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Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the ‘new social risks’ approach has shifted the focus in welfare analysis from ‘old social risks’ to the ‘new social risks’ related to recent changes in the labour market and family structures. This approach captures a number of important changes in contemporary societies. However, it fails to capture fully the fact that European economies confront a wide range of contradictory pressures to cope with increased levels of uncertainty, while also responding to their populations' demands for security and social cohesion. Industrial relations, employment laws and policies and social policies are confronted with new challenges and brought into a new relationship to each other. This chapter presents a new framework to examine these changing relationships. This chapter argues that economic security is governed by the way in which public and private policymakers redistribute uncertainty through various modes of governance across time, place and categories of person.