This book focusses on how historical dynamics and specific actors have shaped the diverse outlook and everyday practice of welfare in and across Europe. Based on the concept that narratives about welfare in Europe are intricately interconnected with various practices of "caring" for oneself and others, the authors take a praxeological approach to analyze specific care activities, the relevant players, and underlying narratives about welfare in Europe in the fields of housing, family provision, social insurance, child care, handling disability, dealing with poverty, and the transition of socialist welfare to the post 1989 world. Welfare is conceptualized as a field of changing relations of co-operation and competition between interest groups (such as labor unions, employers' groups, and churches), public government players, and other societal actors (such as social reformers, occupational groups, or NGOs). The volume contributes to the construction of a European multidimensional welfare geography that transcends state institutions and is defined by locally, regionally, nationally, transnationally negotiated and interconnected practices and traditions of caring and providing for others.

Autorentext

Heike Wieters has been Junior Professor of Historical European Studies at the Institute of History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2019. She completed her doctorate at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder with a thesis on the rise of international humanitarian NGOs in the 20th century. Her current research focuses on the contemporary history of European integration, the history of nutrition, global welfare (state) research, and the transnational history of relationships and interactions between state and private actors.

Nikola Tietze is WiKu Fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch and Associated Researcher at the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire pour la sociologie économique (Lise) (Cnam, Paris) since 2017. After having studied political science in Berlin and Paris, she completed her doctorate in sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and the Philipps-Universität Marburg in 2000 and her habilitation at the Universität Hamburg in 2012. She worked from 2000 to 2015 at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS, Hamburg). Her current research interests concern the migrant workers' capabilities to act upon social inequalities and systemic discrimination, on the one hand, and the process of Europeanization through pos-sovereign territoriality, on the other.