Book Review: Women, Welfare and Productivism in East Asia and Europe by Ruby CM Chau and Sam WK Yu (eds)
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13882627231158522 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Ruby CM Chau and Sam WK Yu (eds), Women, Welfare and Productivism in East Asia and Europe,
Bristol University Press: 2022; 256 pp.: ISBN 978-1447357711.
Reviewed by: Youngcho Lee ,London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
DOI: 10.1177/13882627231158522
Ruby CM Chau and Sam WK Yu’s co-authored book, ‘Women, Welfare and Productivism in East
Asia and Europe’, contains original conceptual thinking and multiple comparative empirical studies
of policies relating to care and work in a variety of East Asian and European countries (France,
Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, South Korea, Sweden and the UK). Based on a critique of the
productivist welfare policy discourse as subordinating informal care to formal employment, the
authors argue for an expanded understanding of productivism, to include both pro-work and
pro-care visions. Ultimately, Chau and Yu envision a model of welfare policy in which work
and care are valued equally and where people’s autonomy to freely organise and move between
different combinations of work and care over their life course is actively protected and supported
by the state. Chau and Yu theorise and empirically apply their ‘life-mix framework’to a range of
policy case studies while also considering the uniqueness of East Asian welfare regimes across a
total of ten chapters.
I very much appreciate and share the authors’recognition of reproductive activities as essential
to production, as well as the understanding that people’s preferences for combining work and care
are not only heterogenous but may also shift over time. The authors’conceptual separation of the
supported adult carer and the supported adult worker models helped to make explicit the work-bias
present in key policies examined, such as childcare leave measures and ECEC (chapter 4), pension
measures (chapter 5) and active labour market policies and alternatives (chapter 6). The choice of
countries as well as policy areas of focus offered a diverse and broad view, utilising rich and
up-to-date comparative data from selected East Asian and European countries. Based on their cross-
country analysis, the authors argue that East Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore
and South Korea lack both the external heterogeneity and internal homogeneity needed to be clas-
sified as a distinct type of welfare state. Instead, they propose that it is more useful to focus on how
the supported adult carer model and the supported adult worker models are coordinated across East
Asia and Europe respectively in specific policy domains. For instance, based on an assessment of
paid childcare leave and ECEC provisions, the authors suggest that Germany, South Korea, and
Sweden could be grouped together for their relatively generous and strong coordination between
policy measures impacting the two supported models.
Although such elements of Chau and Yu’s argument and analysis have originality and merit,
I have reservations about the authors’decision to advocate for individual ‘autonomy’and ‘prefer-
ences’over gender equality. The authors’position on gender equality is perhaps best represented by
their following sentence: ‘We do not reject the idea of eliminating the division of labour between
men and women but disagree that this is the ultimate goal of the welfare policies concerned.’(p. 32)
In other words, Chau and Yu advocate the removal of the current hierarchy between work and care
so that individuals are enabled to freely choose and move between the two, even if people’s patterns
of work and care may continue to be gendered. While the authors acknowledge the relative strength
of Nancy Fraser’s universal caregiver model (1994) for addressing gender inequality, they under-
stand Fraser’s proposition –that we should make women’s life patterns the norm for everyone by
102 European Journal of Social Security 25(1)
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