Search

Research on economic marginalization of less-educated people mainly focuses on purely quantitative displacement mechanisms: the more high-skill supply there is in relation to the demand for high-skilled employees, the more the labor market position of the low-educated group deteriorates. In our research, we expand the explanation of economic marginalization –unemployment risks, socioeconomic status attainment and earnings – by also looking at qualitative characteristics of groups of low-educated people, and argue that negative competence selection, negative social selection, and discrediting mechanisms are also of importance (see Solga 2008). For investigation we use historical analyses as well as country comparison

This project is undertaking a comparative study of the consequences past unemployment has on individuals’ lives even years after regaining employment. Central questions include:

• Why does unemployment have damaging effects on future careers? An empirical test of existing explanations.

• Which categories of the population are most affected and why?

• Which effect do changing policies have on post-unemployment employment trajectories in Europe?

It is the leading question of the project, to what extent and under which conditions new approaches in firms' training and working-time policies are able to foster Life-Long-Learning.

Franziska Scheier’s doctoral project examines the role of company-level employee representatives by consideration of employees’ interests formerly neglected in work policies (weak employees), i.e. employees taking care of children or other family members, low-skilled or unskilled workers, severely handicapped persons, and apprentices.

Overtime and certain components of remuneration can be credited in long-term working-time accounts and then drawn down at a later point. The basic idea is to save up time for use in a later phase of working life. For the company, long-term working-time accounts make for flexibility; for the employee, they offer the opportunity to improve the distribution of occupational and nonoccupational demands across the course of life. However, the range of ways for companies to implement this instrument is extraordinarily broad, as is the range of possibilities for employees to use it.

European declarations aim to establish an enhanced European skill formation area that will strengthen the EU’s global competitiveness. Yet the efforts of decisionmakers to achieve the diverse goals codified in the Bologna (higher education) and Copenhagen (vocational training) declarations imply the reform or even restructuring of national educational systems, which resist transformative change. Focusing on shifting tensions between general and vocational skill formation systems in France and Germany, this project charts changes in the competition between the differentially institutionalized organizational fields of general and vocational education.