Whilst philanthropy has long helped fund private initiatives for public good, governments are becoming more interested in expanding this income source as pressures on public spending increase. One outcome of multiple efforts to enhance philanthropy is the growth of giving circles, which involve individual donors collaborating to support causes of mutual interest. This research examines the degree to which giving circles are a good mechanism for enhancing philanthropy. Our overarching interest is to understand if giving circles in the UK and Ireland might serve to grow philanthropy as well as shift the logic of charity to meet the expectations of policy-makers.

Among scholars and practitioners, there is a growing recognition of the important role of employers in the success of active labour market policies in Europe. However, there is a lack of systematic evidence about why and how employers engage in active labour market policies. In this article, the preferences and behaviour of employers towards active labour market policies are untangled. A typology of four types of employers is constructed for analytical and empirical analysis. By distinguishing positive and negative preferences from participation and non-participation, four types of employers are identified: the committed employer, the dismissive employer, the sceptical employer and the passive employer. The utility of the typology is tested with survey data on employer engagement in Danish ALMPs. The findings indicate that only a minority of Danish employers can be classified as ‘committed employers’, and the majority are either ‘dismissive’ or ‘passive’ employers. In the final section, this finding and the usefulness of the typology for analytical and empirical research is discussed.

This article reports the results of a case study on the introduction of the living wage. Three employers in the City of York became living wage employers. Using data derived from a sample survey of their employees and qualitative interviews, this article explores what impact the receipt of the living wage had on poverty and deprivation. It found that not all living wage employees were income poor or deprived, although those on living wage rates were more likely to be poor and deprived than those on even higher wages. The more important determinant of the employees’ living standards was the household they lived in, and there were a high proportion of living wage employees living in multi-unit households. Also important were the number of earners in the household and the hours worked by the living wage employee. Lone parent families and single people appeared to be most vulnerable to poverty and deprivation. In addition, whether the employee took up their entitlement to in-work benefits was critical and, using benefit checks by welfare rights experts, it was found that some were not.

The feminisation of international migration for care labour has gained prominence in the last three decades. It has been theorised mainly in the context of the changing care regime in the Global North; the changes in other parts of the world have been largely neglected. This article explores the dynamics between changing care regimes, labour markets and international migration in the East Asian context through the case of Korean Chinese migrants to South Korea. Korean Chinese came to South Korea through various legal channels beginning in the late 1980s and occupy the largest share of both male and female migrants in South Korea. Korean Chinese women have engaged in service sector jobs, including domestic work and caregiving, since their influx, yet such work was only legalised during the 2000s in response to demographic changes and the care deficit. This article sheds light on the female Korean Chinese migrants’ engagement in care work in the ambiguous legal space of migration and the care labour market, and their changing roles in the process of development of the care labour market. Based on interviews with Korean Chinese migrants in South Korea, immigration statistics, and the Foreign Employment Survey in 2013, this study explores how the care regime intersects with migration in the process of the care regimes development.

Increasingly, the construct of resilience has been used by social scientists and (social) policy makers in relation to individual resilience to economic hardship. There are a number of issues within the literature on the subject that are unresolved including: whether it is an attribute or a process; the extent to which resilience is a positive phenomenon; the extent to which individuals living in economic hardship have agency; and whether it is finite. The article unpacks these issues, drawing on qualitative data from a longitudinal study in Northern Ireland. It found resilience to be a negative experience for study participants, although they did exhibit a number of attributes that may be described as being positive. They were often unable to exercise ‘positive’, transformative agency, because the choices available were limited and pernicious in nature. The article concludes that as an analytical tool for exploring the experiences of people living in economic hardship, the construct of resilience is not helpful.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 analyses and problematises central assumptions in Sweden's National Strategy for Developing Parenting Support, a document that addresses children's deteriorating psychological health. The analysis was performed with Bacchi's (2009) approach to policy analysis. The results show how parental determinism is expressed; psychological ill health among school-aged children is described as an individualised problem caused by insecure parents, who are represented as the most important persons in a child's life and, therefore, are considered to be risk factors that require continuous support. Evidence-based parenting support programmes in particular are described as a central tool for improving parents’ sense of responsibility and parenting skills. While the strategy aims to offer all Swedish parents support, it underlines ideals that have been related to gendered, middle-class notions of parenting. The issue concerning children's psychological health is problematised and discussed in relation to parental determinism, the risk society, equality, equity and psychological health.

Parent education surfaced as a political question in Sweden in the 1960s and support for parents has since remained on the political agenda. Despite different views on the ideal relationship between the welfare state, the family and children, support for parents has been advocated by parties from all over the political spectrum. By tracing the political debate, this article addresses the question of how the notion of support for parents was adapted to different political ideas, ideologies and ways of defining the relationship between state, family and children from the 1960s until the 2000s in Sweden. We analyse the arguments that different political parties offered and the varying meanings attributed to terms like ‘parent education’ (föräldrautbildning) and ‘parenting support’ (föräldrastöd) during three different phases in the transformation of the Swedish welfare state: the final period of its expansion in the 1960s and 1970s; the economic crisis and retrenchments of welfare services in the 1990s; and the era of individual responsibility in the 2000s. Support for parents has been actualised as a solution to different social and political problems and the notions of parent education and parenting support have proven the capacity to accommodate different political ideas, ideologies and visions.

This article examines the expansion and underlying aims of structured parenting support in Norway. Norway's approach to parenting support differs from that of most other countries (Glavin and Schaffer, 2014), in supposedly being universal and offered to all parents (Eng et al., 2017). However, it is difficult to determine whether parenting support in Norway is actually unique, since little is known about how it is implemented in practice (Bråten and Sønsterudbråten, 2016; Wesseltoft-Rao et al., 2017). This article contributes further knowledge of how parenting support travels from national-level policy-making down to the level of municipal institutions where it is implemented. The analysis draws upon insights from a comprehensive case study in Bergen, Norway's second largest city, that included fieldwork observations and service mapping over a period of two years (2015–2017), a large number of in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, and analysis of relevant documents (advertisements, project applications and project reports, budgets, etc.).