Book review: European Social Models from Crisis to Crisis, Employment and Inequality in the Era of Monetary Integration
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Effrosyni Bakirtzi |
| DOI | 10.1177/1388262718760913 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
promote social rights in the world of work. One can only hope that the reviewed collection will
stimulate further academic scrutiny and will significantly raise awareness amongst practitioners
and trade unions about, as the authors eloquently put it in the foreword, the ‘necessary anchor of
the social dimensions of the European Union in legal and political practice’.
Author biography
Primoz
ˇRataj is a Teaching Assistant in Labour and Social Security Law at the Faculty of Law,
University of Ljubljana. His interests include employment relations and social security law, espe-
cially the areas of social security coordination, healthcare and unemployment.
Jon Erik Dølvik and Andrew Martin (eds.) (2017). European Social Models from Crisis to Crisis,
Employment and Inequality in the Era of Monetary Integration, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
464 pages, ISBN: 978-0-19879-886-6 (paperback).
Reviewed by: Effrosyni Bakirtzi, University of Kassel and the University of Applied Sciences of Fulda, Germany
DOI: 10.1177/1388262718760913
European social models, understood as referring to the constellation of institutions comprising the
employment relations, social policy and skill formation regimes that structure the labour markets’
supply side, have evolved during the past quarter-century. Their evolution has been influenced by
certain political and economic developments beginning with the German reunification and its
consequent recession followed by the two major advancements in economic integration in the
EU: the single market and single currency, and the subsequent financial, economic and sovereign
debt crises. The book under review brings together scholars from different disciplines (political
sciences, political economy, economics, social research, anthropology, sociology) and seeks to
address the controversies within policy making and academic contexts over how the considerable
changes in the social models of EU Member States affected the functioning of their labour markets.
The conception of social models used in the book draws eclectically and selectively on a wide
range of literatures (economic sociology, labour economics, industrial relations, comparative
studies of welfare states and political economy) without, however, providing specific sources to
the literature used.
In their introductory chapter, the editors Jon Erik Dølvik, Senior Researcher at the Fafo Institute
for Labour and Social Research in Oslo, Norway, and Andrew Martin, Senior Researcher at the
Center for European Studies, Harvard University, demonstrate the methodological approach they
have taken in their book, explaining how they took into consideration the momentous historical
developments bracketed by two periods of economic crisis. The first was in the early-1990s when
the end of Germany’s post-unification boom triggered a Europe-wide recession, and the second
was the financial meltdown beginning in the late 2000s that turned into the economic and sover-
eign debt crisis within the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).
Following an overview of the most impor tant political and economic changes s haping the
context within which the European social models evolved, the editors continue with two
70 European Journal of Social Security 20(1)
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