New ICTs', such as smartphones and tablet computers, have revolutionised work and life in the 21st Century. Crucial to this development is the detachment of work from traditional office spaces. Today's office work is often supported by Internet connections, and thus can be done from anywhere at any time. Research on detachment of work from the employer's premises actually dates back to the previous century. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jack Nilles and Allan Toffler predicted that work of the future would be relocated into or nearby employees' homes with the help of technology, called 'Telework'. Analysing technological advancements-the enabling forces of change in this contextover four decades sheds new light on this term: they have fostered the evolution of Telework in distinct stages or 'generations'. Today's various location-independent, technology-enabled new ways of working are all part of the same revolution in the interrelationship between paid work and personal life.

Europe combines several unique features in regard to the development, incidence and effects of telework. Many countries on the continent have seen large-scale economic shifts over the past five decades, away from employment in manufacturing and towards information and telecommunication-enabled service and knowledge-based jobs. This development coincided with an increasing demand for flexible workplace and working time policies at the national, sectoral and company levels, fuelled by a steady rise in dual-earner households owing to increasing female labour market participation. Europe is also unique in the sense that policy-making and social dialogue regarding telework are embedded into a 2002 framework agreement for telework on the supranational level, the European Union. This agreement among the European Union level social partners has changed the nature of dialogue and policy-making in relation to telework in a way that cannot be found outside this region. A comparison of European countries also unveils how telework can, against the backdrop of these common characteristics, develop differently depending on the social and economic setting. All of these particularities are discussed in detail in this chapter with help of 2015 data from the European Working Conditions Survey and detailed national reports compiled by experts from ten countries on the continent.

Record-high levels of international migration both toward and across Europe have recently given rise to a new body of research on the social protection of immigrants. A recurring argument in this literature maintains that migrants are generally more likely to gain access to social benefits in generous welfare states. The article offers a critical review of this hypothesis with a focus on unemployment benefit provision. The tides of European welfare politics have produced a set of systems in the past which are today highly stratified on the basis of employment. This mechanism generates a considerable benefit gap in reference to migration, especially for those who arrived to their country of residency only recently. Empirical analyses with micro-level data for 14 Western European countries provide supporting evidence for this argument. The findings indicate a negative relationship between generosity and social protection which has not been accounted for in previous research.

Welfare benefit recipients who are subject to benefit sanctions live below the subsistence level for a fixed period of time. Individuals with low education bear an increased risk of being sanctioned. Quantitative analyses of linked administrative and survey data indicate that this increased risk cannot be attributed to a lower motivation to work or a lower willingness to make concessions regarding job offers. Our analyses of qualitative interviews and individual case files reveal complex processes: Low cultural capital when dealing with administrative matters, a habitual distance vis-à-vis job center employees as well as previous negative attributions in case files can advance the sanctioning of low-skilled welfare recipients. In this way, sanctions contribute to the (re)production of social inequality.

Sanctions are payment cuts that case managers implement in order to discipline welfare recipients. Previous research suggests that immigrants face a particularly high risk to receive such reductions, primarily due to the prevalence of stereotyping in street‐level bureaucracy. The study contributes to this literature with help of a triangulation between in‐depth interviews, survey data and administrative records for the case of the German social assistance system. Our findings indicate that immigrants tend to be sanctioned at a lower rate than other benefit recipients in this context, especially if they arrived at the country only recently on grounds of international protection. This finding can be explained by the importance of reciprocity and control in the country's ‘Bismarckian’ welfare state. Our qualitative data shows that case managers exert a considerable level of agency over the implementation process. This discretion is, on the one hand, used to discipline benefit recipients who are perceived as having contributed little to the welfare system as a whole through taxes and social insurance contributions. Those who are considered to have limited control over their labour market position, on the other hand, are given a certain degree of leeway. We therefore conclude, against the background of the current street‐level bureaucracy literature, that immigration can also act as a deservingness cue in means‐tested social assistance, given that the benefit system is embedded into a welfare regime in which labour market participation, work‐testing and social insurance contributions are the dominating principles of eligibility.