Classifying Labour Regimes beyond the Welfare State: A Two Dimensional Approach

The tendency of previous research to subsume labour markets entirely within the domain of the welfare state has obscured differences in the extent and ways in which the commodification of labour has occurred across countries. This chapter aims to fill the gap in comparative research by making a distinct contribution to the development and operationalization of labour regime analysis. First, it advances the conceptualization of labour regimes as the intersection of two dimensions – selectivity and forms of regulation of employment relations –focusing on the ways in which labour is mobilized in different political economies. Second, it demonstrates the clustering of western European economies in four distinct regime types, which only partly overlap with prevailing welfare typologies. These findings are then used to advance debates about what kind of empirical and theoretical relationship exists between welfare and labour regimes.