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This article studies the soft regulation developed in the field of EU employment policy from the late 1990s onwards, a type of policy co-ordination that has been termed the ‘Open Method of Coordination’. It focuses on particular regulatory mechanisms, in the section entitled ‘Discursive regulatory mechanisms’, built into this ‘soft’ system of governance, which are related to language use and knowledge making. These include: joint language use (Eurodiscourse); the building of a common knowledge base (including collection and standardization of statistics); the strategic use of comparisons and evaluations; the systematic editing and diffusion of knowledge, combined with social pressure and time pressure. It is argued that these measures together constitute a systematic system of governance with the potential to transform the practices of the member states and thus add to the integration process, albeit by a partly different kind of dynamic than regulation and integration by hard law.

Social investment (SI) is part of a strategy to modernize the European welfare states by focusing on human resource development throughout the life‐course, while ensuring financial sustainability. Recognizing that this strategy was only partially implemented by the EU member states prior to the financial and Eurozone crises, this article investigates whether reforms and expenditure patterns in labour market policy (LMP) have moved more towards or away from SI following the 2008 financial crisis. We use quantitative and qualitative data to investigate the degree to which there have been shifts in the SI aspects of LMPs in eight countries across four welfare state regimes. We also investigate which aspects of LMPs have been strengthened and which have been weakened, enabling us to make a nuanced assessment of labour market SIs across the EU in a period of permanent austerity. We find that although the eight countries under examination have different starting points, there is little evidence of increased SI‐orientation of LMPs. Upskilling, which is at the heart of SI, did not increase from 2004–08 to 2009–13, while incentive reinforcement and employment assistance – more about labour market entry and marketing of skills – grew in importance. If this trend continues across Europe, there is a risk that SI will become lost in translation and end up as a clearer neo‐liberal version of workfarism.

In this article, we use the case of a government scandal in Sweden to develop a theoretical perspective by which to understand the moral nature of political scandals. We draw on insights from Durkheim's sociology of morality and point, inter alia, to the ritual character of scandals. However, in contrast to most Durkheimian readings, the perspective presented does not presume the existence of a moral consensus. The scandal is understood as a confrontation between various systems of norms. Rather than confirming a given moral order, scandals provoke moral positioning and help in clarifying — and dramatizing — lines of difference or conflict. The empirical case studied is a government scandal in Sweden in 2006 (Nannygate) that forced two government ministers to resign after less than 10 days in office when it was revealed that they had not paid their TV licence and, moreover, had bought `black' (untaxed) services. This transgression provoked a massive public reaction at the time.

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