The class scheme of Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero (see Erikson/Goldthorpe 1992) plays an important role in sociological research on inequality and mobility. The empirical application is based on labour statistics which are regularly collected in representative surveys in most societies....

In empirical education and labour market research, different approaches for measuring education have been pursued; they reach from number of years of schooling and educational scoring as continuous measures to typologies as ISCED and the CASMIN classification as categorical approaches. The value...

Education is the main resource of young people entering the labour market for securing employment, in competing for adequate employment contracts and to fulfill their occupational aspirations. As European countries differ widely in the institutional structure of their education and training...

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,...

The paper addresses the issue of the driving forces behind recent changes in labour market entry outcomes in Europe. Based on data for 12 European countries from the 1988-1997 European Community Labour Force Survey, the empirical analyses estimate panel data models to assess the effects of...

The nature of the linkage of education and training systems to the labour market is often claimed to crucially affect labour market integration in modern economies. More specifically, most current comparative research assumes a more strongly qualification-based allocation in training systems...

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...

Would an observer from an outside world look on the European Union the picture would be one of a obscure rag rug, an organisation monstrum simile, as Samuel Pufendorf put it with regard to the 17th-century Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless to the great surprise of this obeserver (and not only to...

This paper investigates the patterns of male non-agricultural self-employment and how they have changed over time in France, Germany and the UK. It is argued that the development of self-employment in the three countries is based on specific institutional frameworks resulting in different...

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...