This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

Applying the demand-led growth models framework, this book examines the recent macroeconomic performance of the key Mediterranean economies – Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece – including the responses to the economic and financial crisis (2008), the debt crisis (2010) and the COVID-19 crisis (2020). As the book explains, the central idea of the growth model approach is that the widespread breakdown of the old labor institutions, such as the existence of strong unions, centralized wage bargaining and the participation of the workforce in corporate governance, has led to a fall in the wage share and a rise in inequality in most advanced economies. Thus, the two main contemporary growth models are usually characterized as debt-led and export-led. In both models, the same processes that cumulatively drive growth, such as over-consumption, also simultaneously undermine the foundations on which this expansion takes hold. The book examines the extent to which these processes hold true for Mediterranean economics and explores the key factors of their economies including productive capacity, growth of aggregate demand components, wage-led or profit-led regimes, personal income distribution, the foreign sector, the financial sector, labor relations, the labor market and welfare states. In particular, the book examines whether policy responses and state interventions in recent years have led to a divergence between the economies. To what extent are these changes transforming the existing growth models? Are we facing a change in the Mediterranean model or the disappearance of the Mediterranean bloc as a whole? This book marks a significant addition to the literature on the economics and politics of Southern Europe and the fields of political economy, comparative economics, and macroeconomics more broadly.

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 Handbook will comprise of 29 original pieces from key contributors to the field of European social policy. It is intended to capture the ‘state of the art’ in European social policy and to generate and contribute to debates on the the future of European social policy in the 21st Century. It will be a comprehensive and authoritative resource for research and teaching covering themes and policy areas including social exclusion, pensions, education, children and family, as well as mobility and migration, multiculturalism, and climate change.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive treatment of transformations of the state, from its origins in different parts of the world and different time periods to its transformations since World War II in the advanced industrial countries, the post-Communist world, and the Global South. Leading experts in their fields, from Europe and North America, discuss conceptualizations and theories of the state and the transformations of the state in its engagement with a changing international environment as well as with changing domestic economic, social, and political challenges. The Handbook covers different types of states in the Global South (from failed to predatory, rentier and developmental), in different kinds of advanced industrial political economies (corporatist, statist, liberal, import substitution industrialization), and in various post-Communist countries (Russia, China, successor states to the USSR, and Eastern Europe). It also addresses crucial challenges in different areas of state intervention, from security to financial regulation, migration, welfare states, democratization and quality of democracy, ethno-nationalism, and human development. The volume makes a compelling case that far from losing its relevance in the face of globalization, the state remains a key actor in all areas of social and economic life, changing its areas of intervention, its modes of operation, and its structures in adaption to new international and domestic challenges.

Bringing together contributions from leading labour market policy scholars from across the globe, this state-of-the-art Handbook offers extensive and compelling analyses of labour market policy in advanced democracies. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This book is a re-interpretation of labour market policy models from a gender perspective, providing an analysis of within-gender inequality and how these policies affect inequality. It sheds light on the internal and external challenges confronting different gendered political economies, with distinct constellations of adjustment problems and reform agendas to incorporate women into the labour market. As such, the book shows how female political mobilization can influence labour market policy-making process. The target audience of this book is made by researchers and postgraduate students in the disciplines of sociology, gender studies, political science, political economy, and practitioners working in the fields of welfare policies and gender labour market services.

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.

This book argues that liberalization of industrial relations has been a universal tendency among European countries over the last thirty-five years.

How can we best analyse contemporary welfare state change? And how can we explain and understand the politics of it? This book contributes to these questions both empirically and theoretically by concentrating on one of the least likely cases for welfare state transformation in Europe. It analyzes in detail how and why institutional change has taken Germany’s welfare state from a conservative towards a new work-first regime. Christof Schiller introduces a novel analytical framework to make sense of the politics of welfare state transformation by providing the missing link: the capacity of the core executive over time. Examining the policy making process in labour market policy in the period between 1980 and 2010, he identifies three different policy making episodes and analyses their interaction with developments and changes in such policy areas as pension policy, family policy, labour law, tax policy and social assistance. The book advances existing efforts aimed at conceptualizing and measuring welfare state change by proposing a clear-cut conceptualization of social policy regime change and introduces a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of the welfare-work nexus between 1980 and 2010 in Germany. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social policy, comparative welfare state reform, welfare politics, government, governance, public policy, German politics, European politics, political economy, sociology and history.