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Do members of the committees under the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) find that there are coalitions of specific member states in these committees? If so, then what kind of side payments hold these coalitions together? For the first time in scholarly literature, and based on an empirical investigation, the findings in this paper document that two opposing coalitions - with the United Kingdom and France as the respective leaders - exist in OMC committees where mutual learning is the raison d'etre. In the existing theory on this subject in the EU, it is claimed that consensus decision-making leads to a weakening of coalition-building. All three committees analysed in this paper build on consensus decision-making, which is achieved after intensive meetings between all the members. However, it is contended that the 'argumentative contest' working method of the OMC committees leads to more - not less - coalition-building. On the basis of a test, it is also shown that these committees are primarily held together by side payments in the form of 'promises relating to policy among the like-minded'; however, 'payments allied to subsequent decisions' add to the cement of the coalition-building processes stemming from the OMC working method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, deregulation of social welfare provision is underway throughout Western Europe. The major tendency is for disorganisation, together with the emergence of welfare markets. This is also changing the way elderly people are provided with personal and socio-medical services. Focusing on domiciliary eldercare, the paper explores if this is accompanied by a change in what Kohli has termed the moral economy of old age welfare. Departing from a general reflection on the organisation of social services in modern welfare capitalism the paper sketches evolutions in the eldercare system of three major European countries, with a special focus on the role of civic rationales and professional norms in the organisational field under consideration. It is argued that the moral economy of eldercare has become fluid, thus implying a broader transformation in the societal treatment of old age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the effects of 'welfare to work' and 'making work pay' policies such as tax credits on job quality in the wider labour market. It examines the consequences of two policy approaches to the problem of work incentives for the unemployed. One approach is greater conditionality of benefits systems, of which the extreme case is workfare; the other is transfers to supplement low wages. It is argued that both approaches, individually or in combination, threaten to set up vicious circles, creating yet more of the problems they attempt to solve. Through qualitative interview material from Britain, France, Germany and Belgium, from a recent international project supported by the EU,[sup 1] the paper illustrates how the responses of the unemployed to the four countries' benefits systems and insertion programmes structure the effects of these policies on the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I am applying a rights-based approach to childhood social exclusion that, following Sen's capability approach as one formulation of such a rights-based approach, sees social exclusion as the failure of people to have access to critical capabilities relating to their integration into society. The implications of this approach will then be applied to the relation between education and social exclusion, where it is shown that education has a critical impact on mitigating or reinforcing social exclusion. Taking such a capabilities-based approach implies a shift away from a concentration on average achievement generated by an education system to the low end of the achievement distribution and the ability of the education system to raise the performance and integrate the most disadvantaged students. The paper investigates how education systems in Europe and other industrialized countries are achieving this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the development of social services in Britain, France and Germany since the 1980s. In this period services grew strongly and were extended to large population groups, although the welfare state was in crisis. Moreover, the power of the state was enhanced. The share of public service provision declined somewhat, but this was more than balanced by increased public funding and intensified state control of delivery. The paper argues that the rise of social services does not signal a 'new' welfare state. Rather, the belated expansion of social services compared to other areas is explained by the fact that services have become crucial for the economy and the labour market only recently. Since this was the case, they have followed the classical path of welfare state expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]