Workshop 1, Thursday October 19, 2017, Louvain-la-Neuve (12.00 – 17.00, LECL93*)
Negotiating precarity: Comparative perspectives on post-fordist employment regimes
A co-operative workshop series with Prof. Steven Vallas, hosted by the inviting universities: KULeuven, UCL, UHasselt, ULB, ULg, Universiteit Antwerpen, Universiteit Gent, VUB.
Organizers: Valeria Pulignano (KULeuven) & Laurent Taskin (UCL)
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Programme
12.00 Welcome lunch
12.45 Welcome word (Laurent Taskin)
13.00 Introduction to the thematic (Valeria Pulignano & Steven Vallas)
13.30 “Employment quality in Europe: prevalence, evolution over time and country distribution” by Karen Van Aerden, Kim Bosmans & Christophe Vanroelen (VUB)
Discussants: Laurianne Terlinden (UCL)
14.15 “Dealing with insiders and outsiders in workplace transformation: How managers enact labour relations in the blended workforce” by Marie-Rachel Jacob (EM Lyon Business School)
Discussants: Olivier Jégou (UCL)
15.00 Coffee break
15.15 “A cross-national analysis of labour market divides and their social configuration in Europe during the economic and financial crisis” by Nadja Doerflinger, Valeria Pulignano and Martin Lukac (KULeuven)
Discussants:
16.00 “Respective Roles of Employer Strategies and Institutions on Job Quality, by Stéphanie Coster (UCL)
Discussants:
16.45 Observations and conclusions, by Steven Vallas
*LECL93 meeting room, Collège J. Leclercq, Place Montesquieu, 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Employment quality in Europe: prevalence, evolution over time and country distribution.
Karen Van Aerden, Kim Bosmans & Christophe Vanroelen
This paper uses data from three successive waves of the European Working Conditions Survey (2005, 2010 and 2015) in order to shed light on the prevalence of precarious employment in Europe over time and across countries. First, seven different aspects of employment conditions and relations are combined in an overall indicator for precarious employment: employment instability, lack of material rewards, lack of workers’ rights and social protection, de-standardised working time arrangements, lack of training opportunities, lack of collective organisation and unbalanced interpersonal power relations. Then, descriptive analytical techniques are applied to show the evolution of precarious employment over time and its distribution across Europe. Combining information from multiple employment features in order to define precarious employment provides innovative insights considering its occurrence and its consequences in Europe.
Dealing with insiders and outsiders in workplace transformation. How managers enact labour relations in the blended workforce (Marie-Rachel Jacob, EMLyon business school)
This paper tackles the issue of how managers deal with organizational and employment dynamics in the context of workplace transformation. Managers are confronted to specific issues caused by the blending of regular permanent employees and nonstandard workers inside their teams. As the labour relations have developed according to a standard employment relationship, the use of nonstandard workers raises the issue of the participation of these ‘outsiders’ in the workplace. This issue is particularly critical for managers that teamworking becomes the central means to achieve flexibility in the new capitalist regime. The in-depth study of a workplace transformation involving both regular employees and nonstandard workers allows refining three mechanisms explaining nonstandard workers’ participation in the workplace: a work-related mechanism details the work role and perceived performance of external workers, an organizational-related mechanism highlights their embeddedness in the formal structure and a social-related mechanism shows their relations to a manager acting as a sponsor in the organization. The contributions are twofold. First, the study emphasizes the need to bring the formal organizational structure back in work and employment studies. Second, under the constraints of the new capitalist regime, it specifies the agency of both middle-managers and front-line managers in the external workers’ participation which produces outcomes for their work and employment conditions.
A cross-national analysis of labour market divides and their social configuration in Europe during the economic and financial crisis. (Nadja Doerflinger, Valeria Pulignano and Martin Lukac, KULeuven)
Recent studies on the economic and financial crisis, which has hit Europe from about 2008/2009 onwards, highlight that the crisis and its consequences have contributed to increased insecurity and may have reinforced labour market divides (e.g. Chung and van Oorschot, 2011; Gash and Inanc, 2013). This evidence points to changes in the very structure of labour markets, however, dividing lines in European labour markets in times of crisis have not yet been systematically investigated. On the one hand, it is not fully clear where divides in the European labour markets are located, and on the other hand, our knowledge on the identified labour market groups or segments, for instance in terms of social characteristics, is limited to date. According to Eichhorst et al. (2016), labour market divides particularly result from the degree of security or insecurity of jobs nowadays. We follow this argument and view insecurity as closely tied to the specific work situation of people, which is in particular defined by the employment relationship. The choice of characteristics of the employment relationship is grounded in Rodgers’ (1989) work defining insecurity as temporal, organizational, economic, and social. To study insecurity-based labour market divides, we use latent class analysis applied to the European Labour Force Survey data in the crisis period (2009-2015). We examine six countries (i.e. Germany, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Poland, the UK) reflecting different configurations of coordinated, liberal and mixed market economies. Despite their differences, results show similar divides (i.e. three broad labour market groups in Poland, four groups in the other countries) which are stable throughout the investigated timeframe. Furthermore, the identified labour market groups are broadly consistent with the classical sociological categories identified in the social stratification literature.
Respective Roles of Employer Strategies and Institutions on Job Quality (Stéphanie Coster, UCL)
This thesis analyses human resource strategies within the firms, and their interactions with the institutional context, in new services – personal and household services – and how they respectively contribute to employment integration of low qualified workers. Our contribution develops an original framework articulating neo institutionalist approaches and the social regulation theory allowing an in-depth understanding of human resource management, considered as a set of social norms partly determined by the regulatory context and subject to internal interactions between social actors. Results indicate only limited institutional pressures on human resource management practices, what emphasizes the management leeway in defining human resource management. This leads us to stress the diverse organizational logics followed by organizations in the sector. However, what emerged from the empirical investigation is that job quality is not only shaped by institutional constraints and organizational logics but is, in fine, defined through the interactions of the protagonists of the triangular relation – users, employers and workers.
Complete programme here