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Mihaela Robila (ed.) (2014), Handbook of Family Policies across the Globe , New York, NY : Springer . £180.00, pp. 488, hbk.
Writing about family policy, especially in a comparative context, is an ambitious undertaking for two main reasons. Firstly, defining what or who counts as family and what family means can be difficult and different within and across countries. Secondly, defining and identifying family policy/policies is possibly even more challenging. Within the comparative literature, the most basic distinction is between explicit and implicit family policies (see Kamerman and Kahn, 1978; Gauthier, 1998, among others). Explicit family policies are those targeted directly at families, while implicit family policies are those that are not directly aimed at families but affect families nevertheless, e.g. education or housing. This distinction has been criticized by Wasoff and Dey (2000), who argue that implicit family policies encompass almost all policies, which somewhat defeats the point of an analytical category. The authors present three alternative approaches to analyzing family policy: firstly, to focus on its aims, whether those are to distribute resources, regulate behaviour or to create/modify procedures and structures; secondly, to focus on the origin of family policies, whether they are the outcome of rational or incremental choices, the reflection of cultural or elite preference, of institutional structures and processes or the competition between groups; thirdly, by locating them within the main analytical categories of traditional social policy analysis, namely needs, problems and rights of families. In contrast, Millar and Haux (2012) propose that family policy can be...