European employment models in flux: Pressure for change and prospects for survival and revitalization- Gerhard Bosch, Steffen Lendhorff and Jill Rubery

Résumé du document

In this research article, the authors are assessing the changes which European societies are currently going through, and the study their aftermaths. This article is very well crafted; this impression is strengthened by the conclusion, where you see that the four points brought out by the authors are actually the frame of their work. However, this article is very dense, which makes it really hard to read, and thus to fully understand.

The paper starts with a series of typologies of the different varieties of capitalism throughout Europe (and welfare capitalisms as well), in order to introduce us to the European societies, so we could understand a later analysis of their change.

The main distinction of the first typology is the split between the liberal economies, like UK or Ireland, and the coordinated market economies, such as Sweden or Denmark. In this typology, the comparative advantages of the different European economies are studied as well. The authors follow their reflection by examining a second typology; the well-known Bruno Amable's five capitalisms. But the authors truthfully state that typologies alone aren't enough to understand all the dimensions of the European societies.

Extraits

[...] They show that the EU's product market deregulation led to a deep change in the labour market structure, and that the EU currently lacks of means to support and secure it. Once again, they therefore show that the actors have had a huge importance throughout the history, by stressing that national models are the outcome of historic compromises between conflicting interest groups. This reflection upon historical processing is interesting as it invites us to think about our society not as an established order, but as one step in an ongoing process of change towards, hopefully, an ideal society. Sources Bosch, Gerhard, Steffen Lehndorff and Jill Rubery (eds.) (2009). [...]

[...] That theory is actually close to the Marxist or Weberian analysis of social change. In a second part, the authors are analyzing the pressure for change, and the different types of change. They state that change is coming from both the outside (globalization pressure) and the inside of the country. They also study two scholar's opinion about change. First, the authors lean on the five types of changes which were defined by Streeck and Heland; displacement, layering, drift, exhaustion and conversion. [...]

[...] European employment models in flux: Pressure for change and prospects for survival and revitalization- Gerhard Bosch, Steffen Lendhorff and Jill Rubery In this research article, the authors are assessing the changes which European societies are currently going through, and the study their aftermaths. This article is very well crafted; this impression is strengthened by the conclusion, where you see that the four points brought out by the authors are actually the frame of their work. However, this article is very dense, which makes it really hard to read, and thus to fully understand. [...]