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...

The paper focuses on the circumstances that explain lone mothers' dynamics of poverty in five different European settings (Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Sweden) using household panel data. My aim is to tackle the problem of poverty comparatively, dynamically, and with a gender...

During the last decades most industrialised countries have experienced a massive educational expansion. Corresponding to this development there has been an increase of female employment which is, however, to a large extent part-time. At the same time, the attempts of firms to achieve more...

During the last decades most industrialised countries have experienced a rapid expansion of tertiary education enrolments. The sector of tertiary education became more differentiated through the creation of many different subjects, fields and curricula of study. At the same time, men and women...

Recent research on self-employment has emphasised the specific dynamic of the rise of female entrepreneurship. But self-employment is still predominated by men. Only about 25-30% of the self-employed are women and the female self-employment rate is often only half as high as the male...

The civil service in Europe has been undergoing profound changes since the 1980s. Two major developments are responsible for these changes: first, the high budget deficits of governments, and second, the demographic changes causing the share of pensioners to increase. These challenges have...

The transition from initial education to work has received a great amount of attention, but hardly any research treats this process holistically. This paper focuses on the serial succession of statuses instead of on single events in the early years after leaving full-time education. As...

The network metaphor abounds in the fields of regional development studies and of research on forms of subnational government. Unlike the analysis of strategic networks (Powell; Sydow; Staber), of policy networks (Mayntz/ Marin; Kenis/ Schneider) and of policy domain networks (Knoke/ Pappi/...

The paper proposes an empirical examination of the consequences of educational expansion and reform in four European countries in terms of school-leavers' labour market chances. The empirical analyses focus on the returns to higher education on the one side and vocational qualification as...

"Over the last two decades, youth unemployment emerged as one of the major problems of many contemporary European societies. As educational achievement is regularly claimed to prevent labour market exclusion, this paper explores the educational stratification of unemployment in early labour...