The change in employment forms Empirical results and first explanatory approaches

'In all industrial countries the institutional form of gainful employment is in a state of flux. Employment relationships that were hitherto considered regular, i.e. permanent full-time relationships in an employee status, are visibly becoming less significant. An important question in this respect is what factors actually lie behind the dynamics of the change in employment forms. This report is intended to provide initial answers to this difficult question, taking Germany as an example. Germany is still one of the countries with rather extensive labour market regulation. The starting-point for the considerations is therefore first of all the possibilities of arranging an employment relationship. It consists - as is explained in the second section - of a variety of features that can be arranged. These can be affected by regulations in very different ways. Regulations provide for a specific distribution of possible actions: they open up or restrict the options of enterprises and employees to varying extents. This report is, however, not intended to stop at these purely theoretical considerations. The third section takes analyses of the German labour force survey and uses them to examine whether from an empirical point of view the regular employment relationship really should - as is often claimed - already be described as a discontinued line. Finally at the end initial primarily quantitative observations are made concerning the possible determinants of the change in employment forms. They are intended to lay the 'foundation stome' for approaches in labour market prognosis.' (author's abstract)Die Autoren untersuchen auf der theoretischen Ebene die Gruende fuer den Wandel von Beschaeftigungsformen (Rueckgang des Normalarbeitsverhaeltnisses, Verarbeitung von atypischen Beschaeftigungsformen) und analysieren empirisch die Entwicklung 1976-1995 in Westdeutschland sowie 1991-1995 in Ostdeutschland. (IAB)German title: Der Wandel der Beschaeftigungsformen: empirische Befunde und erste ErklaerungsansaetzeAvailable from http://www.iab.de/ftproot/topics34.pdf / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman