Welfare States and Employment

Dear Colleagues,

Paid work is a major element of social integration in contemporary societies, as a source of income, a condition of pension payments, access to social security, and, not least of all, a condition of self-esteem and social recognition. Unemployment, thus, implies that a person experiences losses in multiple dimensions and leaves lifetime scars. Welfare states have cushioned various implications of job loss, but, after three decades of New Public Management reforms and welfare retrenchment, some parts of these safety nets are becoming more porous and conditions for unemployed people are becoming harsher in many Western countries. Popular wisdom observes that accelerating technological change, shareholder interests, and globalization have added to the pressure on the labor market. Jobs at the lower echelon are lost at a faster pace than new, more highly qualified jobs are created, potentially reducing employment possibilities for less qualified workers at a faster pace than the workforce shrinks due to demographic change. These observations culminate in the diagnosis of downward mobility as the hallmark of regressive modernity. Active labor market policies attempt to support unemployed people in coping with the challenges of labor market changes, but outcomes seem to be mixed. Likewise, the success of programs incentivizing self-employment, a major element in the European Union’s strategy to combat unemployment, is rather ambivalent. The share of long-term unemployed tends to increase, thus fueling the emergence of a two-tier society, in which a substantial part of the population suffers from enduring marginalization or exclusion and is permanently dependent on the welfare state.

For this Special Issue, we solicit studies scrutinizing aspects of the interrelatedness of labor market and welfare state developments on a firm theoretical and empirical foundation. Such studies may focus on the individual, organizational or collective level of analysis, dealing with, for example, individual attitudes and behavior, organizational strategies and developments, or national policies, using the full set of methods available to the social sciences.

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