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The EU Government of 'Flexicurity': Trans-Industry Regulation to What End?

This paper examines the European Union’s evolving policy on ‘flexicurity’ – conjoining modes of market and employment flexibility with types of social and employment security. This is a highly contested policy which has received much attention in political arenas and also in a rich academic literature. In this paper, we seek to engage with these debates, operating from within what is termed the Gouvernement Européen Des Industries (GEDI) (European Government of Industry) approach. This means that we conceptualise ‘flexicurity’ in sociological terms as an ‘institution’ (rule and expectation) having both causal and constitutive effects. We hypothesise that ‘flexicurity’ emerges from actor struggles around competing sets of ideas or social representations of the relationships between ‘market’ and ‘society’. A key focus for research is to map the history of these struggles to explain how and why flexicurity has emerged as an EU-wide solution to a range of economic and social problems. Second, we ask ‘who’ does the EU institution of ‘flexicurity’ act upon? In addressing this question, we understand that studying EU flexicurity means studying convergence of economic and social institutions towards this EU-defined goal. Within the literature, analyses of EU-wide employment and social policy convergence to date have been almost exclusively premised upon analytical frameworks whereby the ‘nation state’ is the key unit of analysis for exploring the meaning of convergence between countries. In this paper, and staying within our GEDI approach, we adopt a contrasting starting point. Taking industries, not states, as our core units of analysis, we propose instead an analytical framework for capturing European convergence of industry practices. Finally, we critically examine how academic and practitioner literature has thus far analysed the implementation of flexicurity and reveal a limited attention of this work to precise industry impacts. We finish by identifying new avenues for research into EU flexicurity.