Moira Nelson

There are two major policy approaches at the core of labour market transformations over the past decades: activation and flexibilization. Activation describes the reorientation of welfare states towards employment promotion by recalibrating or reducing benefit generosity and fostering employability more proactively through, inter alia, active labour market policies. Flexibilization, in turn, is often understood as the deregulation of the labour market and the promotion of nonstandard forms of employment. These reform agendas have been advanced by politicians, employers, and economic experts convinced that European labour markets are too rigid and welfare states too expensive, which negatively affect nations’ competitiveness in a globalized economy. In this chapter, we offer a new heuristic for understanding activation and flexibilization trends since the turn of the millennium and provide a brief assessment of the political drivers of these policy approaches as well as a (critical) reflection of their effects.