Publications

The new precariousness of the welfare state and the growing influence of the market, are challenging children’s life worlds, their everyday lives in families, schools, kindergartens and leisure areas. Demographic changes are leaving children vulnerable in the competition for public resources, access to space and use of time. Children
are marginal at the big stage of political and economic actors. They do not have strong interest groups to defend their rights to resources. But societies can not do without children’s contributions to society. Broad social changes call for deeper analyses as to the cultural blindness to children’s input to the societal fabric, and
their consequences for children. These country studies explore children’s welfare from available sources across European countries.

This book explores the role of the family household in the production of well-being through labour – both remunerated and non-remunerated – as well as through the use of public institutions. The family mediates the relationship between individuals and the economy and its organization is a key means by which people experience material well-being (Horrell, Meredith and Oxley 2009: 94). Thus the book also considers the ‘distribution’ of well-being among members of the family household. It explores these themes within a European context, with essays focusing on both historical and contemporary situations. Another key focus is on

the role of gender in the production of well-being within the family. Feminist scholars have long pointed out the relevance of the unpaid work that goes on within the household to sustain processes of social reproduction. Care work and domestic labour remain unremunerated and unequally distributed by gender, so that women undertake the majority of this work. Some scholars have sought to identify, measure and value this labour and to see it as a significant contribution to well-being that is different from, but no less valuable than, market production (for example, Picchio 1992). Nevertheless, conventional approaches still tend to neglect the contribution of unpaid work to well-being and to interpret the family

as a homogeneous and systemic unit – a haven of benevolence and altruism that stands in sharp contrast to the competition and selfishness of the wider economy. Such perspectives ignore or obscure conflicts and inequalities in the distribution of resources between family members or within households.

By exploring the fundamental issues of property rights and markets in land, this book will offer important insights into long-term economic change in Europe. The essays gathered here provide a major consideration of the institutional constraints which can be employed by historians and other commentators in order to explain both the slowness or even absence of growth in certain areas of the European economy between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the discrete experiences of countries within Europe in this broad period.