Deconstructing Flexicurity and Developing Alternative Approaches

Maarten Keune is Professor of Social Security and Labour Relations and Co-Director of the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Labour Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Amparo Serrano is Professor of Social Psychology and Sociology at the University Complutense of Madrid.

• 1. The Power to Name and Struggles over Meaning: The Concept of Flexicurity Maarten Keune and Amparo Serrano 2. Class Relations and Labour Market Reforms Colin Crouch 3. From Flexicurity to Social Employment Regimes Carlos Prieto 4. Inequality as a Central Component in the Redefinition of Security: The Case of Gender Maria Jepsen 5. Beyond Flexibility: Active Securities for Flexible Employment Relationship Günther Schmid 6. Labour, Capabilities and Situated Democracy Robert Salais 7. From Flexicurity to Capabilities: In Search of Professional Development Bénédicte Zimmerman 8. Life-First Welfare, and the Scope for a "Eudemonic Ethic" of Social Security Hartley Dean 9. Quality of Employment: An Alternative to Flexicurity? Dominique Méda

"The book offers an inspiring contribution to the question of the semantic shift in ideas on employment and social policy in the European public, political and academic debate, incorporating power relations and dialectical processes into social analysis. […] the book is a very welcome contribution to the scholarly literature exploring the complex construction of ideas, the power of concepts and the ‘struggle of meanings’, while also representing an important contribution to the wider fields of sociology, social policy and EU studies, as it introduces an empirically informed analysis into the theoretical debate about the transformations now affecting the social and economic dimensions of Europe."Reviewed by Luigi Burroni (University of Florence) and Gemma Scalise (University of Florence), Transfer: European Review of Labour Research, 2016, Vol. 22(2) 257–260