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The purpose of this paper is to examine the changes in local childcare policy that have taken place between the years 2008 and 2016 in the city of Jyväskylä, Finland, and to study how the local gender contract for women is being reshaped via these transformations in local policy.

Case study was applied as a research strategy. Local and national level statistics were used to explore the use of childcare services. Documents regarding the decision-making and administration of childcare in the city were analysed to distinguish the local policy changes during the time period. These documents include city budgets and records from the two municipal boards that have held the administrative responsibility of local childcare policy. The analysis of the data was conducted by using document analysis and feminist content analysis as a methodological framework.

The results show that the overall development in local childcare policy has been towards cutbacks in childcare services and benefits, and towards the marketisation of childcare services. The city has also implemented new, locally specific childcare policies, which constitute a hybrid form of marketisation and neofamilism. Together these developments are creating a new local gender contract, which goes beyond the past previous traditional or modern models. This new local gender contract for women is defined as that of “entrepreneurial homemaker”.

This paper contributes to the research on local social policy by identifying the role of local childcare policy in reshaping the gender contract in a Nordic context. This paper advances the theorisation of the concept of gender contract by introducing the “entrepreneurial homemaker” model of gender contract.

The purpose of this paper is to increase one's understanding of psychological contracts by proposing and testing relationships between employees' personalities and their psychological contracts and to consider the influence of gender on psychological contracts.

Data were collected from 163 employees in ten organizations. Regression analysis was used to explore the relationships between each of nine psychological contract dimensions plus gender and the Big Five personality dimensions.

It was found that personality is related to five of the nine psychological contract dimensions and that each personality dimension is related to one or more of the psychological contract dimensions. It was also found that gender had a significant impact on our results. Women held stronger obligation attitudes than did men. The personality of men related to varying obligation attitudes, whereas, women's attitudes did not vary significantly within personality dimensions. The study suggests that employees' psychological contracts may be more emotionally based than cognitively based.

The self selection of participants limits the generalizability of the results. The data is cross‐sectional precluding inference of causality. The paper assumed a linear career model for participants and did not consider alternate models

Personality would appear to be an important factor in our understanding of psychological contracts, particularly in men. Personality provides a basis for psychological contracts being idiosyncratic. The interaction of personality and gender complicates the psychological contract management process.

Despite 17 years of research, the factors underlying employees' idiosyncratic psychological contracts remain to be adequately explored through empirical research. This is the first study that connects employees' personality to their beliefs about employee and organizational obligations. Gender appears to play a role in the development of psychological contracts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore: How do changes in the role of the husband affect the marriage of a woman entrepreneur? How do changes in the marriage affect the woman entrepreneur and her relationship with her business?

A novel theoretical approach based on marriage contract theory, gender role ideology and psychological contracts was used. Qualitative methodology included analysis of multiple cases based on rich interview data gathered from 12 Scandinavian couples.

Research revealed that the pattern of dominance between the husband and wife, the gender role ideologies of the two spouses, and the interaction between this pattern and the gender role ideologies, and overall level of marital harmony were key determinants of husbands’ spousal support.

Sample size and geographical limitations. Future research: exploring other cultural settings, further application of marriage and psychological contracts in female entrepreneurship; studies of the impact areas of the husband in the wife’s business – also from the perspective of implicit contracts.

Research sheds light on how women run their businesses and how the changing roles of the spouse alter marriage dynamics and influence the wife-business relationship.

Findings benefit female entrepreneurs considering the launch of a business, couples in which the wife currently owns a business, state and governmental policymakers, business consultants, and entrepreneurship instructors. These findings can help couples better prepare for the demands of entrepreneurship.

For scholars: expanded understanding of the work-family interface of female entrepreneurs via novel theoretical approach. For business practitioners: understanding the impact of a spouse on life and career of female entrepreneur.

The focus in this chapter is on male strategies of coping with unemployment and how these strategies are gendered due to local contextual factors, physical and natural as well as social and cultural. The results of the study show, in the case of men's relations to the labour market and the factors affecting such relations, how the Swedish welfare model and gender contracts work in a rural setting. The interrelation among labour market, household and family is formed according to the local gender contract and is supposed to develop within the frames of national policies, but it is also formed according to hegemonic gender regimes.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span.

Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women's transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements.

The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men.

The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors' propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).

The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss to what extent and why women's entrepreneurship contributes to rural economic viability and gender equality in an advanced welfare state.

The authors use detailed register data to explore men's and women's rural businesses in the most common industries for rural women entrepreneurs in the Swedish welfare state. Based on a literature review, the authors develop hypotheses and analyse how family, business and industry factors influence earnings.

Women's rural entrepreneurship is important for rural viability, as women's businesses provide a wide range of services necessary for life in rural areas. Although women's rural businesses are not significantly smaller than those of men, women's income is lower and more sensitive to business and industry variables. Marriage has positive effects for the earnings of men but negative effects for the earnings of women. The authors argue that the results are contingent on the gendering of entrepreneurship and industries, as well as on the local rural gender contracts. For these reasons, the importance of women entrepreneurs for rural viability is not reflected in their own incomes. Hence, women's rural entrepreneurship does not result in (economic) gender equality.

Entrepreneurship scholars rarely explore women's rural entrepreneurship, and particularly not in the Global North or Western welfare states. Therefore, this empirical study from Sweden provides novel information on how the gender order on the business, industry and family levels influences the income of men and women entrepreneurs differently.

This volume looks at the construction of gendered citizenship in different rural contexts: under different welfare and gender regimes, and different rural and agricultural conditions. Through applying the concepts of the welfare state and gender regimes within rural research, this book contributes to the further development of a comparative theoretical framework for rural gender studies. The importance of integrating rural gender studies into both the mainstreams of rural and feminist research has been emphasized in previous volumes, as has that of developing comparative analytical frameworks (Whatmore, Marsden, & Lowe, 1994, p. 2; Brandth, 2002; Shortall, 2006). The conceptual framework adopted in this volume sets out to meet this challenge by approaching rural gender relations as the meeting point of two core research areas: feminist research into gender regime studies and research on rural transformative processes. Research into gender regimes offers a promising analytical framework for comparing gender relations in diverse rural settings. By formulating gender relations in terms of citizenship rights, this approach elevates the concerns of rural gender relations to broader discourses located at the nation state level (Werbner & Yuval-Davis, 1999; Asztalos Morell, 1999a). The evolution of citizenship rights at the nation state level has created hegemonic frameworks that are able to influence and transform rural gender relations. At the same time, by addressing rural concerns, deriving from the specificity of rural transition processes and gender regimes, the approach also contributes to an elucidation of the complexity of citizenship. In accordance to current debates emphasizing the embedded nature of gender relations with other social forces of differentiation, such as age, class and ethnicity (Walby, 1997; Hobson & Lister, 2002) we aimed to elucidate how gendered citizenship is constituted in the rural context.

This paper aims to assess the design of national-level flexible work arrangement (FWA) policies, evaluating their potential to serve as an effective resource for employees to work flexibly depending on how they set the stage for flexibility claims that will be subject to industrial and workplace dynamics.

Using a capability approach, the authors conceptualize and operationalize two aspects of FWA policy design, namely accessibility and availability. The authors' analysis allows for an understanding of how the availability and accessibility of national FWA policies explicitly and implicitly restrict or facilitate flexible working in a structural manner. The study focuses on countries with differing working time regimes and gender norms on work and care: the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia.

The authors' findings highlight how FWA accessibility is broader when national policy is specified and FWA availability is not conditional to care. In Spain and Slovenia, access to FWAs depends on whether employees have care responsibilities, which reduces accessibility and reinforces gender imbalances in care provision. In contrast, the Netherlands provides FWAs universally, resulting in wider availability and accessibility of FWAs for employees regardless of their care responsibilities. Despite this universal provision, gender imbalances remain.

The originality of this paper lies in its conceptualization and operationalization of FWAs at the national level using a capability approach. The study adds to the existing literature on flexible working and provides insights for policymakers to design more effective FWAs.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the background and consequences of the Spanish job market on the employment conditions of Spanish women and on underlying attitudes on gender role in the working environment.

From the European Social Survey (2004, 2008, 2010, 2016), the authors draw a sample of 3,706 individuals aged from 25 to 64 years old living in Spain. The sample allows the authors to make estimations from several aggregation levels depending on gender (men and women) and generational cohort (baby boom and X generation).

Education improves the perception of women’s work among both men and women. The role of education is especially interesting for older people. Educational levels help women adapt to a changing context, promote female participation in the job market and protect them from unemployment situations. This study demonstrates that both gender and generational cohort moderate the impact of education on gender labour attitudes and working status.

Finally, this work is not exempt from limitations. For example, the use of cross sections does not allow the authors to obtain a richer set of causal relationships than the use of panel data would allow them. In addition, it would be interesting to replicate the study of gender labour attitudes among human resource managers and workers to have a broader view of what happens within companies.

The main contribution to the state of the art is to demonstrate that both gender and generational cohort moderate the impact of education on gender labour attitudes and working status. In addition, this study analyses whether gender labour attitudes change throughout the economic cycles, because population characteristics change (endowment effect) and/or because the same characteristics have different impacts (coefficient effect).

The chapter is an auto-ethnographic account of the self-management of a chronic illness within the context of a participatory research project on Mediterranean Diet (MD). A group of Italian women with type 2 diabetes is following a non-medical, personal interpretation of the Mediterranean-style diet. The research account is preceded by a critical appraisal of the scientific narratives of the MD.

Analysis of epidemiological research on MD examines some methodological aspects of gender blindness in its scientific approach. The ethnography concerns self-management of MD diet and redefinition of gender relations.

MD is analyzed as a case of transplantation of yesterday’s cultural and social capitals of the peasant classes, to today’s discourses on food considered as appropriate for affluent people suffering from satiety diseases. The ethnography highlights gender aspects of biographical work, examining in particular a “conversion” dietary model.

The ethnography must be amplified to include women and men from different social classes with various Mediterranean cooking habits, and family and gender patterns.

The chapter highlights cultural processes for women’s empowerment in self-managing type 2 diabetes.

This chapter may represent a seminal sociological work on chronic illness, gender and food studies in one of the “native” contexts of the Mediterranean-style diet.