Self-employment still forms an important element in the social structure of modern societies. However, the group of the self-employed has experienced an enormous economic and social change. After a long term decline until the beginning of the 1970s in almost all industrialised countries,...

This paper is concerned with lone-mother families in Austria and Finland during the 1990s with a special focus on housing. The main aim is to investigate how the housing situation and housing problems of lone mothers in these two countries are caused and influenced by the welfare, gender and...

During the early post-war period, Western trade union movements grew in membership and achieved an institutionalized role in industrial relations and politics. However, during the last decades, many trade unions have seen their membership decline as they came increasingly under pressures due to...

Political interest of citizens usually is depicted as an individual attribute that can be explained by referring to the resources and skills of the people concerned. The analyses presented here are based on a critical assessment of the explanatory power of these approaches in cross-national and...

The paper compares young adults' position in the '90s in three European welfare states: Finland, Sweden and Germany. Finland and Sweden, which represent the Nordic welfare state model, experienced deep recession at the beginning of the decade. This caused high youth unemployment and low labour...

Northern and Southern welfare states form different families of nations, and it is claimed that the families typical of each nation are profoundly different. Family structure in Northern nations is described as modern and deinstitutionalised, whereas the Southern family structure is traditional...

Many studies have underlined the existence of clear and persistent differences in the levels of political interest among European citizens. In this report these differences and developments in political involvement and political apathy are described and analysed, and conventional explanations in...