The European Employment Strategy (EES) aims to promote convergence of domestic labour market policies by soft law instruments. Previous studies on the impact of the EES are mainly focused on active labour market policies. The present study aims at explaining cross national variation in national...

The European Employment Strategy (EES) aims to promote convergence of domestic labour market policies by soft law instruments. Previous studies on the impact of the EES are mainly focused on active labour market policies. The present study aims at explaining cross national variation in national...

Since 2009, the European Union (EU) portfolio of commonly agreed social in-dicators includes measures of material deprivation. The rationale for this inclu-sion is that if purely income-based indicators of poverty and inequality are es-sential, they are nevertheless not sufficient to...

The EU?s Lisbon strategy, launched in 2000, included a social aspect, which encouraged the coordination of national policies to fight against social exclusion and poverty, by means of benchmarking. Through the sociological study of quantification activities, which give form to this management...

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...