Youth unemployment remains a significant problem in most EU countries. In this paper we explore the dynamics of this problem by comparing young people's transitions from unemployment to employment in nine member states. Using the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel, we follow the progress of 14,600 young Europeans over a two-year period. We examine how the employment prospects of young unemployed people are affected by their country of residence and by their personal characteristics such as age, gender, parenthood and educational attainment as well as by previous work experience and unemployment duration. We attempt to unpack the cross-national differences in the underlying transition rate by substituting country names with macro/institutional level variables such as youth long-term unemployment rates, active labour market policy expenditure, employment regulation regimes and benefit provisions for unemployed young people.

There is a widespread view that ‘jobs for life’ and stable employment have been consigned to the past. The impact of technological and institutional changes are said to have eradicated traditional labour market patterns, brought about the destandardisation and individualisation of work and ushered in a new ‘age of insecurity’. The transformation of work, according to Sennet (1998), has witnessed the advent of a ‘New Capitalism’ in which there is ‘no long term’. This paper is concerned with explanations for the paradox of pervasive insecurity and the rise in long-term employment in the 1990s in the UK. The analysis of long-term employment in the UK suggests that insecurity is not explained by compositional changes in the workforce or in terms of labour market restructuring. Instead insecurity is best understood in its institutional and ideological contexts, as the ‘manufactured uncertainty’ that attends the greater exposure of the state sector to market forces, corporate restructuring in the private sector in terms of mergers, acquisitions and sell-offs and the diminution of social protection systems.

Recent literature has begun to disaggregate groups of the ‘self-employed without employees’ to examine in greater detail what determines their working conditions. This article continues this trend by presenting the findings of a survey of professional translators and discussing their status as ‘homeworkers’, ‘teleworkers’, and ‘portfolio workers’. It reveals that freelance translators enjoy higher levels of autonomy and control over their working conditions than other comparable self-employed groups. This is largely because the nature of their expertise and their relationship with clients create inelasticities in the supply of their skills. The more successful are then able to use their market position to exert substantial control over areas like pay and deadlines. In addition, the lack of a traditional career structure means that many translators have actively chosen freelance work and that even those who were originally forced into it would not now take an in-house job. The article concludes that labour market characteristics are a key factor in determining differences in working conditions between various groups of ‘portfolio workers‘.

It is frequently suggested that working at home will be the future of work for many people in the UK and that trends in this direction are already well underway. This paper examines these claims by analysing data from the Labour Force Survey which has, at various times, asked questions about the location of work. Seven key hypotheses are identified, including issues surrounding the extent and growth of working at home, reliance on information and communication technology, prevalence of low pay, average pay rates, gender issues, ethnic minority participation and household composition. The results paint a variegated and complex picture which suggests that those who work at home do not comprise a homogeneous group. The paper in particular highlights differences between non-manual and manual workers, and those who work mainly, partially and sometimes at home.

There is concern that the UK general practitioner (GP) workforce has declined relative to the expanding needs of a primary care-led NHS. Much of the debate about possible solutions within the profession and amongst medical workforce planners has focused on the need to raise medical school intakes and recruit more new GPs. However, other evidence shows that, as with medicine in general, a differential relationship exists in the GP labour market based upon socially ascribed characteristics. It follows that many already qualified GPs (e.g. women, ethnic minority and older doctors) are under-used in the context of generally accepted career structures. Hence, we would argue, part of the solution to workforce shortages lies in better retention and management of existing human resources. This paper first suggests a simple re-conceptualisation, which will help to frame a more sophisticated analysis than so far used for workforce planning of the nature of GP demand and supply. The framework is then used to explore the findings of the first ever national survey (n = 621) and follow-up interviews (n = 32) with a cohort of GP principal leavers. These showed that a variety of more flexible employment arrangements are needed in order to improve both GP recruitment and retention. In taking this approach, the paper also explores the potential implications of changing social trends for the structure of the GP profession.

This paper examines the organisation and performance of household work among dual earner couples of working age. Utilising data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) 1994 the research employs linear modelling techniques in order to model the variables associated with both the time spent on household work and the sharing of household work between men and women living together. In particular, household circumstances and characteristics of partners are considered as independent variables. The findings show that the time men and women spend in paid employment, their partners' time in paid employment, economic power, attitudes, social class and presence of children emerge as variables significantly associated with the two measures of household work performance. The explained variation for time spent on household work is also much higher for women than men. The results show that women continue to carry a ‘dual burden’ of paid and unpaid work which disadvantages them in terms of employment, income and welfare.

This paper explores changes in employment policies and practices that are typically associated with the classical ‘model’ of the internal labour market. Drawing on documentary information and interviews with managers in four large organisations in the UK, the evidence suggests that many of the ‘traditional’ pillars of the internal labour market have been dismantled. New policies around training, recruitment, pay, job security and career progression have been introduced in response to pressures and opportunities for change, both internal and external to the organisation. Changes in the external labour market involve a shift in the balance of power between labour and capital, coupled with a weakening of the mechanisms which coordinate and regulate labour market exchange. Within the organisation, there are a range of pressures to transform production, or service delivery, including the restructuring of traditional forms of work organisation, the extension of working-time and changes in organisational structure. This paper analyses evidence of new employer-led ‘market solutions’ to this range of conflicting pressures. The aim is to highlight the tendency for contradictory outcomes as new policies capitalise on changing external conditions, but at the expense of meeting organisational demands. Also, new policies implemented by individual employers may be unsustainable where, on aggregate, they fail to develop workforce skills or to fulfil career expectations.

Strategies for work life reform amongst informal sector workers in developing countries are currently dominated by resource-based approaches such as the micro-credit movement. This policy framework is predicated upon certain liberal assumptions about individual human action and the relationship between human behaviour and economic development. This article contends that these assumptions are inappropriate when applied to informal sector workers and their economic activities. A focus on the intersubjective conditions of work and economic development, based on the work of Axel Honneth (1995), provides an alternative way of conceptualising the work life experience of marginalised workers and appropriate interventions for economic and social security. An example of a collective strategy implemented by the Self Employed Womens' Association (SEWA) in India, demonstrates the important role that interpersonal recognition plays in activating worker identity and agency to achieve development. The success of SEWA's methodology has implications for how we think about the meaning of development and work life reform in poor countries, suggesting that interventions for economic and social security must engage workers at both the economic and cultural levels at which insecurity, moral injury and social exclusion are produced.

Since the beginning of the 1980s students' labour market participation in the Netherlands has increased enormously. The first part of this article offers a description of the changed labour market position of students in the Netherlands. It demonstrates that this is the result both of changes in the system of student financing and of an increased use of flexible staffing arrangements by employers. The second part of the paper concentrates on the question whether the displacement of workers with lower levels of education was caused by an increasing labour market participation of students. It finds that the labour market participation of lower educated workers dropped at about the same time as students started to enter the lowest job levels, which were the former stronghold of the lower educated workers. Since many of the jobs at this level ask for part-time or temporary work, students have a competitive advantage in comparison to lower educated workers.

The size and source of the gender wage gap in Britain has been well researched. Women's typically lower status employment and their reduced, discontinuous career profiles when they have caring responsibilities have combined seriously to damage their ability to earn a decent wage. Such marked gender differences in employment patterns produce a substantial gender gap in levels of wealth too, yet despite this there has been less attention paid to the gendering of assets than there has to gender differentials in earnings and income. So to pull out these multi-dimensional effects of a gender disadvantaged labour market, this article explores the extent of wage and assets inequality in Britain in the mid 1990s. Analysis of the Family Resources Survey shows that women continue to have lower incomes than men even with their increased entry to the labour market, and have fewer chances to build up a safety net of savings in their working lives and a good income for their retirement. It would seem that in a future Britain where individuals will increasingly depend on private pensions rather than a state minimum, even if women continue to increase their participation levels, the poverty they face in old age will persist.

Positive accounts of teamwork emphasise its potential not just to improve organisational performance, but to transform employees' experience of work in overwhelmingly positive ways. The key outcome is said to be enhanced employee discretion, which in turn contributes to satisfaction, commitment and positive views of management. Critical accounts of teamwork, which locate the phenomenon in the context of the labour process argue that enhanced organisational performance from teams results from an undermining of employee discretion, which contributes to work intensification and increased stress for employees. Differences between the two accounts have not been resolved, in part because of the fact that neither model has been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny using reliable large-scale statistical data which allow generalisations to be made about the impact of team membership on employees. Utilising the data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) it is possible to identify team members and non-members and to compare them in terms of discretion, commitment, satisfaction, relations with management, and stress. The analysis shows no statistically significant association between team membership and any of the outcome variables and on this basis, both positive and critical accounts are called into question.

The expansion of the parental leave scheme in Norway, which now grants extensive rights to employed fathers, has occured in a period of great changes in working life. The equality politics of the welfare state have been explicitly focussed on bringing reproduction more into the open in working life by allowing mothers and fathers the right to stay at home on leave when they have children. To have working life adapt to family life is, however, in contrast with the new trends in working life whereby some workplaces are becoming more and more seductive and greedy. In this article we examine two different types of leave with regard to standardisation and flexibilisation, and ask what type is most successful considering central characteristics of late-modern working life such as individualism and choice, flexible working hours and boundless jobs. Findings show that the majority of fathers use the compulsory leave while the uptake of the flexible leave is inhibited by considerations of its impact on men's employment.

Although the populations of the richest advanced industrial societies have achieved unprecedented levels of formal credentials, analysts report on the massive scale of underutilisation of knowledge and skills in current market economies. This paper describes the underemployment situation in the Netherlands (1977–95). We show by different methods that the ‘education-jobs gap’ has widened increasingly. The return to credentials of Dutch employees has diminished for every educational category. Within the total labour population, an increasing share of employees can be considered as underemployed and deal with credential inflation. At the lower levels of education men have suffered from credential inflation more than women. At the higher levels of education it is the reverse. It also appears that young people deal with a ‘waiting-room effect’: they enter the labour market at relatively low skill levels, given their educational level and gender. A further breakdown by educational specialisation shows that employees with an educational background in health care or technical studies have suffered relatively more from credential inflation compared to those with a commercial education. We conclude by stating that in spite of much rhetoric about the skill deficiencies of the current workforce, the lack of decent jobs has caused basic allocation problems at the Dutch labour market. From a human resources perspective, the growing wastage of employees' potential should not be underestimated or dismissed. We argue that an effective allocation of knowledge and skills to occupations will be the basic tenet of labour market policy and new forms of work organisation.

This paper explains varying degrees of employee commitment to organisational change across four organisations. Of the many workplace innovations in recent years, Quality Management (QM) is one of the most common and also, potentially, the most far-reaching. QM is the backdrop for a focus on variations in worker acceptance of change and the factors which explain this. These factors are split into two dimensions. First, the discursive aspects of quality are analysed, that is, the management ideology or ‘culture of quality’ and the way this is communicated to employees. Second, the more material bases of work and employment are examined. Neither discourse or materiality are privileged in the analysis; rather, it is argued that only by grasping the interrelationship between the two can a thorough explanation of employee responses be derived.

In recent years, much cross-national research on women's work has focused on the impact of the state in creating the conditions to enable women to combine paid work and motherhood. However, when dealing with women's domestic responsibilities, this research has concentrated heavily on caring functions, whilst largely ignoring the importance of other basic household chores. Furthermore, few studies have addressed the question of how state policy concerning women, work and childcare impacts on the ways in which parenting and domestic duties are constructed and distributed between mothers, fathers and others in the everyday experiences of individuals. The present article addresses both of these questions through evidence gathered from a qualitative cross-national comparative study of the child-care strategies of two groups of women, one French and one British, working in secretarial or clerical occupations, living with a partner and with at least one child aged under twelve. Minimal differences concerning the gender division of domestic and parenting work are discovered between these two national groups. This finding is then used to question some of the theoretical perspectives regarding the relationship between women's greater participation in employment and men's greater participation in domestic and parenting work.

Education in law in Norway must be characterised as an open educational field, with lower entry requirements than other prestigious professional fields. Such an open system might be expected to lead to a high degree of equality by social class origin among the graduates. The impact of social origin is assessed at different steps of the educational and occupational career in a unique sample consisting of all Norwegian graduates in law between 1981 and 1996. The results demonstrate that there is a high level of social inequality in academic performance, which is greater at later stages than early in the educational career. Large and increasing income inequality is found also, for graduates with equal levels of academic performance. Various mechanisms that may produce this pattern are discussed, including specific forms of cultural capital, such as knowledge about strategies of self-employment, social and financial capital.

This article presents a new approach to measuring the most important dimension of gender segregation – the vertical dimension – in quantitative survey data. This, in turn, allows for a reassessment of the view that high levels of gender segregation are synonymous with high levels of social inequality. In order to do this, the article also draws upon significant conceptual developments. ‘Segregation’ as it is commonly understood is named as ‘overall’ segregation, and is the resultant of two components, ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ segregation, representing difference and inequality separately. This provides a clear approach to measurement. The argument is developed with a case study of the British labour force. The pattern of segregation, in terms of its overall level and its components, varies considerably across sections of the labour force. In terms of inequality, the vertical components measured indicate that British women working full-time are more advantaged than we would expect, and that women working in part-time manual occupations, though facing the greatest relative disadvantage in terms of pay, are actually slightly advantaged over men working in manual occupations in terms of social stratification. Although overall segregation has remained relatively unchanged over the five year period from 1991 to 1996, there have been some significant changes to its components within the various sections of the employed British labour force in that time. By looking at the various sections of the labour force, relative to the labour force as a whole, we can achieve a better understanding of how segregation operates with respect to gender inequalities.

Tackling social exclusion is at the heart of current British social policy, yet the concept remains ‘essentially contested’. Here we report on the transitional experiences (school to work, parental home to independent household, family of origin to family of destination) of young people (eighteen to twenty-five years) with low educational qualifications living in two areas of rural Scotland. Through in-depth interviews we explore: whether labour market participation always enhances social inclusion and, if so, in what ways; how young people experience and balance the relationship between labour market participation and demands (and their priorities) in other areas, such as family life, education and housing; and how age, gender, lifecourse stage and local opportunities affect labour market participation and social inclusion. The findings challenge the political rhetoric that all employment is broadly equivalent with respect to promoting social inclusion. We argue that to develop further the concept of social inclusion it is necessary to examine and promote ‘opportunity’, something which in turn rests upon the twin elements of available ‘resources’ and accessible ‘arenas’.

In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the problems faced by older workers in the UK labour market. In this paper we examine the issue of older workers: participation in vocational training and education, drawing upon data from the Labour Force Survey. Our initial analysis identifies how rates of participation in work-related education and training differ between age groups. Further exploratory analysis attempts to identify possible reasons for this, analysing the type of training undertaken by various age groups as well as the incidence of self-financed training. We then estimate an ordered-probit model for males and females separately, in an attempt to isolate the extent to which this lower incidence among older workers is due to employer or employee decision making. We find that, when compared to a reference group of prime aged individuals, those aged between 40 and 49 and 50 and 59/64 are less likely to undergo training and, also, less likely to be offered training. We conclude that the lower incidence of training among older workers can be mainly attributed to employer decision making. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for public policy.

This article investigates the restructuring process of the East German employment system after German unification. It raises the question of whether and how job mobility has contributed to coping with rapid change in the occupational structure. In particular, it explores the importance of occupational credentials in these mobility processes in East Germany. The empirical analysis is based on retrospective life histories of East German men and women belonging to three birth cohorts (1939–41, 1951–3 and 1959–61). The main result is that vocational certificates have driven occupational matching in East Germany after 1989. Thus, change in the employment structure was achieved by ‘credentialised’ exclusion and inclusion processes and, moreover, the efficacy of occupational credentials even increased after 1989. Beyond the East German case, the paper provides interesting insights in the social value of occupational credentials and the relationship between labour market regulation and social change.