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Abstract

The guiding research question of the volume is ‘why does the share of flexible and/or cheap employment differ across occupations?’ (Eichhorst and Marx in this volume). The editors propose two factors that might explain the variety of non-standard employment across occupations: replaceability of workers (as determined by labour supply and demand as well as the level and type of skills) and flexibility of labour market institutions, which in turn depends on the power of unions and the specific institutional set-up of the industrial relations systems. This chapter elaborates and refines these propositions by exploring how the institutional set-up of a country’s industrial relations and vocational training system shapes the two dimensions of replaceability and flexibility. Whereas the country chapters are concerned with identifying occupation-specific characteristics that are linked to these two dimensions, we argue that the institutional context will influence the relative importance of employment in different occupations associated with non-standard employment. This chapter elaborates and refines these propositions by exploring how the institutional set-up of a country’s industrial relations and vocational training system shapes the two dimensions of replaceability and flexibility.