IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-30415-4_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Organization of Work and Systems of Labour Market Regulation and Social Protection: A Comparison of the EU-15

In: Learning Regional Innovation

Author

Listed:
  • Edward Lorenz
  • Bengt-Åke Lundvall

Abstract

Recent work on national systems of innovation (Amable 2003, Hall and Soskice 2001, Lorenz and Lundvall 2006, Whitley 2006) has argued that there are systematic relations between systems of labour market regulation and social protection on the one hand, and the dynamics of knowledge accumulation and learning at the workplace on the other. Systems combining low levels of employment protection with relatively high levels of unemployment protection and expenditure on ‘active’ labour market policies may have an advantage in terms of the adoption of the forms of work organization and knowledge exploration at the firm level that can lead to ‘new to the market’ and possibly radical innovation. This is related to the fact that organizations that compete on the basis of strategies of continuous knowledge exploration tend to have relatively porous organizational boundaries, so as to permit the insertion of new knowledge and ideas from the outside. Job tenures tend to be short as careers are often structured around a series of discrete projects rather than advancing within an intra-firm hierarchy (Lam and Lundvall 2006). While the absence of legal restrictions on hiring and firing will not necessarily result in the forms of labour market mobility that contribute to a continuous evolution of the firm’s knowledge base, strong systems of employment protection may prove an obstacle to their development.

Suggested Citation

  • Edward Lorenz & Bengt-Åke Lundvall, 2011. "The Organization of Work and Systems of Labour Market Regulation and Social Protection: A Comparison of the EU-15," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Marianne Ekman & Bjørn Gustavsen & Bjørn T. Asheim & Øyvind Pålshaugen (ed.), Learning Regional Innovation, chapter 3, pages 50-69, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-30415-4_3
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230304154_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bengt-Åke Lundvall, 2016. "From manufacturing nostalgia to a strategy for economic transformation," Economia e Politica Industriale: Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, Springer;Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale, vol. 43(3), pages 265-271, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-30415-4_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.