Respective Roles of Employer Strategies and Institutions on Job Quality: The case of household services sector in Belgium

This article analyses human resource strategies within the firms, and their interactions with the institutional context, in new services – personal and household services – and how they respectively contribute to employment integration of low qualified workers. Our contribution develops an original framework articulating neo institutionalist approaches and the social regulation theory allowing an in-depth understanding of human resource management, considered as a set of social norms partly determined by the regulatory context and subject to internal interactions between social actors. Results indicate only limited institutional pressures on human resource management practices, what emphasizes the management leeway in defining human resource management. Organizations operating within a similar institutional context develop diverse human resource practices, which in turn generate contrasted outcomes in terms of job quality. This leads us to stress the diverse modes of management developed by organizations in the sector.