Open scholarship at Cornell
eCommons is a service of Cornell University Library that provides long-term access to a broad range of Cornell-related digital content of enduring value. Learn more about eCommons.
Make a deposit
Submit your document, research paper, image, data, code, and more into Cornell's digital repository. Learn how to submit.
Recent Submissions
Fast Radio Burst Community Newsletter - Volume 5, Issue 11
Nimmo, Kenzie; Chatterjee, Shami (2024-11-26)
Insertion as an Alternative to Workfare: Active Labour Market Schemes in the Parisian Suburbs
Schulte, Lisa; Greer, Ian; Umney, Charles; Iankova, Katia; Symon, Graham (SAGE, 2017)
Many governments have tightened the link between welfare and work by attaching conditionality to out-of-work benefits, extending these requirements to new client groups and imposing market competition and greater managerial control in service delivery – principles typically characterized as ‘workfare’. Based on field research in Seine-Saint-Denis, we examine French ‘insertion’ schemes aimed at disadvantaged but potentially job-ready clients, characterized by weak conditionality, low marketization, strong professional autonomy and local network control. We show that insertion systems have resisted policy attempts to expand workfare-derived principles, reflecting street-level actors’ belief in the key advantages of the former over the latter. In contrast with arguments stressing institutional and cultural stickiness, our explanation for this resistance thus highlights the decentralized network governance of front-line services and the limits to central government power.
Marketization, Inequality, and Institutional Change: Toward a New Framework for Comparative Employment Relations
Greer, Ian; Doellgast, Virginia (SAGE, 2017)
This article develops a framework for analyzing the social effects of marketization, defined as the imposition or intensification of price-based competition. The conceptual background is debates in comparative employment relations over the liberalization of markets and its consequences across Europe. Our central proposition is that marketization in its diverse forms leads to increased economic and social inequality via its effects on non-market institutions. We outline two mechanisms through which this happens. First, the means used by managers and investors to seek influence shifts from voice to exit, leading to the disorganization of industrial relations and welfare institutions. Second, economic activity shifts from productive toward non-productive activities, leading to changes in market regulation that are insulated from public scrutiny.
The State and Class Discipline: European Labour Market Policy After the Financial Crisis
Umney, Charles; Greer, Ian; Onaran, Özlem; Symon, Graham (SAGE, 2017)
This paper looks at two related labour market policies that have persisted and even proliferated across Europe both before and after the financial crisis: wage restraint, and punitive workfare programmes. It asks why these policies, despite their weak empirical records, have been so durable. Moving beyond comparative-institutionalist explanations which emphasise institutional stickiness, it draws on Marxist and Kaleckian ideas around the concept of ‘class discipline’. It argues that under financialisation, the need for states to implement policies that discipline the working class is intensified, even if these policies do little to enable (and may even counteract) future stability. Wage restraint and punitive active labour market policies are two examples of such measures. Moreover, this disciplinary impetus has subverted and marginalised regulatory labour market institutions, rather than being embedded within them.
Toward a Precarious Projectariat? Project Dynamics in Slovenian and French Social Services
Greer, Ian; Samaluk, Barbara; Umney, Charles (SAGE, 2018)
Project organization is used extensively to promote creativity, innovation and responsiveness to local context, but can lead to precarious employment. This paper compares European Social Fund (ESF)-supported projects supporting ‘active inclusion’ of disadvantaged clients in Slovenia and France. Despite many similarities between the two social protection fields in task, temporality, teams and socio-economic context, the projects had different dynamics with important implications for workers. In Slovenia project dynamics have been precarious, leading to insecure jobs and reduced status for front-line staff; in France, by contrast, projects and employment have been relatively stable. Our explanation highlights the transaction, more specifically, the capacity of government agencies to function as intermediaries managing the transactions through which ESF money is disbursed to organizations providing services. We find that transnational pressures on the state affect its capacity as a transaction organizer to stabilize the organizational field. In Slovenia, transnational pressures associated with austerity and European Union integration have stripped away this capacity more radically than in France, leading to precarious project dynamics and risk shifting onto project workers.