Skill Change and the Quality of Working Life

This project compared the quality of working life in European societies with very different institutional systems – France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Sweden. It focused in particular on skills and skill development, opportunities for training, the scope for initiative in work, the difficulty of combining work and family life and the security of employment. Drawing on a range of nationally representative surveys, it revealed striking differences in the quality of work in different European countries. It also provided for the first time rigorous comparative evidence on the experiences of different types of employee and an assessment of whether there has been a trend over time to greater polarization between a core workforce of relatively privileged employees and a peripheral workforce suffering from cumulative disadvantage. It explored the relevance of three influential theoretical perspectives, focusing respectively on the common dynamics of capitalist societies, differences in production regimes between capitalist societies and differences in the institutional systems of employment regulation. It concluded that the third of these – an ‘employment regime’ perspective provided the most convincing account of the factors that affect the quality of work.