Introduction: A care crisis in the Nordic welfare states?

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the care crisis in the Nordic welfare states. The Nordic welfare model represents a ‘passion for equality’ that has been institutionalised as a political commitment to public-funded care services and to universalism. The chapter explains that this universalism has enabled women to reconcile being mothers, daughters, workers, and citizens, and increased the status of care work through care ‘going public’ and a state-supported — or state-engineered — professionalisation of care work. However, the Nordic welfare state model and the Nordic labour market model are exposed to major challenges following the turn to neoliberal politics and the financial crisis. This has put pressure on care in various ways with the increasing focus upon individual responsibilities to self-care, welfare state retrenchment, and/or austerity policies, and the focus upon quality through ‘documenting care’. The chapter then defines the key concepts of this book: care, neoliberalism, care crisis, and gender equality.