Beyond activation: reforming European unemployment protection systems in post-industrial labour markets

ABSTRACT: Though activation has been a key theme in recent comparative scholarship on social policy, existing research has arguably failed to capture some important cross-national differences in the extent of welfare state adaptation it entails. Conceptualising activation as but one unemployment policy reform indicator alongside ‘unemployment support homogenisation’ and ‘unemployment policy co-ordination’, and empirically sketching reform trends in four European states, this article argues it is possible to identify a cleavage between countries where activation policies are part of an unambiguous adaptation of labour market policies to the emergent post-industrial economy, and countries in which similar trends of policy adaptation have been more constrained, hesitant and uneven. To account for this fracture it is necessary to understand the differing ways that conventional unemployment policies were institutionally articulated within national political economies, as this bears on the feasibility of a new paradigm of labour market regulation emerging. Key words: labour market policy; activation; comparative analysis; welfare reform; European social policy; post industrialism 1