The conference is hosted by the research project on “Demographic change and the public sector labour market” of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 580 Social developments in post-socialist societies.
The varieties of capitalism’s approach demonstrates impressively how modern societies differ in their basic ways of functioning and how these differences are reproduced by education and financial systems. However, the approach pays little attention to the significant role of the public sector for structuring national labour markets in quantitative and qualitative terms.
Within the public sector there are also “varieties of capitalism”, i.e. large differences between countries concerning forms of contracts, corporatism and self-conception. At the same time this formerly quite persistent part of society has been changing during the last decades. Are varieties of capitalism converging through the adoption of similar strategies of restructuring?
Do flexibility requirements of the public sector lead to an internationalization of the transformation? Or is the persisting structure of the public sector instead a central condition for the reproduction of a rather increasing divergence of modern societies? In addition to two general plenary lectures addressing social dynamics of the public sector, the conference will host three panels on the following topics:
Please send your abstracts by June 17, 2007 to Final papers should be sent via email by November 25, 2007 to be included in the conference volume.