Governance of Employment and Activation Policies - Summer School

Overview

For twenty years EU Member States have been facing severe challenges: Increasing global competition, demographic changes as well as changing family and gender patterns have rendered established employment policies ever less adequate to ensure jobs, prevent unemployment, and to cover new social risks. The European Union therefore has set up multiple programs and strategies but also promotes ‘new governance’ mechanisms for a modernization of domestic employment policies, services and administrations. Next to programmatic reform, examples of the new governance approaches for the activation of unemployed include public-private partnerships, the introduction of quality and performance management techniques, the decentralisation of public employment services, interagency collaborations or administrative integration. A wider range of actors is involved in processes of the ‘co-production’ of policies and services comprising issues as ‘beneficiaries’ participation’ or the involvement of social partners, welfare organizations and NGOs. While the legal and regulatory dimensions of employment policy reform have attracted ample research, activation reforms’ governance mechanisms and their effects on the welfare state ‘architecture’ are still not well understood.

The seminar invites contributions that deal with aspects of the European, national or local, public or private, social or economic dimensions of the governance of employment and activation policies. Contributions on theoretical questions as well as practical consequences are accepted. The summer school aims to evoke the following questions: What kind of governance reforms do activation reforms imply? What kind of problems, dilemmas and conflicts emerge in the implementation of employment policy reforms? How do governance reforms relate to the legal changes of labour market and social policy programmes?

CETRO’s 3rd international summer school takes place in the framework of the EU research project LOCALISE (Local Worlds of Social Cohesion. The Local Dimension of Integrated Social and Employment Policies). Participants of the summer school will have the opportunity to exchange with researchers from the European consortium. Lead partners are:

Martin Heidenreich, Jean Monnet Centre for Europeanisation and Transnational Regulations Oldenburg, University of Oldenburg
Paolo Graziano, Department of Institutional Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi University
Christina Garsten, Stockholm Center for Organizational Research, Stockholm University
Ronald McQuaid, Employment Research Institute, Edinburgh Napier University
Thierry Berthet, Political Science Institute, Sciences Po Bordeaux
Sławomir Mandes, Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw

Researchers adhering to the project will both lecture on current topics of the ‘Governance of Employment and Activation Policies’ and comment in-depth on the participants’ research papers. Please, find further information on http://www.localise-research.eu/

Application

Interested PhD students, postdoctoral students and young researchers are invited to send in an abstract (max. 300 words) of the project or the paper they plan to present. The abstract should give information on research question, theory, methodology, and (expected) findings.

Application deadline is 15th July 2011

Please send your application to sebastian.kuenzel (at) uni-oldenburg.de. Applicants will be notified about acceptance by 18th July 2011. Accepted applicants will be asked to submit full research papers or project proposals (max. 8.000 words) by 16th August, 2011.

Costs and Scholarships: Accommodation (two nights), lunches and one summer school barbecue are provided free of charge. Additionally, successful applicants can apply for full travel scholarships. There is no registration fee.

http://www.cetro.uni-oldenburg.de/

Please quote Scholarization.blogspot.com on your application when applying for this scholarship