International labour market and social policy analysis : essays on segmentation, cross national variation and European Union regulation

This book contains three essays on labour market segmentation theory, international welfare state comparisons, and European Union regulation of social security that have been circulating for some time within the international welfare state and labour market policy research community but so far have not been available for a wider audience. The essays are linked by a general concern about international developments, both on the intellectual and on the economic and political level. Debates about the welfare state have always been strongly international in their origin and orientation. Already in the nineteenth century policy makers were heavily involved in the international exchange of policy ideas and academic scholars were concerned with coming to grips with the analytics and empirics of the social issues and policies in the different industrial countries. Probably as a result of the expansion of mass universities and the greater use of university graduates in routine public administration, during the 1970s and 1980s much of the traditional international orientation of research and policy making was lost when scholars became more concerned and preoccupied with the detailed exploration of the conditions in their home countries and the national context. The essays in this book break with this national-ethnocentric turn and, by placing the international context at the centre stage of the examinations, rekindle the traditional international orientation of research and scholarship.