Classifying Labour Regimes beyond the Welfare State: A Two Dimensional Approach

Abstract

The labour market has been a favoured object of social science research. This is unsurprising considering that it represents both the main mechanism to allocate labour power to productive tasks and the primary source of social inequalities and class formation. However, the current transformations of work and the increasing diffusion of conditions that lie between the categories of employment and unemployment confront both advanced economies and mainstream theories of the labour market with new challenges. Moreover, in spite of the large number of scholarly works that have developed around the classification of advanced economies on several institutional domains, few works have analysed the institutional variety of labour markets per se (Bosch, Lehndorff, and Rubery 2009; Gallie 2007a; Mingione 1997a; Rubery and Grimshaw 2003; Schmid and Gazier 2002).