During his stay in Belgium at the host institution CESO (Centre for Sociological Research-KUL), Professor Steven Vallas will pursue a research program on :

« Flexible Employment Regimes and Social Inequalities »

The research program is articulated in 5 workshops and a closing conference :

Negotiating Precarity : Comparative Perspectives on Post-Fordist Employment Regimes
Projected date and venue : 19th of October at UCL

The Personal Consequences of the Neo-Liberal Turn : Subjectivity, Alienation, and Worker Health
Projected date and venue : 16th of November at ULB

Neo-liberalism and ‘Active’ Labor Market Policies : Dilemmas and Debates
Projected date and venue : 14th of December at ULiege

Different Forms of Work in a Post-Fordist Labor Regime : Policies, Discourses, and Experiences
Projected date and venue : 18th of January at UGent

Neo-liberalism and Social Difference : The Discourse of « Diversity »
Projected date and venue : 8th of February at UHasselt

Closing Conference
Projected date and venue : 8th of February at UHasselt

We will welcome Prof. Vallas at HEC on December 14th, 1:30 -5:30 pm
Neo-liberalism and ‘Active’ Labor Market Policies : Dilemmas and Debates
Organizer : Francois Pichault (ULiege) and Ive Marx (UA)

Active labor market policies have assumed growing importance since the end of the nineties.The concept of flexicurity (Wilthagen and Tross, 2004) has been particularly influential. Although under the financial crisis and austerity measures flexicurity has received severe criticisms (Burroni and Keune, 2011), the concrete impact of such policy orientations, presumed to reduce the risks of precariousness and job insecurity for nonstandard workers, strongly varies from country to country. The result has generated a host of dilemmas concerning policy responses to long term unemployment, labor market subsidies for older, disabled, or minority workers, as well as how best to combine security for workers facing transitions with the flexibility that firms need to compete on the global stage. Moreover, the search for new trade-offs between flexibility and security does not only emanate from public labor policies : it also results from experimental initiatives, emerging at a micro level either in the private or non-profit sectors (Pulignano, Doerflinger, and DeFranceschi, 2016 ; Lorquet, Pichault and Orianne, 2015). The papers in this workshop confront these issues, addressing theoretical and empirical questions regarding how labor market uncertainties might best be managed in an era of rapid economic change.

Free access, registration mandatory
More details on the workshops.