What has been analysed in France mainly under the term "précarité de l'emploi" over the past 30 years was mostly dealt with differently in other countries (atypical, non-standard employment). Research on these issues dates back to the 1970s in sociology and institutional economics. More...

The main purpose of the present text is assessing EU law from the perspective of its "impact" on national systems of social protection, social services and labour law: how does EU governance affect "social policy" in the Union? After recalling the main characteristics of EU governance and...

The first part of the text is devoted to an assessment of the influence of the introduction of performance contracts in the Public Employment Service (PES) in France. It shows that this management technique (“contractualism”) had a very marginal impact in the period considered (1990-2003)....

Cross-national comparison of policies is basically linked, albeit implicitly, to translation for two main reasons. On the one hand, understanding policies from a comparative point of view is impossible without taking seriously the central role played by language in any political activity. On the...

From 2004 on a new Lisbon strategy was in force, after the Commission and Council's decisions to refocus the previous European Employment strategy and associated Open methods of coordination in the social area. After Kok's taskforce report, the order of the day was to focus on structurall...

In matters of "activation of social protection" as in other policy areas, one would expect that three types of welfare regimes would be identifiable. However, with the hindsight of 20 years of the deployment of "activation strategies", it is still impossible to draw the stylized characters of a...

Flexicurity, as a notion, has spread since 2000, from its use in Netherlands and Denemark. The origin of the word is well known : invented by a sociologist who was an aide to the Dutch minister of labour in 1990. Demark became emblematic of flexicurity in 2004-2005. We compare public and social...