| dc.description.abstract | European welfare states have over past decades made considerable efforts to redirect labour market policy, employment regulation, social security benefits, pensions, family services, and education and training programs, contingent on internal and external pressures, political mobilization and support, existing policy legacies and the institutional make-up of different welfare regimes. The result has been a highly dynamic era of reform, marked by considerable retrenchments, but also profound processes of 'welfare recalibration' conjuring up to a fundamental recasting of the functional, normative, distributive and institutional underpinnings upon which European welfare states were historically based. | en |