Leading scholars in the field examine the highly topical issue of the future the welfare state in Europe. They argue that welfare states need to adjust and examine which kind of welfare architecture will further Europe's stated goal of maximum social inclusion and justice. This volume concentrates on four principle social domains; the aged and transition to retirement; the welfare issues related to profound changes in working life; the risks and needs that arise in households and, especially, in child families; and the challenges of creating gender equality.
The book makes a major new contribution to the sociology of employment by comparing the quality of working life in European societies with very different institutional systems - France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Sweden. It focuses in particular on skills and skill development,opportunities for training, the scope for initiative in work, the difficulty of combining work and family life and the security of employment.Drawing on a range of nationally representative surveys, it reveals striking differences in the quality of work in different European countries. It also provides for the first time rigorous comparative evidence on the experiences of different types of employee and an assessment of whether there hasbeen a trend over time to greater polarization between a core workforce of relatively privileged employees and a peripheral workforce suffering from cumulative disadvantage. It explores the relevance of three influential theoretical perspectives, focusing respectively on the common dynamics ofcapitalist societies, differences in production regimes between capitalist societies and differences in the institutional systems of employment regulation. It argues that it is the third of these--an 'employment regime' perspective--that provides the most convincing account of the factors thataffect the quality of work in capitalist societies.The findings underline the importance of differences in national policies for people's experiences of work and point to the need for a renewal at European level of initiatives for improving the quality of work.
