This book examines the marketization of employment services and its consequences in Denmark, Great Britain, and Germany. What concretely does marketization mean in practice? What are its effects on the services and their governance? How does marketization and its effects map against the main ‘regime types’ found in comparative social science? These questions are answered using more than 100 qualitative interviews with policymakers, managers, and front-line workers. The qualitative material in the book shows how transactions are structured by the public authorities that fund the services and how managers respond both collectively as a sector and individually in organizing services. The book does so within a framework that allows both within- and between-country comparisons. Employment services are used as a window into the much larger phenomenon of intensified economic competition across Europe. These three countries have marketized their employment services in different ways, and the distinct trajectories are discussed. We define employment services as government-funded services to move jobless people into, or closer to, paid work, with a public employment service as the responsible ‘public authority’. Marketization in this book is conceptualized in terms of the features of transactions that produce competition between providers. Providers of employment services are deeply affected by marketization, because it shapes the uncertainty and resource scarcity that they face. Marketization can lead to the disorganization of employment relations and the intensification of managerial control, and the quality of services is part of these organization-level effects. Marketization creates four dilemmas that lead to change in governance—price versus quality, payment-by-results versus equal access to services, user choice versus user compulsion, and transparency/openness vs transaction costs. Failures of the work-first welfare state are due in large part to the failures of marketization.

Over the past twenty-ve years, unemployment has been growing continuously in West Germany. In this study one of the reasons for growing unemployment is analysed: unemployment of older people in their transition from employment to retirement. First, the different possibilities of transitions into retirement are explained within the framework of social security regulations. Taking this legal framework as a starting point, early retirement passages are then modelled with the IAB unemployment subsample. It will be shown that -due to the long duration of these unemployment episodes -early retirement contributed considerably to the rise of total unemployment. Early retirement patterns will be broken down by economic sub-sectors and establishment size. It turns out that this kind of unemployment originates primarily from large establishments in manufacturing and extractive industries. Multivariate analysis presented at the end of the paper also includes personal characteristics such as gender or skills and income levels. In the light of these ndings, the 'push' and 'pull' hypothesis common in explaining early exit are discussed. Drawing on the statistical ndings as well as on the institutional analysis, it is argued that both kinds of factors are at work.

A comparison of unemployment rates in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, the UK and the United States suggests poor performance by the German labour market. The present study endeavours to show that a more sophisticated picture of unemployment can be drawn by taking into account additional forms of non-employment (such as incapacity, retirement or labour reserve). For this purpose, data from the 'European Social Survey' (ESS) and the survey 'Citizenship, Involvement and Democracy' collected in 2004 and 2005 have been analysed. While 'unemployment' plays a dominant role in Germany, people with comparable demographic characteristics and similar health status are more likely to identify themselves as 'permanently sick or disabled' and hence are classified thus in other countries. The results of this study underline that an international comparison of labour market performance, particularly a comparison of the effectiveness of labour market and social policy reforms, should not rely only on employment and unemployment rates. Taking alternate forms of non-employment into account can enhance one's knowledge and understanding of the functional differences between the labour markets in Europe and the United States.

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From 2005 to 2015, the German government implemented a special programme for jobseekers aged 50 plus and receiving minimum income benefits. Descriptive comparisons and econometric evaluation indicate that this programme was more effective and cost‐efficient than the German jobcentres' standard operations. However, our evaluation did not ascertain any particular instrument or technique which would explain this accomplishment. Rather, the formula for success appears to be hidden in the governance and design of the programme which differed markedly from routine support. Network‐type governance mechanisms as applied in this programme appear to have served as an expedient in circumstances where hierarchical steering is no longer feasible. This article explains how the governance dilemma of the German Public Employment Service's ‘second tier’ (serving recipients of minimum income benefits) probably triggered the innovative approach so successfully pursued in the programme under consideration. The analysis is concluded by proposing some conceptual clarifications for the long‐standing debate about hierarchies/bureaucracies, markets and networks in the governance of welfare programmes.

2 AbstractIn the transition from an industrial society to a service society, particularly changes on the labour market are likely to occur. A number of authors assert that these changes will result in an increasing external-numerical flexibility, which is assumed to affect labour market processes in terms of a generally higher labour market mobility and a decreasing employment stability ('high-velocity-labourmarket').This paper examines the hypothesis of a growing importance of numeric-external flexibility, applying simple descriptive statistical methods to the event-history data of the IAB Employment Subsample for the West German labour market in the years 1976 to 1995. There is no evidence for an accelerating labour market dynamic, but rather for a stagnating or even slightly declining labour market mobility since the 1970s. Furthermore, the job stability does not decrease over time, as one might have expected, but increases.Although the general results show no increasing fluctuation and instability, it is conceivable that service-sector jobs have become more unstable but that this increased instability is cancelled out by a considerable stabilisation of employment relationships in manufacturing. However, in the end of the paper it turns out that there is no evidence for such contrasting developments in the 'old' and 'new' labour markets.

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