Labour Market Risk Shifts in 18 Post-industrial Economies: An Application of Fuzzy-set Ideal Type Approach

Abstract

The discussion of “new risks” in the field of social policy started to gain attention in the late 1990s and it is commonly argued that new risks are provoked by deindustrialization and/or globalization being more concentrated among the young, women and low skilled individuals. This study commences its inquiry with a conceptualization of labour market risk in an attempt to critically rethink the argument of new risk. A reevaluation of the concept is followed by an empirical investigation on the different types of risks and their changes by different degree. Eight-teen countries are selected in order to provide a comparative account to understand new risk. These are comparatively analyzed using the fuzzy-set ideal type approach to discover different types of social risks and to measure degrees of changes in relation to social risk. In sum, this paper aims to answer: what is new risk? and how do the characteristic of labour market risks differ in different post-industrial countries? The findings suggest that the types of risk are diverse and the speed or the directions of shift are also diverse.