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The conclusions summarize the main results. In particular, neither the Marx' reserve army mechanism nor mass unemployment as a disciplining device, as in Kalecki's work, are necessary for the functioning of a capitalistic system. The introduction of minimum and maximum real wages can attenuate the negative consequences of booms and recessions provided that markets, including the labor market, are sufficiently flexible implying that employers must not be constrained in their hiring and firing decisions. Further, lower and upper bounds for real wages can be seen as one ingredient of a flexicurity economy that intends to overcome the conflict between capital and labor. Thus, flexicurity capitalism can be considered as a Western type of competitive socialism, as envisaged by Schumpeter, that does not only successfully solve the coordination problem but also the incentive problem in the principal-agent scenario.

New social risks are at the forefront of the EU's social policy agenda. In part, this is because a new social risk approach fits with open market policies, which stress constraints on state interventions and the importance of adapting social provision to meet economic goals; in part because old social risk areas are so heavily occupied by existing national government policies that it is difficult to find support for innovations. During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of attempts to develop international policy harmonization were pursued. These failed due to the difficulty of achieving cross‐national consensus. There are a number of relevant directives, chiefly in the areas of equality of opportunity for men and women and other labour market issues. The most important current developments, however, are in the area of ‘soft law’ through the Open Method of Co‐ordination and the National Action Plans in relation to employment, social exclusion, pensions, health and social care. The European Employment Strategy, with its stress on ‘flexicurity’, is the most advanced of these. It is at present unclear to what extent this process will achieve substantial changes in comparison with the importance of the economic pressures from the Single European Market.

Chapter 6 deals with the labor market policy of the OECD and compares its Jobs Study from 1994 with the re‐assessed Jobs Strategy of 2006. The initial Jobs Study recommended a single policy package which was based on a deregulation framework in many respects. The re‐assessed strategy, in contrast, recognizes two equally legitimate paths: the liberal Anglo‐Saxon path and the Social‐Democratic Nordic path. The framework of one‐size‐fits‐all has been abandoned, and it is emphasized that countries make different political choices based on values that need to be taken into account when designing policy reform. The policy message has undergone considerable changes – yet, in both cases, the OECD has argued that its policy recommendations are evidence‐based. Why have such different conclusions been reached? In order to understand the policy course changes the chapter considers both organizational relationships within the OECD and its relationship to its surrounding world. It argues, inter alia, that the ‘expert organization’ has become more pragmatic, increasingly taking into account the countries' abilities and willingness to implement recommendations.

This chapter is concerned with the labor market policies that governments in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden pursued after the emergence of high unemployment. It attempts to explain why these countries followed different reform paths, and why political conflicts over labor market reform played out differently. In the 1990s and 2000s, Denmark and the Netherlands made a series of reforms in the areas of unemployment insurance and active labor market policy, introducing a model of labor market regulation that has become known as “flexicurity.” The chapter's main argument is that this was a result of two factors: the early onset of unemployment and the renegotiation of postwar political arrangements in Denmark and the Netherlands that began in the 1980s. Political circumstances and economic policy choices in the 1970s and 1980s continued to matter to labor market policymaking in the 1990s and 2000s.

This chapter gives an introduction and a survey of the book. It presents a short summary of the discussion about flexicurity economies in Europe. In addition it identifies the three pillars on which a flexicurity economy should rest. They concern labor market institutions, the underlying educational system and the process of elite formation in democratic societies. The chapter also points out important contributions from the seminal works of Marx, Kalecki-Keynes and Schumpeter and characterizes the focal points on which this book concentrates.

Chapter 3 starts from Schumpeter's investigation of the possibility of a Western type of competitive socialism that successfully not only solves the coordination problem, but also the incentive problem in the principal-agent scenario of a socialist economy. Viewed from today's perspective one has to question his solution of the coordination problem under socialism. Yet, a flexicurity reform of the labor market would not only integrate the concepts that are discussed in chapters 1 and 2, but would also make Schumpeter's type of socialism unnecessary for a proper working of the economy in democratic societies. Moreover, many aspects of capitalism, its microeconomic institutional experience of running small, medium-sized or large enterprises in particular, could just simply remain intact under such a new social structure of accumulation.

In Denmark, there have been strong integration tendencies in terms of risk re-categorization and activation. Where benefit requirements used to be fairly undemanding, today employment and activation conditions have not only been tightened but also extended to all categories of non-employed benefit groups. In addition, all working-age transfer recipients have been administratively integrated in a unitary job centre system. With regard to the third dimension of integration the situation is more complicated. Due to a declining benefit ceiling in unemployment insurance, claimants receive increasingly homogeneous benefit levels. Recent restrictions to benefit duration may however lead to a growing share of the registered jobless receiving lower social assistance transfers. This may jeopardize the famed Danish ‘flexicurity’ model.

By giving an historical account of the Danish business system, this chapter offers an alternative interpretation to how Danish flexicurity operates. The argument is that employees, unions, and vocational training institutions take a much more activist role than is usually observed. This argument is then justified, first, by giving an account of general Danish industrial developments and innovation patterns, and secondly, by studying how Danish firms strategize, organize, and relate to global economic processes. The case studies provide evidence that firms and labour—market institutions have simultaneously been changed in many different ways locally. Entirely new ways of working have opened for taking on new, advanced roles in the new global economy, making inclusion of all employee groupings possible.

This chapter summarizes what characterizes an enabling welfare state, identifies its core institutions and how it makes possible distinctive business strategies based on highly autonomous forms of work organization. Then it interprets this institutional formation as an alternative risk-sharing system to that of the Anglo-Saxon model. While the latter is based on markets and financialization/securitization the Nordic one allows for different actors and modes of search for future comparative advantages and positions in the international innovation system. The comparative differences, advantages, and weaknesses of the Nordic countries are highlighted, and what they can learn from each other to gain more comprehensiveness. Finally the chapter indicates what will be important issues if the enabling welfare state and its experimentalist economy are to be cultivated in a much more deliberative way in the future.

In the current era, where global competition increases the need to constantly develop and renew skills and competences, governments play an important role, both in terms of direct social investment in the upgrading of skills and in designing institutions so that they underpin individual and organisational learning. This chapter shows that there are dramatic differences among European member states in terms of organizational learning. In southern European nations, jobs are relatively simple or Taylorist, while jobs in the Nordic countries are characterised by more access to learning and to discretion in pursuing tasks. Such differences seem to reflect labour markets with flexicurity and open education systems. The chapter argues that to realise the aim of the Lisbon strategy, ‘to make Europe the most competitive region in the world with social cohesion’, the strategy should have given more attention to upgrading the institutions of labour markets and education systems with the aim of speeding up and facilitating the industrial transformation of countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain.

This contribution analyzes the history of the language of the Dutch welfare state. We progress with the 1960s and 1970s, when the passive, benefit-oriented “verzorgingsstaat” was completed and perfected and the term not only became dominant, but the system’s generosity became a source of political pride for both Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. In the 1980s and mid-1990s, however, the complex system developed severe problems, which among other things, was because of an explosion of the number of beneficiaries, especially in the Disability Scheme, the social law that is most typical for the very generous, yet extremely passive, social policy arrangements. The influx of claimants was exhausting the program’s financial capacity, which led to the introduction of a new discourse of austerity and retrenchment, but more importantly, led to a fundamental criticism, rethinking and then remodeling the passive “verzorgingsstaat.” This development reached its pinnacle in the mid-1990s with the gradual introduction of a more active and service oriented social policy paradigm, exemplified by the ideologically important, and later exported, neologism “flexicurity”.

In the most recent institutional and academic literature, both work flexibility and worker security are understood as concepts with a multifaceted nature. Flexibility of a work relationship involves aspects concerning hiring and firing costs, the wage, the time schedule, the organisation of work and the place where it is carried out. In turn, the degree of security that workers enjoy depends on all those factors that affect their capability to provide themselves with a decent standard of life through participation to the labour market or by accessing public income-maintenance schemes. No theory is able to provide indubitable insights on whether enhancing the dimensions of work flexibility affects positively or negatively the security of workers. Hence, this is basically an empirical matter.

In this chapter explores whether the direction of labour market reforms in France has changed since 2010 by comparison with the previous two decades. It looks into broad labour market policy areas, namely, income support for the unemployed, active labour market policies and employment protection legislation before and after 2009 and asks the following questions. What form has retrenchment taken under the recent fiscal pressures and how has it been distributed across these policy domains? Has the emphasis of active labour market policy instruments changed? How have policy changes affected insiders and outsiders in the labour market? It is shown that during economic crisis and the subsequent fiscal austerity period there were no paradigmatic changes in French labour market policies, which continued to develop along a path pursued since the early 2000s. Successive governments, both centre-right and centre-left, have implemented flexicurity à la française, with a focus on flexibility at the expense of security. External flexibility – firms’ ability to hire and dismiss workers – has been developed for both core workers and more precarious forms of employment (temporary work). Furthermore, new measures also introduced important changes in the field of internal flexibility (working-time organisation, wages).

This chapter emphasizes the role of unemployment insurance and labour market policies. Starting from the recent evolution of unemployment in the European countries, it presents the main aspects of unemployment insurance systems and shows the disparities in terms of generosity and coverage among the countries. The trade-off between flexibility and protection of employees is presented and the example of the Danish flexicurity is put into perspective with recent reforms introduced in France or Germany that push for more activation and experience rating. The chapter then surveys the recent changes in the nature of European employment such as the case of deported workers or the increase of jobs related to new technologies. These changes exert pressure on the poorest workers and call for controls of work contracts.