Gerd Falkner is Head of the Department of Political Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Oliver Treib is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna. Miriam Hartlapp is Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. Simone Leiber is Researcher in Political Science at the Institute for Economic and Social Studies, Düsseldorf.

• Preface; 1. Introduction: flexible EU governance in domestic practice; 2. Theorising the domestic impact of EU law: the state of the art and beyond; 3. EU social policy over time: the role of Directive; 4. The Employment Contract Information Directive: a small but useful social complement to the internal market; 5. The Pregnant Workers Directive: European social policy between protection and employability; 6. The Working Time Directive: European standards taken hostage by domestic politics; 7. The Young Workers Directive: a safety net with holes; 8. The Parental Leave Directive: compulsory policy innovation and voluntary over-implementation; 9. The Part-time Work Directive: a facilitator of national reforms; 10. Voluntary reforms triggered by the Directives; 11. The EU Commission and (non-)compliance in the Member States; 12. Beyond policy change: convergence of national public-private relations?; 13. Implementation across countries and Directive; 14. Why do Member States fail to comply? Testing the hypotheses suggested in the literature; 15. Making sense of compliance patterns: a typology; 16. Conclusions: myth and reality of 'social Europe'; References.

'This is an excellent book on an important theme in European governance, forming an essential part of a wide-ranging, multi-authored series. Its excellence derives from its detailed, scholarly approach which is both exhaustive and, in the end, compelling in its conclusions.' Industrial Relations Journal