Age-arrangements, Age-culture and Social Citizenship:A Conceptual Framework for an Institutional and Social Analysis

This chapter considers the various interrelationships between the three guiding foci: changing labour markets, changing ‘welfare states’ and citizenship. Age-culture is the shorthand description of social norms, values, ideals or perceptions in society that structure the ideas of the age-work relationship. This interpretation of institutions is the dominant one in sociology. Age-related social norms can be reflected by many other concepts in a society. One particularly interesting concept in this context is the so-called ‘seniority-principle’. Actor-constellations form the third relevant institutional dimension to analyse the changing age-work relations. Age-cultures and age-programmes cannot explain all changes within one country or the differences between countries. ‘Age-culture’, ‘age-programmes’ and ‘actor-constellations’ are all inter-linked and all three institutional dimensions can and will influence one another. In the end, the combined effect of these three dimensions is a particular ‘age-arrangement’, in a particular society, at a particular historical point in time.<br/

The Shift from Early to Late Exit: Changing Institutional Conditions and Individual Preferences:The Case of the Netherlands

This chapter focuses on the historical, social, economic and institutional background of the actual problems of an ageing Dutch society. From an institutional point of view The Netherlands can be characterised as a country with a highly institutionalised low labour force participation of older workers, notwithstanding the fact that the formal age of retirement is 65. The ideological and cultural ideas have become institutionalised in all kinds of welfare state regulations and arrangements as well as in the daily practice of different labour market actors. The relative low labour market participation of older workers is a cultural and institutional effect. The low participation of women was directly related to the particular ‘ideology’ of a male breadwinner concept. The reconstruction of the early exit pathways is one of the central political objectives to realise the enlargement of the labour market participation of older workers

Global value chain restructuring and the use of knowledge and skills

This report focuses on the role of knowledge in the restructuring of value chains and the implications for work organisation and for the use of knowledge and skills. The key perspective is on the effects of the growing complexity and highly dynamic nature of corporate structures, production and labour processes. Four different questions are investigated: What is the role of knowledge in value chain restructuring? What is the impact of value chain restructuring on the use and management of knowledge in the organisation? What is the impact on the required skills of the employees involved in restructuring? What are the effects on internal labour markets and on regional or sectoral vocational training structures? The results of 58 organisational and 33 occupational case studies undertaken in the frame WORKS project form the major basis for this analysis. In addition, the results of major EU establishment and employee surveys are used by means of secondary analysis.nrpages: 94status: publishe

The Netherlands: The strong civil Society Response

The Dutch HIV/AIDS policy in the past decade can be characterized as having been marked by a civil society response to the problem: with a very strong involvement of private and community organizations. This chapter begins with a general picture of the epidemiological context. It explains the size and development of the overall HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Netherlands from 1980–1995 and describes the social structure and dynamics in terms of groups at risk and sub-epidemics. The chapter analyses the Dutch policy response as “active and liberal”, indicating the explicit policy of non-intervention in individual or group behaviour and provides the general organizational pattern and its structural differentiation. The general pattern and structure of the organizational response can be characterized by the organizational density, the structural differentiation and the development of the number of organizations. The chapter discusses the functional differentiation and discusses the organizational response in policy terms, using a differentiation between top-down, bottom-up and horizontal responses