A Conceptual Approach of the Destandardization of Employment in Europe since the 1970s

Abstract

The present book addresses the issue of destandardization of employment. Employment is qualified as either standard or non-standard, while a social process is understood as transforming previously standard employment into forms of non-standard employment (NSE). Since the following terms may compete with other descriptions — atypical, precarious, vulnerable, and many other semantically connected terms used in various languages — these should first be reflected upon and this is the main goal of the present chapter. In our view, describing labour market developments in terms of ‘destandardization’ does not pre-empt any particular type of explanatory theory. The issue is generally linked to or even mixed with issues of ‘employment atypicality’, 1 and sometimes ‘employment precariousness’ (Barbier, 2005a). These topics have been analysed for a very long time by many disciplines with the help of a variety of concepts. Initial important insights can be related to the literature on labour market segmentation of the 1970s and later, to the literature on flexibility of work and of employment. Sociology and institutional economics remained the main disciplinary location for this analysis and their literature extends over a period of about forty years. Recently, presumably partly inspired by mainstream economics, political scientists have addressed the subject; one of their prevailing perspectives is ‘dualization’ or ‘dualism’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.