cutbacks to family services. Despite these cutbacks, resources allocated to services underlining the role of parents – namely, parenting support – increased, manifesting in the establishment of family support projects in the 2000s. Employing positioning theory and pragmatic modalities, I explore how key attributes of good parenting – responsibility and competence – are discussed within family support projects (n = 310). Given discussions regarding the relationship between parenting-related anxiety and the increasing number of parenting-related experts, this article explores parents’ positions within such discussions and overall parenting support in Finland. The analysis of projects clarifies the role of the parenting-related experts, but also provides a nuanced view of the position of parents. In some projects, for instance, parents are positioned as experts whose parenting responsibilities and competence are strengthened within peer-parent relationships and shared within the surrounding community.

The analysis of EU level social and gender policies highlights uneven developments and concerns over the EU as not (always) beneficial to social progress and gender equality. The EU, although primarily market driven, has developed a range of social policies, with gender equality enjoying a long-standing status as EU's founding value, dating back to the 1957 principle of equal pay for equal work. Yet, sixty years later, social justice objectives and equality between women and men remain to be realised. Social and gender themes have been revived by the proposal to develop the European Pillar of Social Rights, the shaping and implementing of which post-Brexit UK will not take part in. This initiative entails some meaningful developments for social and gender progress. However, its current form and content represents an adjustment to, rather than a transformation of, the unequal European economy and society.

The practice of extended family and friends helping to care for children when their parents are unable to is an enduring tradition in many cultures. Kinship care provides the largest proportion of out of home care in Western society but many of these carers experience poverty and deprivation, and do not receive comparable levels of support, financial or professional, to other placement types. This study provides UK evidence for the relationship between kinship care and deprivation and examines how the welfare state frames kinship care in policy and practice.

Iceland enjoys a reputation as one of the most gender equal countries in the world. It has also received much attention for an innovative approach to parental leave where fathers have three months of non-transferable leave, thereby encouraging active involvement of fathers in the caretaking of their children. This article focuses on the discrepancy between on the one hand the goals of the state of drawing men, particularly fathers, into traditional female dominated areas such as caregiving of infants and young children and on the other hand a discourse that equates motherhood with parenthood and promotes the ideology of intensive mothering.

This article examines the development of the EU's gender equality framework of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ law, including the incomplete gender mainstreaming of the European Employment Strategy. It highlights contradictions, rooted in political tensions between the social democratic principles which underpin the European Social Model, and the promotion of neo-liberal economic policies. It assesses the UK's role in shaping this European framework, and the framework's impact on the UK's employment policy. It concludes that Brexit will harm the pursuit of gender equality in the UK due to decoupling from the EU's equality framework and policy pathway. An additional risk is greater insularity in UK policy making through reduced exposure to the Open Method of Coordination. Brexit may, however, help progress gender equality in the rest of the EU if the outcome is greater unity focussed on an inclusive employment policy without the UK dragging its heels in favour of deregulated flexibility.

Social workers all around the world work with families and family complexity in their everyday practice. In this article, we present findings from a cross-national study exploring how social workers in child welfare conceptualise ‘family’, and how they relate to ‘family’ in their practice. Data presented is taken from focus groups with twenty-eight social workers from Chile, Mexico and Norway. The findings reveal that in Chilean, Mexican, and Norwegian social work, the conceptualisation of family has expanded over time, acknowledging various family forms and displays, and an increased orientation towards networks regardless of biological ties. However, differences were found, particularly in the way professionals view extended family, perspectives on family intervention, and the position of children in the family. Practical implications will be discussed.

Applying a political economy lens, this article examines the impact of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), within a political context marked by crisis and austerity. Taking the case of Portugal, a country that faced a financial crisis and underwent an austerity plan, the article seeks to understand the impact of the CRPD at domestic level. What has changed, what has remained the same and what has deteriorated? And how has the disability movement responded and resisted to the crisis? This article addresses these questions and discusses the challenges of implementing disability rights in times of ‘enduring’ austerity.

This study examines the conceptualisation of family in key social legislative documents guiding social workers in two European countries, whose welfare systems have previously been labelled as re-familialised (Lithuania) or de-familialised (Sweden). The focus is on the concept of family as delineated on three legislative levels: the constitutional level, the general family policy level, and the child welfare policy level. ‘Family’ is explicit in Lithuanian law, and the regulation of family formation and responsibility is imperative, while this is much less so in Swedish law. The analysis reveals how general welfare systems (regime-types) are linked to legislative frameworks, which, in turn, provide fundamentally different conditions for social work in different contexts.

In Denmark, a process of defamilising has taken place since the expansion of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector in the 1960s, in the sense that children now spend a large part of their childhood outside the family. Nevertheless, parents are still seen as key figures in children's upbringing and as having primary responsibility for the quality of childhood, implying a simultaneous process of refamilising. Based on ethnographic fieldwork we show that parents are not only held responsible for their children's lives at home, but also for ensuring that ECEC staff have the best possible opportunity to support children's development at ECEC institutions. We analyse how ECEC staff offer guidance on how to be a responsible parent who cooperates in the right ways, and on how to cultivate children's development at home. Parents willingly accept such advice because of a strong risk awareness embedded in diagnostic forms, positioning ECEC staff as parenting experts.

This article explores the gendered nature of the process of withdrawing from the European Union. Considering the EU is widely accepted as a gender actor, particularly in the context of employment policy, the marginality of these issues in current debates reflects a hierarchy in the value attributed to different policy areas that crystallizes the high-low politics binary. European led initiatives have undoubtedly changed the nature of equality policies in the Member States. Recent studies have also outlined how, and to what extent, EU policy contributes to shifts in gender regimes, gender policy and gender relations at the national level. Women in the UK have benefited greatly from membership of the EU/EEC; thus, looking at Brexit as a process provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the relationship, and patterns of influence, between European and national legislation.

There is growing concern surrounding the retraction of disability social provisioning measures across the western world, with state fiscal policy trends foregrounding austerity as a central principle of welfare provisioning. This is occurring within many of the nation-states that have ratified and legislated rights enshrined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This article undertakes a critical analysis of disability income retraction in Australia since the early 2000s and examines these changes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with disability by focusing on Article 20 of the CRPD, the right to personal mobility, a core right for people with disabilities and Indigenous peoples. Beyond economic inequality, the article illustrates that the various administrative processes attached to welfare retraction have implications for the realisation of mobility practices that are critical for individual cultural identity and wellbeing. Disability austerity has resulted in a new form of Indigenous containment, fixing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disabilities in a cyclical motion of poverty management.