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Work–family balance practices available in several work organizations to help employees with children to manage the demands of work and family life can have a negative impact on employees with family commitments, on childless employees and on the organization itself, as Perrigino et al. show in their theoretical review. This is the work–family backlash phenomenon expressed by the four mechanisms of stigma, spillover, inequity and strategic. Even if the stigma mechanism towards working women with children was widely explored, no study until now considered the four backlash mechanisms jointly, in the Italian context. The purpose of this paper is offering a first empirical exploration of these mechanisms in Italian work organizations.

For this study, 15 Italian career women with different care burdens were interviewed, and the four mechanisms were analysed from the perspective of women with and without children, and of organizations.

Analysis has shown that the backlash phenomenon can trigger a vicious cycle of perceived inequity that leads to job dissatisfaction and low work motivation. Management responsiveness and fairness in dealing with employees’ needs are central to promoting well-being by effectively balancing career paths with personal needs, especially in a cultural context where most responsibility for family needs is still left to women and few public supports are available.

This study, in spite of some limitations, offers a first contribution to the analysis of the different facets of the work–family backlash in the Italian context and suggests several possible research and practical developments.

The new economic-policy regime in Sweden in the 1990s included deregulation, central-bank independence, inflation targets and fiscal rules but also active labour market policy and voluntary incomes policy. This chapter describes the content, determinants and performance of the new economic policy in Sweden in a comparative, mainly Nordic, perspective. The new economic-policy regime is explained by the deep recession and budget crisis in the early 1990s, new economic ideas and the power of economic experts. In the 1998–2007 period, Sweden displayed relatively low inflation and high productivity growth, but unemployment was high, especially by national standards. The restrictive monetary policy was responsible for the low inflation, and the dynamic (ICT) sector was decisive for the productivity miracle. Furthermore, productivity increases in the ICT sector largely explains why the Central Bank undershot its inflation target in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The new economic-policy regime in Sweden performed well during the global financial crisis. However, as in other OECD countries, the moderate increase in unemployment was largely attributed to labour hoarding. And the rapid recovery of the Baltic countries made it possible for Sweden to avoid a bank crisis.