Our project examines childcare policies as well as the public and expert discourses around it. It
emphasizes the importance of decisions that are made in certain periods, which set different
countries on difference trajectories. It also investigates the influence of these discourses on these
decisions as well as the influence of these decisions on later discourses by comparing three
countries: the Czech Republic, Sweden and France. It uses both an institutionalist analysis of path
dependency (focusing on the key decisions about the childcare) and a critical discourse analysis
(focusing on the interplay between institutional arrangements and the public discourse). The
findings will help to understand the socially constructed character of discourses on what constitute
the "proper" form of childcare, as well as the influence of the historical-institutional development
on the current forms of childcare policies and the manner in which discourses and institutional
practices are interlinked.

Publications