Based on contributions from international experts, this volume provides an up-to-date account of globalization's influences on individual life courses in nine different modern societies, and of cross-nationally varying political strategies to mediate this influence.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.Policymakers throughout Europe are enacting policies to support youth labour market integration. However, many young people continue to face unemployment, job insecurity, and the subsequent consequences.Adopting a mixed-method and multilevel perspective, this book provides a comprehensive investigation into the multifaceted consequences of social exclusion. Drawing on rich pan-European comparative and quantitative data, and interviews with young people from across Europe, this text gives a platform to the unheard voices of young people.Contributors derive crucial new policy recommendations and offer fresh insights into areas including youth well-being, health, poverty, leaving the parental home, and qualifying for social security.

Long-running trends towards increasing inequality between the rich and poor across Europe have been exacerbated by the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath. As employment opportunities for young people diminish and as the welfare state is pulled back, pathways to adulthood change and become more difficult to navigate. Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession consists of a collection of papers by researchers from Britain, Norway, Germany, Portugal, Italy and Greece, locating young people’s transitions to adulthood in their national social, economic and political contexts. It explores young adulthood with reference to generational continuity and change and intergenerational support. With a cross-national comparative framework, this volume highlights the importance of variations in structural contexts for young people’s transitions. Bringing together authors across sub-disciplines such as the sociology of youth, family and kinship, class and inequality and life-course studies, Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession will appeal to academic social scientists as well as final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as political science, sociology, youth studies, social policy, anthropology and psychology; and a wider public readership. Chapter 1 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Work is widely thought to have become more precarious. Many people feel that unions represent the interests of protected workers in good jobs at the expense of workers with insecure employment, low pay, and less generous benefits. Reconstructing Solidarity: Labour Unions, Precarious Work, and the Politics of Institutional Change in Europe argues the opposite: that unions try to represent precarious workers using a variety of creative campaigning and organizing tactics. Where unions can limit employers' ability to 'exit' labour market institutions and collective agreements, and build solidarity across different groups of workers, this results in a virtuous circle, establishing union control over the labour market. Where they fail to do so, it sets in motion a vicious circle of expanding precarity based on institutional evasion by employers. Ieconstructing Solidarity examines how unions build, or fail to build, inclusive worker solidarity to challenge this vicious circle and to re-regulate increasingly precarious jobs. Comparative case studies from fourteen European countries describe the struggles of workers and unions in industries such as local government, retail, music, metalworking, chemicals, meat packing, and logistics. Their findings argue against the thesis that unions act primarily to protect labour market insiders at the expense of outsiders.

This book provides a dynamic and contextualized account of how young people's lives are shaped by economic instability and uncertainty.

Drawing from interviews and survey data across the EU and the UK, this in-depth study explores how worker instability is perceived and experienced, and how this “perception” in turn affects individuals’ economic and social situation. Using intersectional analysis, the authors identify groups who are more prone to labour market risks.

Insecure temporary employment is growing in Europe, but we know little about how being in such jobs affects political preferences and behaviour. Combining insights from psychology, political science and labour market research, this book offers new theories and evidence on the political repercussions of temporary jobs.

For much of the twentieth century, women lagged considerably behind men in their educational attainment. However, in recent decades, young women have become an important source of human capital for labor markets in modern societies, as well as potential competitors to the male workforce. This book asks whether or not women have been able to convert their educational success into gains on the labor market. The expert contributors address the topic on a comparative level with discussions centred on gendered school-to-work transitions and gendered labor market outcomes. Thereafter they analyze the country-specific implications of the gender redress from a wide range of countries including the USA, Russia and Australia. This enlightening book will appeal to graduates and postgraduates studying social policy, education, the labor market, inequality and gender. It will also be of interest to experts in the fields of sociology, education, political science and economics and those interested in educational research.

The third edition of European Business is published at a time of turbulence in Europe. This uncertainty puts Europe's unique business environment at risk. Key features of the new edition include: assessments of how individual member states affect the integration process and bring diversity to European business; new material on the links between Europe and the World’s other main regions, including emerging economies; new case studies on topics such as the rise of the BRICs, the energy crisis, enlargement and the Euro. The book retains popular pedagogical features to help students make sense of a confusing and complex environment. A unique and accessible text, the book is ideal reading for students of European and International Business and important additional reading for those interested in European politics and economics.

This book brings together Eastern and Western perspectives to explore human resource interventions into extending working life, including phased retirement, healthy work environments and lifelong learning. It assesses issues of implementation in differing cultural, intergenerational, institutional and family contexts.