"This engaging collection gathers theoretical and empirical insights from leading family policy experts. The authors - representing diverse countries, disciplines, and methods - bring to life the volume's innovative conceptual framework, which is organized around policy institutions, both public and private. The volume closes with a call for new lines of research that should inform family policy scholars for years to come."--Janet Gornick, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA "Featuring exciting contributors from a range of often-siloed scholarly disciplines, countries and cultures, this Handbook offers nuanced insights into how interacting societal inequality factors influence family policy enactment to reinforce or improve inequality outcomes across gender, class, and nations. It is ambitious, broad-reaching, and succeeds in providing a strategic view within and across nations to inspire thoughtful evidence-based policy implications to improve societies in the future."--Ellen Ernst Kossek, Basil S. Turner Professor of Management, Purdue University, USA This open access handbook provides a multilevel view on family policies, combining insights on family policy outcomes at different levels of policymaking: supra-national organizations, national states, sub-national or regional levels, and finally smaller organizations and employers. At each of these levels, a multidisciplinary group of expert scholars assess policies and their implementation, such as child income support, childcare services, parental leave, and leave to provide care to frail and elderly family members. The chapters evaluate their impact in improving children's development and equal opportunities, promoting gender equality, regulating fertility, productivity and economic inequality, and take an intersectional perspective related to gender, class, and family diversity. The editors conclude by presenting a new research agenda based on five major challenges pertaining to the levels of policy implementation (in particular globalization and decentralization), austerity and marketization, inequality, changing family relations, and welfare states adapting to women's empowered roles

This handbook provides a meaningful overview of topical themes within family sociology as an academic field as well as empirical realities in various societal contexts across Europe. More than sixty prominent European scholars’ original texts present the field’s main theoretical and methodological approaches in addition to issues such as families as relationships, parental arrangements, parenting practices and child well-being, family policies in welfare state regimes, family lives in migration, and family trajectories. Presenting cutting-edge research on findings, theoretical interpretations, and solutions to methodological challenges, it is a timely tool for researchers, teachers, students, and family practitioners who wish to familiarise themselves with the state of family sociology in Europe.

Family policy holds a particular status in the quest for a more equitable world as it intersects the rights of women, children, and workers. But despite local and global efforts and initiatives, the state of family policy in different areas of the world varies widely. Through a cross-section of countries on six continents, Family Policies Across the Globe offers the current state of the laws concerning family life, structure, and services, providing historical, cultural, and socioeconomic context. Lucidly written chapters analyze key aspects of family definition, marriage, child well-being, work/family balance, and family assistance, reviewing underlying social issues and controversies as they exist in each country. Details of challenges to implementation and methods of evaluating policy outcomes bring practical realities into sharp focus, and each chapter concludes with recommendations for improvement at the research, service, and governmental levels. The result is an important comparative look at how governments support families, and how societies perceive themselves as they evolve. Among the issues covered: Sierra Leone: toward sustainable family policies. Russia: folkways versus state-ways. Japan: policy responses to a declining population. Australia: reform, revolutions, and lingering effects. Canada: a patchwork policy. Colombia: a focus on policies for vulnerable families. Researchers , professors and graduate students in the fields of social policy, child and family studies, psychology, sociology, and social work will find in Family Policies Across the Globe a reference that will grow in importance as world events continue to develop.

Family Firms (FFs) form the majority of all firms around the world and they account for an enormous percentage of the employment, the revenue, and the GDP of most capitalist countries. While MNCs have long been thought of as the main contributors to international business, it is now recognised that a substantial number of family firms are active in the international arena. This handbook focuses on the features which make family firm internationalization unique. Chapters provide FF specific theories and cover the process of FF internationalization. It examines the role of network ties and provides an insight into the development of family firms that have grown into big multinationals. Importantly this Handbook equips you with a better understanding of specific features of family firms as they internationalize from or to Asian or emerging markets. Family firms offer a fruitful context to study internationalization through a process perspective, therefore this Handbook is an invaluable source of knowledge for students, scholars and policy makers in the areas of family business, entrepreneurship and internationalization.

This handbook brings together the international research focussing on prisoners’ families and the impact of imprisonment on them. Under-researched and under-theorised in the realm of scholarship on imprisonment, this handbook encompasses a broad range of original, interdisciplinary and cross-national research. This volume includes the experiences of those from countries often unrepresented in the prisoner’s families’ literature such as Russia, Australia, Israel and Canada. This broad coverage allows readers to consider how prisoners’ families are affected by imprisonment in countries embracing very different penal philosophies; ranging from the hyper-incarceration being experienced in the USA to the less punitive, more welfare-orientated practices under Scandinavian ‘exceptionalism’. Chapters are contributed by scholars from numerous and diverse disciplines ranging from law, nursing, criminology, psychology, human geography, and education studies. Furthermore, contributions span various methodological and epistemological approaches with important contributions from NGOs working in this area at a national and supranational level. The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family makes a significant contribution to knowledge about who prisoners’ families are and what this status means in practice. It also recognises the autonomy and value of prisoners’ families as a research subject in their own right.

A landmark publication in the field, this state of the art reference work, with contributions from leading thinkers across a range of disciplines, is an essential guide to the study of children and childhood, and sets out future research agendas for the subject.

This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: ‘“what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?” The chapters—diverse in content, form and perspective—establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.