This is the first issue of European Societies produced from my new base at the University of Plymouth. The chance to live in a beautiful part of the country has brought me to a thriving Social Science group in a large and expanding university with colleagues writing in such areas as family and housing, social exclusion, criminal justice, electoral politics, and health and health care. The University of Plymouth will be an excellent base for continuing to produce the ESA journal. Day-to-day editorial work remains with Agnes Skamballis at the University of Essex.
The papers in this issue of European Societies cover the areas of employment and unemployment, social policy and social insurance, and the European political process.
The papers on employment and unemployment cover aspects of active employment policies, the experiences of first-time job seekers, and female part-time workers. Peter Triantafillou of the Department of Society and Globalisation at Roskilde University uses Danish data to investigate the implementation of the European Employment Strategy. He shows that forms of an active employment policy were in evidence in Denmark before 1997, but that the introduction of the EES has had a significant impact on this emerging policy of ‘normalization’. Ilaria Covizzi of the Institüt für Soziologie at Universität Basel employs Italian data to explore the effects of family background on the chances of long-term unemployment, especially among new entrants to the labour market. It was found that first-time jobseekers and established workers who have lost jobs have significantly different unemployment experiences. The chances of finding a new job are significantly determined by family characteristics, and education becomes relevant only after a long spell of unemployment. Tracey Warren of the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham compares the situation of female part-time workers in Britain with that of their counterparts in other European countries, using data from the European Household Panel Survey. She shows that wage levels were generally lower in Britain for these women, especially in the lower-paid jobs. Nevertheless, there was no clear-cut correlation between this objective deprivation and subjective feelings of well-being. Issues of unemployment are further considered in the books by Gallie and by Furåker, Håkansson, and Karlsson reviewed in this issue.
In the first of our papers on social policy and social insurance. Arieke Johanna Rijken and Trudie Knijn of the Interdisciplinary Social Science unit at Utrecht University investigate Dutch fertility rates and family policy. Social policy in The Netherlands does not actively support the combination of paid work and domestic care among parents, yet fertility rates are high by European standards. The explanation for this was found partly in the availability of part-time jobs for women, but more significantly in the combination of male affluence and the low levels of human capital that women can, in general, bring to the labour market. Families can afford to support children even when women are not employed. Ingalill Montanari, Kenneth Nelson, and Joakim Palme of the Swedish Institute for Social Research at the University of Stockholm are concerned with the question of convergence in social policy among EU member states. Using data on 14 countries they show that the period between 1980 and 2000 has been characterised by divergence rather than convergence and they conclude that there is not yet any sign of a distinctively European social model of social insurance.
The final papers turn to aspects of the political process in European societies. Çağatay Topal of the Department of Sociology at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara looks at the impact of the events of 9/11 on migrants from Turkey into Germany. Increased levels of surveillance, at a global level, of those perceived to be potential terrorists by virtue of their ethnicity or religious background were apparent in Germany, increasing their experienced marginality and sense of social exclusion. Aspects of this issue are ore broadly explored in the nooks by Muro and Bertossi, which cover questions of ethnicity, nationalism, and citizenship. Horst-Dietrich Elvers, Matthiasd Gross, and Harald Heinrichs of the Universities in Berlin, Leipzig, and Lüneburg compare European-level strategies of environmental justice with the experience and impact of the environmental justice movement in the United States. They concentrate on the development of a processual model for describing and explaining variations in policy, taking the debates in the UK and Germany as their principal points of reference.