Reshaping Welfare States and Activation Regimes in Europe: (54 Travail & Societe/Work & Society)

The activation-based intervention paradigm is being adopted by several European countries resulting in major reforms to the social welfare system. The spread of the activation paradigm has had major repercussions, not only for welfare interventions aimed at combating unemployment, but also for the political regulation of the social question and citizenship. Citizenship is being redefined in contractual terms and greater emphasis is being placed on its economic aspects. Nevertheless, a wide range of policies are labelled with recourse to this interpretative framework and a pluralistic approach to implementation could serve just as well to empower as to weaken workers'/citizens' position in society. This book analyses the extent of these changes from a cross-cultural perspective. Institutional settings as well as prevailing work values and social representation of social exclusion (activation regimes) have a key role in defining the instruments to be used in national activation strategies to regulate the behaviour of job seekers. In this book, a discussion about the range of social welfare model reforms throughout Europe and a typology of activation regimes is proposed.

About the Author :
The Editors: Amparo Serrano Pascual is Lecturer and Researcher at the Complutense University in Madrid (Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology). She has published and edited several books and articles on the concept of activation and employability, comparative labour market policies, the European Employment Strategy, the European social model, the regulatory nature of the EU institution and gender mainstreaming. Lars Magnusson is Vice-rector of Uppsala University and Professor and Chair in Economic History at the same university. He is the Chairman of SALTSA and has published a number of works dealing with the political economy of Europe, the social dimension of Europe and the European Employment Strategy. He is a regular visitor at the European University Institute in Florence.

Review :
«Not only is 'Reshaping Welfare States and Activation Regimes in Europe' of major relevance on account of the topical and detailed analysis that makes it a reference text for any research on recent transformations in European welfare states. It represents, in addition, a valuable instance of the study of welfare state regimes from a historical-hermeneutic perspective, moving beyond the traditional combination of socio-economic indicators and thereby resulting in an original critical contribution to earlier studies and opening up new avenues of interpretation.» (María Paz Martín Martín, Transfer)