Among the issue explored are the following: motivation, mobility, and flexibility in the labour market; effect of contractualisation on public accountability and responsibility; effect on the individual's statutory relationship under social security; whether and to what extent the conditions on which one country successfully introduces contractualisation apply to other countries; and, the unemployed individual as 'contract partner': What conditions can he or she set? The analyses focus on experience with contracts as service deliverance in the labour markets of eight countries: Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Finland. Because a certain measure of experience has already been built up by governments, providers, and clients, now is the time to try and learn form good as well as bad practices in order to build coherent institutional frameworks to help the unemployed

Contractualism and Citizenship is a special issue (Volume 18 No 2) of the journal Law in Context. The contents are listed below. You can read the abstract for each chapter by clicking on its title.You can purchase a single copy of this issue through this page, or subscribe to the journal from the journal page.

Across Europe, market mechanisms are spreading into areas where they did not exist before. In public administration, market governance is displacing other ways of coordinating public services. In social policy, the welfare state is retreating from its historic task of protecting citizens from the discipline of the market. In industrial relations, labor and management are negotiating with an eye to competitiveness, often against new non-union market players. What is marketization, and what are its effects? This book uses employment services in Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain as a window to explore the rise of market mechanisms. Based on more than 100 interviews with funders, managers, front-line workers, and others, the authors discuss the internal workings of these markets and the organizations that provide the services. This book gives readers new tools to analyse market competition and its effects. It provides a new conceptualization of the markets themselves, the dilemmas and tradeoffs that they generate, and the differing services and workplaces that result. It is aimed at students and researchers in the applied fields of social policy, public administration, and employment relations and has important implications for comparative political economy and welfare states.

Employment services are at the centre of a complex web of rules deriving from the EU, national public law and from private agreements. This book examines the law and regulation of public services through case studies of the public employment services in EU member states.

How can the EU's community of welfare states adapt their public policies to economic globalization? What happens when the economic and social aims of the EU come into conflict? This book examines the developing legal regimes and regulation of public services in the UK and other European countries. Public services are examined though a case-study of the complex area of public employment services. These are job-placement and vocational training services which aim to maximize employment and minimize unemployment within EU member States' Active Labour Market policies. Employment services are at the centre of a complex web of rules in both hard and soft forms of law deriving from the EU, national public law and from private, and at times contractual, agreements. They also lie at the crossroads of a series of trends in regulation, and priorities have been inspired by an array of conflicting policy rationales. These policy rationales include the establishment of an open and competitive European internal market, the establishment of an efficient welfare state, the scaling down of state administrative machinery, the fulfilment of core public service responsibilities, and the creation of public-private partnerships. Public employment services provide a highly informative and novel case study of the interaction and conflict between the economic and social aims of the EU and between regulation at national and supranational levels, and the changing forms which this regulation has taken.

Not all labour law and industrial relations scholars agree on the efficacy of the comparative approach - that the analysis of measures adopted in other countries can play a constructive role in national and local policy-making. However, the case deserves to be heard, and no better such presentation has appeared than this remarkable book, the carefully considered work of over 40 well-known authorities in the field from a wide variety of countries including Australia, France, India, Israel, Peru, Poland, and South Africa. The volume contains papers delivered at a conference sponsored by the Marco Biagi Foundation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in March 2008.

Welfare to work programmes that apply conditions to benefits constitute a new type of social contract. This book argues that conditional welfare undermines civil rights and that strengthening welfare rights and relaxing rules of entitlement would better achieve the ends that welfare to work programmes should advance.

This volume provides an up-to-date overview of activation strategies in unemployment benefit systems and social assistance in selected European countries and the United States. A particular focus lies on the development of activation schemes, governance and implementation as well as on the outcomes of activation in terms of labor market and social integration. The volume is the first to address these issues both from a socio-economic and a legal perspective.

Drawing on a wide array of policy domains and events, this book provides an innovative account of social control and behaviourism within welfare systems and social policies, and the implications for disadvantaged groups. This accessible collection reviews the controls, assumptions and persuasions applied to individuals and households and explores broader themes, including how ‘new behaviourism’ was consolidated during the New Labour and Cameron periods. Social policy and social control offers timely engagements with key issues for researchers and policy makers, and is relevant for students in social policy, sociology, socio-legal studies, social work and social care, disability studies, human geography, politics and public policy, and gender, family and life course studies.

The last decade of the 20th century was marked by a shift in how welfare-states deal with those at the bottom of the income ladder. This shift involved the introduction/strengthening of work-obligations as a condition for receiving minimum income benefits - which, in some countries, was complemented by efforts to help recipients return to the labour market, namely through the investment in active labour market policies (ALMP). Based on case-studies of developments in the US and eight European nations (UK, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, France, Portugal and the Czech Republic), this book argues that this first set of reforms was followed by a second wave of reforms that, whilst deepening the path towards the focus on work, brings important innovations- be it the tools used to help recipients back to the labour markets (ex., financial incentives) and in how activation policies are delivered (ex., integration of benefit and employment services). Looking at the array of developments introduced during this period, we discern two key trends. The first concerns the strengthening of the role of the market in the governance of activation, which is visible in the strengthening of the focus on work, or the marketisation of employment services. The second, concerns a move towards the individualisation of service delivery, visible in the expansion of the use of personal action plans or in efforts to streamline service delivery. Finally, we show that the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, has triggered a new wave of reforms. Whilst tentative only, our analysis points to a worrying trend of the curtailment or benefits (Portugal) and activation services (Netherlands, Czech Republic) to minimum income recipients and, in parallel, a further deepening of the focus on work-conditionality (UK and Norway).