The paper provides an overview of institutional provisions and reforms regarding employment protection, active and passive labor market policies in Germany as well as of actors' responsibilities in these areas. It covers the period between the early 1990s and the most recent Hartz reforms....

Since the 1970s early exit from work has become a major challenge in modern welfare states. Governments, employers, and unions alike once thought of early retirement as a peaceful solution to the economic problems of mass unemployment and industrial restructuring. Today governments and...

The ongoing privatization of pensions - the shift from state to private responsibility for old age retirement income - raises fundamental issues of social and participatory rights. The recent financial market crisis makes the problematic nature of funded private pensions that fall short of...

Path dependence as a concept in institutional theories has become increasingly popular in economics and other social sciences. The key idea is that in a sequence of events, the latter events are not (completely) independent from those that occurred in the past. Yet, common usage of the concept...

The reform of the welfare state entails changes in interdependent policy fields stretching from social policies to employment and wage policies. These linked policy fields are often governed by varying sets of corporate actors and involve different decision making procedures. Adaptation in one...

Der Mitgliederschwund sollte die deutschen Gewerkschaften alarmieren: nur noch jeder fünfte Arbeitnehmer der noch nicht im (Vor-)Ruhestand ist, zahlt heute einen Mitgliedschaftsbeitrag, während die anderen als Trittbrettfahrer von der Arbeit der Tarifverbände profitieren, ohne hierzu...

The notion and interpretation of path dependence have been discussed and utilized in various social sciences during the last two decades. This innovative book provides significant new insights onto how the different applications of path dependence have developed and evolved. The authors suggest...