Wim Van Lancker

Assistant Professor (tenure track) in Social Work and Social Policy, affiliated with the Centre for Sociological Research (CESO).

Postdoctoral Fellowship affiliated with the Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy.

Visiting Fellowship based at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE).

Teaching undergrad course 'Samenleving, feiten en problemen', introducing actual topics relating to the Belgian and European welfare states, and a Master course 'State-of-the-art: Labour' in which actual labour market issues and trends are discussed from a socio-economic point of view.

The historical objective of welfare states is to protect the population against “social risks”: sickness, unemployment, disability et cetera. However, society has changed and “new” social risks (NSR) emerged, such as the inability to reconcile paid work and care work in the household, becoming a single parent or being low skilled. Welfare states adapted to these new risks and subsequently developed new social policies. This research project contributes to the ongoing sociological debate about the changed nature of social risks and aims to assess the distributional effects of social policies covering NSRs, with the work-family conflict as a case in point. Since inequality is on the rise again, the overarching research question concerns the role of NSR policies in the redistributive capacity of welfare states. Based on the dominant theories of welfare state redistribution, several hypotheses are tested for three welfare states (Belgium/Flanders, Sweden and The Netherlands) in a European comparative perspective. The results are expected to shed light on coverage of NSRs in different institutional settings (do they promote more equality or do they work in the opposite direction?) and to fuel the theoretical debate on the mechanisms underlying welfare state redistribution.

At the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), the main aim of the visit was the collection (and investigation) of appropriate data on the use of childcare services and parental leave by different social groups in the Swedish society, and on the government expenditures regarding those policies (including information on fiscal policy and tax deductions).

Research about family-work combination and unemployment of low-skilled women in the Belgian welfare state.

I worked on temporary basis as a researcher for the Yearbook on Poverty and Social Exclusion.