Michelle A Brady

Parental leave policies have considerable potential to contribute to the advancement of social equalities, however this is highly contingent on design features such as breadth of coverage and, for gender equality, support for a shared earner/carer social model. These characteristics are in turn shaped by the prevailing welfare state regime and gender order, with coverage also dependent on levels of labour market fragmentation and insecurity. In this paper we examine a number of these intersecting influences in the Australian case. We show that Australian parental leave policies have relatively broad coverage, but note limitations and gaps that could be exacerbated in a future, more fragmented, labour market. We also underline the extent to which current provisions reflect and consolidate, rather than challenge, a ‘maternalist’ care regime. In conclusion, we canvass strategies to optimise coverage and support gender equality in the future, recognising the constraints of path dependencies arising from Australia’s distinctive policy history and the ensuing tension between a ‘welfare’ and ‘employment’ basis for entitlements. Policy adaptations to strengthen connections with employment and move beyond a ‘primary carer’ focus are recommended as conducive to a more egalitarian future.

This special issue, New Social Inequalities and the Future of Work, brings together a collection of papers that illustrate in differing ways the resilience and recreation of social inequalities in the context of contemporary trends in the world of work. Its draws on research presented at a symposium of the same name, held in June 2018 over two days at the Queensland Office of Industrial Relations and the University of Queensland.1 The symposium focused in particular on inequalities associated with age and gender, and their possible expansion in future labour markets. Themes explored ranged from training and work experience for young workers, the risks and possibilities for gender equality with changing employment and economic circumstances, the views and aspirations of young workers and the role of social supports for redressing inequalities located at the intersection of social reproduction and paid employment.

Individualized, maternalist and marketized discourses of childcare are pervasive in Australia as they are in other liberal welfare states. Responsibility is overwhelmingly placed on mothers to carry out most childcare work themselves or to arrange informal or paid childcare. One of the key tasks for most employed mothers is transporting children alongside their commuting journeys. In this context we used mapping/graphic elicitation interviews with 45 Australian employed mothers to explore their commuting experiences through the lens of emotional geographies. Our findings reveal that mothers’ experiences of their commutes were shaped by negotiations with intensive mothering and ‘ideal worker’ ideologies during this journey resulting in emotions of guilt, shame and stress. The spatial and temporal organization of childcare, and incompatibilities between their commuting transport needs and the organization of public transport and parking, tended to amplify these tensions. Through an emotional geographies lens we complicate linear understandings of commuting and mainstream transport and planning work, while calling for more attention to the affective and relational dimensions of mothers’ everyday geographies of care and paid work.

Single parents are increasingly a target group for ‘activation’ though new obligations to seek paid work or engage in education or training. Researchers commonly characterise new activation policies in terms of epochal shifts or unidirectional movements away from understanding single parents as ‘carers’ or mothers. We argue this characterization downplays the degree to which the post-war welfare state viewed single parents as potential workers and the contemporary reforms view them as carers. Drawing on Foucault's concept of problematization and research on neoliberal governmentalities, pre-emptive politics and anticipatory modes of power extend existing characterisations of activation policies for single parents.

Activation reforms targeted at single parents simultaneously construct them as a legitimate target for activation policy and subjects them to new obligations to engage in paid work or education/training. The social policy literature has established that the work of ‘making-up’ target groups occurs at the street level as well as in government legislation. The street level has become even more significant in recent years as there has been a shift towards establishing quasi-markets for the delivery of welfare-to-work programmes and organising these around the principles of performance pay and process flexibility. However, what is largely missing from the existing literature is an analysis of how contract conditions, together with individual’s activation obligations, shape how they are targeted at the street level. Drawing on a study conducted over  eight years with agencies in Australia’s quasi-market for employment services, this paper argues that the changes to the contracts for governing this market changed how Australian single mothers were targeted by employment services. Over time there was a shift away from making-up single-parent clients as a distinct, vulnerable target group and a shift towards viewing them in terms of risk categories described within the agencies’ contracts.

Neoliberalism is among the most commonly used concepts in the social sciences.  As an analytic category neoliberalism is powerful in allowing scholars to illuminate interconnections among practices and changes occurring at multiple levels of governance, including links between the regulation of global finance and migration flows, everyday encounters in state and corporate bureaucracies, and individuals’ self-understandings. Yet there are recurrent concerns that labelling social practices, policies, and shifts as “neoliberal” obfuscates more than it enlightens and encourages monolithic or totalizing assessments of our present and recent past (Flew, 2012; Rose, O’Malley, & Valverde, 2006). This volume seeks to contribute to and extend the current conversation about neoliberalism, especially as it relates to governmentality, by questioning common assumptions about its character as well as the extent to which it is shaping our lives.

Research on single mothers’ employment overwhelmingly focuses on the importance of access to formal childcare at a single point in time. However, to understand the relationship between childcare and single mothers’ employment we must consider their access to and use of multiple forms of childcare - their childcare packages - and how these change over time. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study and employing the concepts of “caringscapes” and “work-time/childcare-time”, this article highlights how childcare packages shape single mothers’ employment trajectories. Informal carers play a crucial role within mixed (formal and informal) childcare packages in helping mothers bring children’s needs, work-time and childcare-time into alignment, thus strengthening their employment trajectories. Informal carers achieve this effect by: 1) increasing total hours of non-parental care; 2)  “gluing” together complex jigsaws of care; 3) offering a “safety net” in times of crisis; and 4) playing a “connector” role during employment transitions.

Qualitative researchers interested in social policies around work and family face a puzzle. Key welfare to work, childcare and child support initiatives have in recent decades been based as much on persuasive narratives as any hard data or evidence. At the same time, in the context of a heightened concern with ‘evidence-based policy’ (Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, 2012) qualitative researchers often face disinterest and resistance from policymakers in these fields, many of whom dismiss qualitative and narrative research as ‘anecdotal’ and ‘subjective’. Rist’s (1994) influential framework provides a useful starting point as it highlights the kinds of contributions that qualitative research can make to the policy process. He suggests that qualitative research can make specific contributions at each stage of the policy cycle (policy formulation, policy implementation and policy accountability), and that it can also help policy makers to choose the most appropriate policy tool (e.g. tax credits versus fortnightly payments). However, much has changed in the 20 years since Rist's framework was published. Qualitative research has begun to gain a much more central place in large scale pilots and ‘demonstration projects’ in the United States (Gardenhire & Nelson, 2003; Weisner, 2008), and also in evaluations of new work and family measures in the United Kingdom (Lewis, 2007; Ritchie & Spencer, 2002; Spencer, Ritchie, Lewis, & Dillon, 2003). A rich body of ethnographic work has also developed around documenting the experiences of poor families as they seek to combine work and care, and as they interact with various policies and supports (Weisner, 2008). Finally, qualitative researchers have developed new methodologies and theoretical frameworks for understanding social life and social policy.
The aim of this special issue is to provide an opportunity to think again about the kinds of contributions that contemporary qualitative research can make to social policy. A number of these articles were first presented at a workshop entitled ‘Qualitative Research on Work, Family & Policy: Current Issues & Future Directions’ held at the School of Social Science, University of Queensland in November 2013. That workshop sought to foster debate and dialogue about the kinds of contributions qualitative scholars should be seeking to make to work and family policy, and the kinds of methods that we should use in a context where qualitative research seems to be viewed as less persuasive than quantitative studies. The aim of this special issue is to address the following questions:

What specific contributions can qualitative studies make to work and family policy?

Is there a place for increased comparative research, and if so what are some innovative examples of comparative qualitative studies?

What specific kinds of methodologies can make a contribution to work and family policy? What are the details of these methodologies and why are they particularly powerful?

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This article is aimed at Foucauldian scholars and seeks to introduce them to ethnographic works that interrogate neoliberal governmentalities. As an analytic category ‘neoliberalism’ has helpfully illuminated connections between seemingly unrelated social changes occurring at multiple scales. Foucault began his engagement with neoliberalism 35 years ago in his College de France lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, significantly prior to the emergence of neoliberalism as a dominant political force. Despite this, Foucault’s grasp of neoliberal rationalities remains fresh and insightful, which perhaps explains why scholars inspired by his analytics of governmentality have been able to make major contributions to the current literature on neoliberalism. However, there are increasing concerns that governmentality scholars succumb to a more general tendency among social scientists to present neoliberal transformations in monolithic and linear terms. A small but growing group of researchers is combining governmentality with ethnographic and quasi-ethnographic methods in order to investigate the changes wrought by neoliberalism while avoiding deterministic, homogenous and static accounts of social transformation. By beginning with the everyday these works reject the idea that neoliberal governmentality forms a coherent apparatus and instead focus on governmental ensembleges or assemblages within which neoliberal political rationalities link up with non-liberal rationalities for governance, and neoliberal thought and practice changes across time and space.

Research has established that families in developed countries commonly combine multiple sources of childcare. Yet, families’ packages of childcare and their effect on maternal labor force participation are underresearched, and the few existing empirical studies are primarily descriptive or use cross-sectional data. We add to the existing literature by theorizing and testing the relationships between family type, childcare arrangements, and mothers’ work hours using Australian panel data and panel regression models. We find that employed mothers of young children who use a mixed childcare package complete more hours of paid work than do employed mothers of young children who use other childcare packages, but the reasons for this association are different among single and partnered mothers. For single mothers the most important characteristic of mixed childcare packages appears to be their flexibility, whereas for partnered mothers mixed childcare increases employment hours by maximizing the hours of childcare available to them. Free access at: http://goo.gl/4HV2gc

"In this article I argue that the spaces of freedom and constraint that personalized planning programs targeted at Australian single parents open up and close down are distinctly different when viewed from a top-down perspective of governmental rationalities as compared to a bottom-up perspective, or what Foucault referred to as the ‘witches’ brew' of actual practices. Around 90% of single parents with dependent children in Australia are single mothers, and around 80% of these single mothers receive single rate Parenting Payment. Changes to this payment (and its precursor, Sole Parent Pension) over the last 25 years have recognized this gendered composition by focusing on issues of mothering and the intensive activities of care that continue to be carried out most commonly by mothers. While the existing literature argues that the 2005 Welfare to Work package sharply broke with this practice by not focusing on gender and the unique features of mothers' life courses, I find that these considerations have remained a key part of the ‘witches’ brew' of actual practices. Given this finding, a key argument is that studies of governmentalities which combine sociologies of actual practices together with studies of official governmental rationalities can make important critical contributions to understanding the heterogeneous logics and practices through which welfare reform policies occur.
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"Within Australian social policy debates Catherine Hakim’s preference theory and closely rated theories about maternal identities have become prominent frameworks
for understanding mothers’ decisions around paid work. These theories suggest that women have relatively static preferences regarding their labour force participation that
are manifestations of their pre-existing identities as ‘mothers’ or ‘workers’ and that these will affect their labour force decisions much more profoundly than cultural, social
or economic conditions. Drawing on ethnographic research with single mothers, this article argues that preference theory is an inadequate framework for understanding how they make choices around paid work. It suggests that a mothering practices
framework has much more explanatory power. The mothering practices framework, which emphasizes that mothering is something that is practiced rather than something that one is, fits closely with single mothers’ narratives about their labour force decisions and plans. In contrast to identity theories, it illuminates the day to day material tradeoffs involved in participation in education and paid work, as well as the reality that single mothers have differential access to family support and quality childcare.
"

Michelle Brady’s “Absences and Silences in the Production of Work-Life Balance Policies in Canada” focuses on developments in Work-Life Balance policy in Canada since the 1990s by engaging with the discursive shift in federal documents away from concerns about work-family conflict. The author argues that this shift further obfuscates the legacy of patriarchy in the division of paid and unpaid work, and the corresponding organization of industrial relations. Brady contends that Work-Life policy in Canada ascribes responsibility for overcoming imbalance to individuals, especially women, at the cost of reinforcing systemic factors that underpin persistent gender inequalities. The system presumes that individuals can and should achieve balance on their own, but without any public effort to remedy systemic barriers that constrain diverse groups of women more than men.

Homelessness programs may improve the health, well‑being, financial security, labour market and housing outcomes of clients. This, in turn, may result in decreased utilisation of health and justice services, reduced child residential care costs, lower housing management costs, lower income support payments and higher revenue from increased income tax payments. When costed, such impacts represent whole‑of‑government savings or cost offsets to the provision of homelessness programs. This paper provides indicative estimates of the value of potential savings or cost offsets in two areas, namely, the health and justice fields from homelessness program interventions. Our key finding is that homelessness programs have the potential to save over twice the value of the capital and recurrent funding of homelessness programs on the basis of health and justice cost offsets alone.

Abstract

In the period since the 2005 Welfare to Work reforms, some single parents have been required to take part in intensive employment programs through the Job Network (now Job Services Australia). This paper presents findings from a two-phase interview study with providers of employment services, exploring their experiences serving single mothers. We conducted the research in Perth because its economy creates special challenges for finding flexible employment for women. Our first interviews took place in 2007 when single parents were just starting to interact with the Job Network in small numbers. We found most employment services had not developed specific approaches to serving mothers, but suggested parents would benefit from the same services as mainstream unemployed, and that “individualized service” would effectively address the systematically different needs of mothers. In the second stage of our study in 2013, the number of parents using employment services has grown significantly, and we outline how the de-gendered and individualized model has had to confront issues of caring and gendered responsibilities in this larger cohort. We suggest that individualized service needs to be systematically informed by the structural needs of single parents to reconcile tensions between work and caring obligations.

The Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme was augmented by the introduction of Dad and Partner Pay (DAPP) from
1 January 2013. Eligible fathers and partners can receive two weeks’ pay at the rate of the National Minimum Wage, when they take unpaid leave or are not working for pay, to spend time with their newborn or recently adopted child.
The objective of DAPP is to provide financial support to fathers and partners caring for newborn or
newly adopted child ren, in order to:
1. Increase the time that fathers and partners take off work around the time of birth or adoption;
2. Create further opportunities for fathers and partners to bond with the child; and
3.Allow fathers and partners to take a greater share of caring responsibilities and to support mothers and partners from the beginning

Bill Martin, Marian Baird, Michelle Brady,
Barbara Broadway, Belinda Hewitt, Guyonne Kalb,
Lyndall Strazdins, Wojtek Tomaszewski, Maria Zadoroznyj, Janeen Baxter, Rachael Chen, Meraiah Foley, Duncan McVicar, Gillian Whitehouse, Ning Xiang

Neoliberalism is among the most commonly used concepts in the social sciences. Furthermore, it is one of the most influential factors that have shaped the formation of public policy and politics.

In Governing Practices, Michelle Brady and Randy Lippert bring together prominent scholars in sociology, criminology, anthropology, geography, and policy studies to extend and refine the current conversation about neoliberalism. The collection argues that a new methodological approach to analyzing contemporary policy and political change is needed. United by the common influence of Foucault’s governmentality approach and an ethnographic imaginary, the collection presents original research on a diverse range of case studies including public-private partnerships, the governance of condos, community and state statistics, nanopolitics, philanthropy, education reform, and pay-day lending. These diverse studies add considerable depth to studies on governmentality and neoliberalism through a focus on governmental practices that have not previously been the focus of sustained analysis.

Activation reforms targeted at single parents simultaneously construct them as a legitimate target for activation policy and subjects them to new obligations to engage in paid work or education/training. The social policy literature has established that the work of 'making-up' target groups occurs at the street level as well as in government legislation. The street level has become even more significant in recent years as there has been a shift towards establishing quasi-markets for the delivery of welfare-to-work programs and organizing these around the principles of performance pay and process flexibility. However, what is largely missing from the existing literature is analysis of how contract conditions together with individual's activation obligations shape how they are targeted at the street level. Drawing on an eight year study with agencies in Australia's quasi-market for employment services this paper argues that the changes to the contracts for governing this market changed how Australian single mothers were targeted by employment services. Over time there was a shift over time away from making-up single parent clients as a distinct, vulnerable target group and a shift towards viewing them in terms of risk categories described within the agencies' contracts.

ABSTRACT Individualized, maternalist and marketized discourses of childcare are pervasive in Australia as they are in other liberal welfare states. Responsibility is overwhelmingly placed on mothers to carry out most childcare work themselves or to arrange informal or paid childcare. One of the key tasks for most employed mothers is transporting children alongside their commuting journeys. In this context we used mapping/graphic elicitation interviews with 45 Australian employed mothers to explore their commuting experiences through the lens of emotional geographies. Our findings reveal that mothers’ experiences of their commutes were shaped by negotiations with intensive mothering and ‘ideal worker’ ideologies during this journey resulting in emotions of guilt, shame and stress. The spatial and temporal organization of childcare, and incompatibilities between their commuting transport needs and the organization of public transport and parking, tended to amplify these tensions. Through an emotional geographies lens we complicate linear understandings of commuting and mainstream transport and planning work, while calling for more attention to the affective and relational dimensions of mothers’ everyday geographies of care and paid work.

Governments are increasingly implementing policies that encourage early father-infant bonding. However, to date, research has not systematically examined fathers’ perspectives and experiences of early bonding. Using a social constructionist embodiment perspective we argue that paternal bonding is best conceived as a process of repeated, embodied performances that are shaped by gendered parenting discourses. Drawing on 100 semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of Australian fathers of young infants, we argue that most men believe they are capable of developing early strong bonds. They assume that bonding is a product of spending sufficient time with a child, irrespective of the parent's gender. In contrast, a sizable minority of fathers assert that physiology means fathers are ‘largely useless’ to very young infants, and tend to remain distant in the early months. We conclude that social policies promoting early paternal bonding must engage with and challenge gendered/p...

This article is aimed at Foucauldian scholars and seeks to introduce them to ethnographic works that interrogate neoliberal governmentalities. As an analytic category ‘neoliberalism’ has over the last two decades helpfully illuminated connections between seemingly unrelated social changes occurring at multiple scales. Even earlier —in his College de France 1978-9 Birth of Biopolitics lectures, to be precise—Foucault began his engagement with neoliberalism as a dominant political force. Despite being more than three decades old, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal rationalities remains fresh and insightful, which perhaps explains why scholars inspired by his analytics of governmentality have been able to make major contributions to the current social science literature on neoliberalism. However, there are increasing concerns that governmentality scholars succumb to a more general tendency among social scientists to present neoliberal transformations in monolithic and linear terms. This...