Introduction

Since the 1980s, stock markets have emerged as a key financial infrastructure in the global economy and as important drivers of economic growth (). Between 1978 and 2020, the number of listed companies tripled from 13,712 to 43,248 while their market capitalization increased from 23.1 per cent to 134.6 per cent of global GDP (). The spread of capital markets changed how corporate governance, financing, and ownership of companies functions globally and is central to financialization processes that have engulfed not only the core but also the periphery of the global economy (). While in 1978 only 9 per cent (1,257) of listed companies were from non-high income countries, 39 per cent (16,870) Lavelle, 2004World Bank, 2021Bonizzi, 2013of these companies are listed in emerging/developing economies by 2020.

Stock markets are crucial intermediaries that structure national financial systems’ integration into the global financial system (). Importantly, they essentially act as catalysts, potentially serving both as a source of subordination as well as statecraft for these emerging markets. On the one hand, stock markets can exacerbate financial subordination (). By enabling easy access for global institutional investors, they contribute to subsuming countries to the vagaries of global capital flows (). On the other hand, they can curtail the power of global capital and states can organize markets in ways that direct market outcomes towards certain state objectives and policies (Petry, 2020bBonizzi and Kaltenbrunner, 2018Naqvi, 2019Chen and Rithmire, 2020), hence facilitating financial statecraft. This chapter argues that whereas stock markets in more neoliberal financial systems are more likely to suffer from the adverse effects of international financial subordination, more state-capitalist financial systems offer the possibility of increasing resistance and exercising statecraft through stock markets (despite global financial hierarchy).

Introduction: A new era of financial statecraft

The war in Ukraine is one among several recent factors causing turmoil and transformation in the global economy. It is triggering rapid and profound adjustments by rerouting basic supplies, ranging from oil and gas to food staples, fertilizers, and various metals. These disruptions are only in part due to the armed conflict. Western countries have levied extensive sanctions against Russia that are introducing additional uncertainty and instability, not only to trade and financial ties with Russia, but also affecting the wider global political economy.

The bigger picture indicates a coming sea change in several key commodity trades that could reshape geoeconomics. Most notable will be the energy trade. Another key evolution is likely to occur in international finance. Of all the sanctions levied against Russia, those in the financial realm are biting the hardest and are likely to cause the most severe consequences, both intended and unintended.

These financial sanctions aim to cripple the Russian economy, even to the extent of causing a crisis. As with other developing and emerging market economies (DEEs), Russia remains in a subordinated position within the International Monetary System (IMS) dominated by Western powers. As a result, before the war Russian authorities sought to create a buffer to extinguish a potential financial crisis. They amassed more than US$630 billion in foreign exchange reserves to be able to defend the value of the rouble and keep the Russian economy afloat (). However, a considerable part of the reserves is held in international assets domiciled in Martin, 2022the US, Europe, and Japan.

Once allied, what kind of policies will Finland and Sweden pursue in NATO? What kind of impact does NATO membership have on new members? In the first place, new members are integrated into NATO's command and control structure. Accession into a military alliance also implies a change of mindset from being militarily non-aligned to being allied, which is conducive to significant foreign policy repercussions. Moreover, historically, NATO membership has brought about many political, societal and cultural changes in new member states beyond the military and foreign policy dimensions.

In Finland and Sweden's case, the starting point was different as both countries were long-standing partners of NATO and deeply imbedded in Western structures (Iso-Markku et al 2023). It is, moreover, important to make a certain distinction between necessary and contingent changes due to the membership. Being new members, the debate in Finland and Sweden about NATO often fails to see that the pressure to rethink security and defence policy does not stem directly from NATO membership but from the same underlying factors and considerations that led to the membership. In other words, many changes in Finland and Sweden's foreign policy orientations and societies are taking place in parallel with NATO membership, and the causes and consequences of changes are often difficult to discern.

This chapter examines first how Finland and Sweden's integration into NATO's political and military structures has played out to date.

Introduction

Across the globe, central banks are either actively exploring or are already engaged in developing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs introduce a new kind of public money into the monetary system, but – perhaps more importantly – they also provide new ways of storing and circulating money outside of the established international financial system (). CBDCs are widely seen to be motivated by geo-economic dynamics. They have the potential to facilitate international transactions that no longer rely on the use of the US dollar and therefore on clearing institutions under US jurisdiction. Therefore, they could become an instrument to evade the reach of Western, and especially US, sanctions, and to shield domestic and cross-border transactions from foreign interference (Kuehnlenz et al, 2022Westermeier, 2023, de Goede and Westermeier, 2022).

While the term of CBDC suggests that it is a coherent and unified concept, the motivations for central banks to develop a digital currency vary from case to case, ranging from the strengthening of ‘traditional’ monetary sovereignty () to preserving autonomy in the digital realm (). The overarching term of central bank digital currency encompasses a large bandwidth of substantially different initiatives, designating either the digitization of cash – in the case of so called ‘retail Chia and Helleiner, 2024Westermeier, 2024 CBDCs’ – or the modernization of the technology for interbank transactions within a given currency zone – ‘wholesale CBDCs’ – as well as the overhaul of cross-border payment infrastructures – ‘mCBDCs’, a shorthand for ‘multiple CBDCs’.

This book project is an outcome of the StateCapFinance project that explores the relationship between state, capitalism, and finance in emerging markets. The idea for this volume emerged in July 2022 during a workshop with our international cooperation partners in Frankfurt – each an expert in their respective areas and country cases. What transpired during this event was that while we came from different theoretical traditions and engaged in different debates and might not agree on all these issues, we all had a common aim of inquiry that bound us together – which was to understand the agency of emerging markets within the context of the global financial system. This book is an extension of this dialogue. Rather than following one paradigm, it ought to be understood as a space for conversation in trying to come to a better understanding of our common goal.

We also would like to thank those who participated in our ongoing conversations but were unable to join the book project for various reasons, especially Alexander Abramov, Muyang Chen, Indradeep Ghosh, Thomas Kalinowski, Nancy Kim, Kai Koddenbrock, Ilja Viktorov, and Jing Wang. Our thanks goes also to Isobel, Ellen, and Inga from Bristol University Press for their enthusiasm, patience, and guidance as well as to Niklas Kullick for his research and editorial assistance. We also acknowledge the generous funding by the German Research Foundation/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (NO 855/7-1) who financed this project. Finally, we would like to thank our families – Becky, Robin, and Sarah, and Andrea, Anouk, and Antonia – for their patience and support throughout this process.

The preceding chapters have explored how men's fathering identities and women's attitudes, in conjunction with the terms and conditions of their respective public and private sector employment and workplace cultures, shape how partners divide childcare and housework. In this final chapter the overall findings and conclusions from this longitudinal study are considered and their implications for our understanding of paid work, unpaid work, families, and gender are explored.

The significance of time and visibility

As discussed in Chapter 2, since the 1970s the UK public sector has not always provided a shining example of model employment, however, research has suggested a supportive approach to working parents in some respects through the favourable application of parental leave (Rubery, 2013) and the availability of reduced hour contracts, flexitime, or home working (Lewis et al, 2017). This has been considered to have established more opportunities for working parent couples to better combine demands of paid work and home. However, as this book has shown, this is not necessarily the case. Earlier chapters show inconsistencies in how paternity leave policy is applied across public and private sector work settings and how some of the lowest paid paternity leave is in public sector areas such as the fire service and police. This reinforces normative understandings of fathers as providers rather than carers, thereby sustaining breadwinner fathering identities which, as we have seen, have consequences for how household tasks are divided.

Appendix: Tables of Participants

Domestic divisions of labour are negotiated in the context of patterns of paid employment and social policies which promote specific childcare arrangements. In this chapter I situate the literature on domestic divisions of labour in this wider context so as to provide a framework for the chapters that follow. I look, first, at how domestic tasks have been conceptualized, before discussing the differences between public and private sector employment which constrain what is possible in terms of de-gendering domestic divisions of labour. I then consider how gendered moral values and responsibilities influence both how couples think they should behave and how these gendered discourses are incorporated into state policies on parental leave and childcare provision, exploring how working practices and childcare provision shape the context within which couples negotiate the division of housework and childcare. Where relevant, I draw attention to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A task is not just a task: conceptualizing domestic labour

Unpaid domestic work was first put under the sociological microscope in the 1970s by Ann Oakley (1974). Her influential text, The Sociology of Housework, challenged the exclusion of domestic work from sociology and argued that housework should be seen as work. She showed that it resembled assembly line work, being associated with ‘monotony’, ‘fragmentation’, and ‘social isolation’, but was unpaid. Oakley not only drew attention to the importance of including housework in sociological research but also highlighted its gendering. Since then, research into domestic divisions of labour has expanded, but domestic labour itself often remains undefined. The terms most used – ‘domestic labour’, ‘domestic work’, ‘housework’, or ‘household labour’ – usually relate to the routine tasks of household maintenance, such as cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes and dishes.

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated significant adjustments to the paid work and domestic arrangements of many working parent couples. Childcare demands increased due to school/nursery closures and couples were unable to see extended family, who, as we saw previously, many had relied on for childcare support. At the same time, people's working lives were disrupted, as some became legally obligated to work from home while others were expected to be physically present in their place of work, meaning working parent couples often needed to divide paid work, childcare, and housework differently. There was a good deal of optimism that changes to paid work during the pandemic presented a unique opportunity to reimagine and reshape gendered divisions of domestic labour, particularly where men were concerned (Carlson et al, 2022; Craig, 2020).

This chapter seeks to contribute to these discussions through revisiting the lives of ten parent couples that I originally interviewed, with the aim of exploring how these couples’ experiences of working and caring for their children had changed since we had last spoken, but also specifically during the pandemic and beyond. I was interested to know whether the effect of the pandemic had altered how couples reconciled paid work and the home, their domestic divisions of labour and the men's fathering identities, in particular, which, as we saw in the preceding chapters, was significant in shaping who carried out specific household tasks.

This is a book about couples at work. By work I mean the paid work that couples do to earn a living, and its varying demands, the unpaid work that goes into running a household, its physical, mental, and emotional dimensions, and the work couples do when negotiating and deciding how to combine the two: the interactions, negotiations, and relationalities involved in deciding who does what, when, and why. Further, in the context of the couple interview, the book concerns the work that partners do in presenting an account of their labour to me, the interviewer, and to each other. Theoretically the book is situated in and informed by several theoretical debates including ‘doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987), moral values and responsibilities (Duncan et al, 2003; Doucet, 2017), ‘good mothering’ (Hays, 1996), and ethics of care (Fisher and Tronto, 1990), with a focus on relational negotiations of decisions and practices (Twamley, 2021; Doucet, 2023). The book explores these elements of work and their relationalities, examining the complexity of gender differences in household divisions and the mechanisms through which the influence of employment on domestic divisions of labour works.

As Chapter 2 elaborates, the book is situated in the context of debates on the relationship between welfare state models (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Lewis, 1992; Esping-Anderson et al, 2002), workplace structures and social policies (Gornick and Meyers, 2003; Hantrais, 2004; Ellingsæter and Leira, 2006; Grunow, 2019), and domestic divisions of labour. It focuses on the UK as an anglophone country (Baird and O’Brien, 2015) with a liberal welfare regime (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Esping-Anderson et al, 2002) characterized by low levels of welfare support, and a ‘modified, weak breadwinner model’.

The previous two chapters explored the decisions made by 25 mothers and fathers about how to reconcile their paid work and childcare, looking especially at decisions about their hours of paid work and how these were shaped by moral values and responsibilities governing expectations about breadwinning and caregiving. This chapter examines how, within that context, couples divided childcare on a daily/weekly basis. It draws on data from the first set of interviews and the couples’ joint creation of their ‘household portrait’. This methodology, discussed in Chapter 1, involves each couple together placing a number of childcare and housework task cards in columns marked ‘woman only’, ‘woman man helps’, ‘shared’, ‘man only’, and ‘man woman helps’ to indicate which of them carried out the task most of the time.

Building on the work of those that suggest that childcare and housework tasks should be explored separately (Sullivan, 2013; Doucet, 2015), this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of couple's discussions of how they divided individual childcare tasks and their reasoning for this. A distinction is made between two categories of childcare, namely ‘everyday’ and ‘unpredictable’ childcare. Everyday childcare includes getting children ready in the morning, dropping them off or picking them up from school, nursery, or another childcare provider. These everyday tasks can be planned for and organized around a couple's respective working hours. Unpredictable childcare refers to tasks which cannot be planned in advance, such as taking them to an emergency doctor's appointment or looking after a child who is unwell or at home because the school/nursery is closed due to bad weather.