Deconstructing Flexicurity and Developing Alternative Approaches

Towards New Concepts and Approaches for Employment and Social Policy

Maarten Keune, Amparo Serrano, Maarten Keune, Amparo Serrano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415634267
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136208027
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In recent years, the concept of flexicurity has come to occupy a central place in political and academic debates regarding employment and social policy. It fosters a view in which the need for continuously increasing flexibility is the basic assumption, and the understanding of security increasingly moves from social protection to self-insurance or individual adaptability. Moreover, it rejects the traditional contradictions between flexibility and security, blending the two into a single notion and thus depoliticizing the relationships between capital and labour. This volume provides a critical discussion of the flexicurity concept, the theories upon which it is built and the ideas that it transmits about work, unemployment and social justice. It shows that flexicurity fosters the further individualization of social protection, an increase in precariousness and the further weakening of labour in relation to capital. The authors present a series of alternative theoretical, normative and policy approaches that provide due attention to the collective and political dimension of vulnerability and allow for the development of new societal projects based on alternative values and assumptions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Routledge Advances In Sociology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1 The Power to Name and Struggles over Meaning: The Concept of Flexicurity
• 2 Class Relations and Labour-Market Reforms
• 3 From Flexicurity to Social Employment Regimes
• 4 Inequality as a Central Component in the Redefinition of Security: The Case of Gender
• 5 Beyond Flexibility: Active Securities for Flexible Employment Relationships
• 6 Labour, Capabilities, and Situated Democracy
• 7 From Flexicurity to Capabilities: In Search of Professional Development
• 8 Life-First Welfare and the Scope for a “Eudemonic Ethic” of Social Security
• 9 Quality of Employment: An Alternative to Flexicurity?
• Contributors
• Index