Children, Gender and Families in Mediterranean Welfare States

countries in this region have been particularly limited (for an exception to this, see Petmesidou & Papatheodorou, 2006). The underlying assumption in this volume is that despite the diversity of welfare states bordering the Mediterranean Sea, some interesting commonalities are shared by these nations. Indeed, in his contribution to this volume Gal has described these nations as belonging to an extended family of welfare states that share some common characteristics and outcomes, one of which is the role of the family. By bringing together case analyses of the welfare states in the Mediterranean which focus on children, gender, and families, we maintain that it is possible to shed light on aspects of social policy that do not necessarily emerge in most discussions of these issues in the literature. The rationale inherent in a volume that focuses on a group of welfare states is of course embedded in the welfare regime typology notion that has dominated much of the comparative social policy literature over the last two decades. The publication of Esping Andersen’s seminal work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990 (and his related 1999 book), which distinguished between three welfare regimes, became a landmark for comparative work of social policies in various countries. Esping-Andersen regarded his typology as a useful tool for comparison between welfare states because it allowed “for greater analytical parsimony and help[s] us to see the forest rather than myriad trees” (1999, p. 73).

* John Gal is professor of social policy at the Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of interest include social policy in Israel and in a comparative perspective, and the link between war and welfare. Recent books include a study on income maintenance in Israel, a study of the history of unemployment policy in Israel and Professional Ideologies and Preferences in Social Work: A Global Study with Idit Weiss and John Dixon. His e-mail address is: msjgsw@mscc.huji.ac.il.* Mimi Ajzenstadt is a professor at the Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare and at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests lie in the areas of sociology of law, qualitative research methods and in the areas of social policy and the welfare state. She has examined the establishment and operation of social policy towards women in the Israeli welfare state, and has analyzed the history of the social construction of attitudes towards juvenile delinquency in the Jewish community in pre-State Palestine and in the State of Israel. Her articles were published in journals such as: British Journal of Criminology, Social Problems, Social Policy , Symbolic Interaction, Qualitative Sociology and Theoretical Criminology.