Investing, Facilitating, or Individualizing the Reconciliation of Work and Family Life: Three Paradigms and Ambivalent Policies

After decades of promoting work–family reconciliation with the aim of advancing gender equality, European Union (EU) discourses around work and family have been reframed. This article distinguishes three currently paramount discourses: The social investment approach, the transitional labor market model, and the individual life-course model. Respectively, they propose investing in, facilitating, and individualizing the new social risks, including the resolution of tensions in the relationship between work and family life. Each has particular assumptions about risk-sharing, public and private responsibility, and the position of the individual vis-à-vis the state and the community. These paradigms have been analyzed in relation to EU policies on the reconciliation of work and family life. We find some traces of these paradigms in the Lisbon agreements, its amendments, and in the National Action Plans that are regularly submitted by the member-states. We conclude that the gender-equality agenda has been subordinated to the focus on creating competitive knowledge-based economies in the EU. Social investment is the most prominent of the three paradigms in this new agenda, yet because it is mixed up with elements from the other paradigms, current policy agendas lack coherence.