Gallie, Duncan (ed.), Employment Regimes and the Quality of Work, (2009)

Employment Regimes and the Quality of Work

The book makes a major new contribution to the sociology of employment by comparing the quality of working life in European societies with very different institutional systems - France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Sweden. It focuses in particular on skills and skill development, opportunities for training, the scope for initiative in work, the difficulty of combining work and family life and the security of employment.

Drawing on a range of nationally representative surveys, it reveals striking differences in the quality of work in different European countries. It also provides for the first time rigorous comparative evidence on the experiences of different types of employee and an assessment of whether there has been a trend over time to greater polarization between a core workforce of relatively privileged employees and a peripheral workforce suffering from cumulative disadvantage. It explores the relevance of three influential theoretical perspectives, focusing respectively on the common dynamics of capitalist societies, differences in production regimes between capitalist societies and differences in the institutional systems of employment regulation. It argues that it is the third of these--an 'employment regime' perspective--that provides the most convincing account of the factors that affect the quality of work in capitalist societies.

The findings underline the importance of differences in national policies for people's experiences of work and point to the need for a renewal at European level of initiatives for improving the quality of work.

1. Production Regimes, Employment Regimes and the Quality of Work (Duncan Gallie)
2. Skills and Wages in European Labour Markets: Structure and Change (Michael Tahlin)
3. Job-Related Training in Europe: Do Institutions Matter? (Martine Dieckhoff, Jean-Marie Jungblut and Philip J. O'Connell)
4. Task Discretion and Job Quality (Duncan Gallie)
5. Work and Family in Conflict? The Impact of Work Demands on Family Life (Stefani Scherer and Nadia Steiber)
6. Job Insecurity (Serge Paugam and Ying Zhou)
7. The Quality of Work Life in Comparative Perspective (Duncan Gallie)

この本は、異なる制度的システムをもつヨーロッパ社会―フランス、ドイツ、イギリス、スペイン、スウェーデン―における労働生活の質を比較することで、雇用の社会学に対して新たに貢献する。特に、スキルとスキルの発展、訓練の機会、仕事におけるイニシアティブの範囲、仕事と家庭生活のバランスをとる難しさ、雇用の安定性に注目する。

全国を代表する調査を用いて、異なるヨーロッパ諸国における仕事の質の大きな違いを明らかにする。異なるタイプの雇用者の経験について明らかにし、相対的に有利な立場にある雇用者であるコア労働力と、蓄積する不利益に苦しんでいる周辺的な労働力との間の分断を強めるトレンドがあるかどうかを評価する。資本主義社会の共通のダイナミクス、資本主義社会における生産レジームの違い、雇用規制の制度的システムの違いに注目しつつ、3つの影響力のある理論的パースペクティブ―普遍的理論、生産レジーム論、雇用レジーム論―の妥当性を検討する。この本は、3つのパースペクティブのなかでも、雇用レジーム論が資本主義社会における仕事の質に影響する要因をもっとも説得的に説明すると論じる。

この本の発見は、国の政治が人々の仕事の経験にもたらすインパクトの重要性を強調し、仕事の質を改善するための、ヨーロッパレベルでのイニシアティブの必要性を指摘する。